What experience and history teach is this —
that nations and governments have never learned anything from history,
or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. 1770–1831.
Berlin, your dancer is death! Berlin, hold on, you are in distress!
Berlin, you dig with lust in feces! Hold! Let it be! And think a bit …
Friedrich Holländer: Fox macabre. 1920
The year is 2010. More or less unintentionally, Jack Boulder, in the meantime a well-to-do middle-aged man, delves deep into the changes of the social fabric and their consequences of societies in Germany and at another locations in this world — and tries to find his place.
Some high-ranking diplomat in the German Foreign Office seems to have an eccentric hobby: vintage and antique stamps, mostly of the times of the German Reich, between 1871 and 1945 — and the period following until 1990. He steals them together with old envelopes from the archives of the Foreign Office. Jack Boulder gets a helpless telephone call from Berlin:
“We don't know what to do. That’s where you would come in. His office was searched secretly, no trace of these stamps could be found. Nor does he sell them — anyway, they are not very valuable. But the people working in the archive have seen him slipping them in an envelope — several times. We have cameras there. Our security is excellent. So — what happens to them? You would find out, wouldn’t you?”
Jack Boulder thinks: “Who cares? Some pleasant paid days in Berlin …” Then other people suddenly care for him — in Berlin and at the other end of the world, in South America.
Boulder meets Amanda Prutz, a charming, well-preserved woman of mature age and small stature who some twenty-five years ago had left her hometown Bytów in Kashubia in Eastern Pomerania. She finally reached Germany after a detour via Winona, Minnesota, in the United States, but now she spends a lot of time elsewhere; nobody knows where.
She speaks German and wanted to live in Germany. Now a provincial hamlet in the middle of nowhere seems to attract her — apparently a closely knit German-speaking community. But why does she carry old stamps from the archives of the German Foreign Office to that godforsaken place?
Boulder tries to find out. It leads to an adventurous journey.
Shown by the example of Berlin, he suddenly has to realize that his world view and the values of his surroundings have lost their validity elsewhere and cannot be reconciled with a new reality. Then, Boulder is shown a different way of life, but he wonders whether it and its social environment are a true improvement. This is not a political book, but a somewhat impressionistic novel about the moods and atmospheres of living together in two different regions of the world.
In a broad sense, his experience resembles the protagonist's tale of woe in Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet at the Western Front, but with an open end rather than a bitter ending.
In one of de Chamier's earlier books, we find the quote from Juvenal: “It is difficult not to write satire”. This also applies to this book.
This book is part of a cycle of books. The first installment, Unnamed Forces, plays in 2002, the second one, Berlin Export, in 2004, and the third one, Occident Express, in 2006. The story of The Stamp Collector takes place in 2010.
Although each work within the cycle presents an independent, self-contained tale, they are all connected by the characters of the protagonist, his friends and some other persons, and the outcome of the events of earlier plots. Still, each individual installment of the cycle can be read on its own.
The Stamp Collector. Illustrated paperback. 200 pages, 22 color illustrations.
First Edition, 2024 | Publishing date: September 2024.
www.TwinTree.co
ISBN (Europe): 978-3-… | ISBN (outside Europe): 978-628-…
Not yet available for order through bookstores.
Readers' Opinions
«Witty, eloquent, full of esprit.»
U.M., Garden City, New York.
«I like the book, I find it both informative and suspenseful. It is written with insight and is entertaining. Chapeau!»
R.E., Berlin.
«I enjoy reading your book and occasionally giggle.»
G.S., Berlin.
«A fascinating book.»
B.B., Basel.
«The Stamp Collector has unfortunately come to an end. I enjoyed it very much and read it with pleasure. What ideas and the wonderful little barbed remarks — and always the relationship to today! Incredible!»
B.G., Freiburg.
«The book accurately dissects and analyzes in depth what otherwise generally seems to be a big NO GO. For Germany, it is 'anti-mainstream': not streamlined and conformist. It very skillfully names many things that are true and that are often very difficult to see through. And — it reads well.»
R.B., Berlin.
«A great novel that remains exciting through all the events.»
H.G., Stockholm.
© 2024 by Peter de Chamier
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