C. is an East German writer in 1989; having overstayed his visa in the West, he cannot decide where he belongs and so he is living “in the interim.” He rides on trains to see his girlfriends or his mother or to give readings, and in each city he is simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by the trappings of freedom: his ability to buy books (mostly on the Holocaust or the Gulag, books he will never read) or clothes or to frequent red-light districts where even women’s bodies are part of consumer culture. His liminality pushes him to drink; he is between ideologies, between occupations (is he a writer or a worker?), between God and psychoanalysis. “He was one of the human stopgaps from whom the GDR was assembled, the very precondition for its existence,” Hilbig writes, creating the impression of millions of people suffering in this state of uncertainty and unbelief (243). Hilbig’s writing is beautifully painful in places—he writes that “C.’s inner unrest was so powerful that each glass of alcohol seemed to sizzle in it like a drop of water in a forge” (276). Some of this is hard to read, yet the author so convincingly ties C.’s individual condition to his moment in history, you cannot help but sympathize.