Almost fifteen years after the fall of the wall, the young narrator discovers in her grandparents' estate a book which her grandfather had been given on the occasion of an anniversary in the GDR. It is a
propaganda volume of photos from 1968 entitled On Happiness. The granddaughter is outraged by the
arrogance with which happiness is dictated by politics. How can an administration order its people to be happy? With other objects she finds among the belongings, she starts to piece together the story of her family.
Peggy Mädler connects each chapter from the propaganda book with “legends” from her narrator’s family history. There is a chapter about the “legend of the happiness of work”, one about the “legend of the happiness of being together”, and we realise that whether or how people find happiness has less to do with greater circumstances than with personal encounters, small gestures and unspectacular
coincidences.
Densely narrated, Mädler looks at the origins of happiness. How society functions and how private memories relate to history as a whole. The modest, shrewd and elegant way in which she circumvents the pretentiousness of these issues makes her first book a masterpiece of German literature. Mädler has produced an extraordinarily compassionate, rich and linguistically varied first novel, a book that leaves the reader somehow … happy.
