A bit of weed, a brilliant coup and the miracle of Bavaria – Jakob Hein's absurdly funny novel about one of Germany's greatest secrets: how did the East Germans once persuade Bavarian Prime Minister Franz Josef Strauß to save their bankrupt country with a billion-dollar loan? A gloriously wacky story with one of literature's most laid-back heroes.
East Berlin in the early 80s: His boss never would have imagined that Grischa – the shy assistant at the Planning Commission – would be prone to subversion, let alone devise an (admittedly rather ingenious) plan to provide the ailing GDR with a surprisingly good new source of foreign currency. Maybe it was Grischa’s rather idiosyncratic taste in movies – somewhere between American drug mafia thrillers and socialist heroic epics – that sparked the idea?
In any case, Grisha’s boss is dumbfounded, as are several elderly ministers from the Central Committee. But soon, it’s the police chief of West Berlin who’s the most astonished of all when chaos erupts at the Invalidenstrasse border crossing – on the wrong side! As if by magic, hundreds of young people suddenly want to cross to the East. When the government in Bonn catches wind of the situation, things really heat up.
