A book about what comes after you leave a depressing housing estate and a chaotic youth behind and the question: can you really escape your class and your past?
Hendrik has moved from Stralsund to Berlin, from a housing estate full of East German Neo-Nazis to a campus full of left-wing, alternative West German middle-class kids. In the news: bank bailouts and austerity; in his inbox, texts from new acquaintances who seem somewhat interested, yet expect something different from a friend or partner than what Hendrik has to offer: a pumped-up upper body, a chaotic post-reunification past he would rather forget, and the constant feeling of living on a battlefield.
Trapped between the hyper-masculine, violent value system of his youth and a baffling new bourgeois reality, Hendrik falls into a downward spiral of grueling retail shifts, heavy drinking, and alienation. Was moving here a huge mistake after all?
