When the writer Christoph Hein was once asked in an interview why the protagonist of his post-reunification novel “Willenbrock” was a used car dealer by profession, he said that after the fall of the Wall in the East, from one day to the next there were these on every corner Used car dealers had appeared: buntings of bunting, limp C-Classes, in the middle a container in which a biographically broken figure sat. Looking back, there was a time that can be clearly defined in history when these traveling car dealers covered the newly opened East German sales market like harbingers of the coming collecting society.
The author Christoph Hein turns 80: Defying the GDR dictatorship – culture
