Buch für die U-Bahn

This collection titled, "Buch für die U-Bahn," (Book for the U-Bahn) is comprised of three short stories that are structured to explore themes of identity, migration, and loss in the context of post-Wall Germany. The three stories, "Berlin Circuitry," "Mind the Gap," and "Vergiss Uns Nicht," (Don't Forget Us) are representative of each of these themes and serve as placement, displacement, and replacement. In "Berlin Circuitry," the female narrator living in modern-day Berlin has placed herself within the city and is building a machine that seems to be crucial to the construction of her identity. Jürgen Fetter in "Mind the Gap," has migrated to London, but he feels displaced and finds that London has become dangerously similar to his experiences growing up in East Berlin before the fall of the Wall. Lastly, "Vergiss Uns Nicht" is about a man named Paulo Rios who moves to Berlin where he laments the divorce of his wife and cannot seem to remember the name of his German friend he had met so long ago, but the budding of a new friendship seeks to replace those feelings of loss. The characters in all these stories not only have common thematic elements, but they are connected to one another through their experiences that have shaped their identities, their migrations, and their loss.