Der Himmel unter Berlin

A novel for the living and the dead - rock stories from the Berlin Underground. A thirty-year-old teacher escapes from Prague to the contemporary German metropolis to start a music band called U-Bahn and find his girlfriend Katrin... The style of Jaroslav Rudiš's first novel is based on the free flow of the main character's narrative. With an almost rake-like sense of language stained by life, he records the conversations that all the characters and figures he encounters in and under Berlin have with each other and with him. A book written at a riveting pace, and an entertaining one at that. This mature debut has won over not only young readers, lovers of Wim Wenders and punk rock music, with its non-conformist scenes, but also those who still remember the GDR, plastic Indians or how our East German neighbours scaled the wall of the West German embassy in the autumn of 1989, only to leave their Trabants at the mercy of the industrious Pragueers. The author was awarded the Jiří Orten Prize 2002.