For 20 years Maxim Biller has been writing his Moral Stories that have been published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. Every second sunday during the past three years, his stories either depress the readers or make them laugh – mostly it’s a mixture of both. Intense reactions are guaranteed when Biller describes people´s every-day life and the depths of the human soul. A tattooed number on somebody´s arm turns into a winning lottery number, a butcher´s knife proves to be a marriage´s guarantor or a father´s ghost turns up while his son is with a Polish prostitute.
Looking at the stories´ titles, e.g. Sense of Life, Cosmos or Poetry and Truth, the stories seem to deal with the big issues of life. Reading them however, it is soon clear that they rather describe the elementary life – dreams, phantasies and Freudian slips resulting in the most surprising and relieving perceptions.
