Der stille Engländer

Charlotte, a young Swiss woman, spends her year in England as a general assistant in a run-down fin-de-siècle hotel in a small provincial town on the eastern Channel coast. Here she meets an eccentric owner couple, a close-knit community of staff and an oddball group of guests made up of pensioners, war veterans and Thames Fog refugees. Each of them has their own story and suffers from it: the feisty chef with Italian roots in search of his father who went missing in the war, the bear-faced concierge who has been battered by life, a capricious, fun-loving head waitress with preferences for her superior and a sly money-box-mouth chambermaid with her carefully guarded life lie. Among the fraternising crowd of permanent guests, Charlotte meets the subtle, clever Brit of choice and German emigrant Shimon. An impressive man with a past and life experience who questions Charlotte's world and turns it upside down. Returning to Switzerland suddenly becomes uncertain; staying on the island remains an option. Six rounded stories - self-contained and yet seamlessly overlapping into the next - tell of the shabby chic biotope and create a snapshot and a coherent picture of the late sixties in Great Britain. Threads of unagitated romances, secret flirtations and fiery affairs of very different colours converge in the old home, become entangled, tangled, divided, torn apart and ultimately turn the seemingly clueless Charlotte into a woman who realises exactly what she really wants. A no-frills declaration of love to the island and its people, a homage to the Anglo-Saxon way of life and the art of preserving otherness on the island through sometimes alienating isolation, in the firm conviction that diversity is necessarily and from the outset the wiser choice.