Der Kollege

The colleague says that the unemployed depend on the employed to remain independent. In concise sketches and meticulously observed, Jörg Steiner's narrative 'The Colleague' develops the psychoprotocol of an unemployed person, the process of marginalizing an individual: a person who is made to disappear. Since the day the word "quitting time" lost its meaning for mechanic Bernhard Greif and his colleague, Greif and his friend have become inseparable. Each of their unemployed days has its own path: along the post office, to the cafeteria of the high school where they have suffered, at the public restroom where one can shave, in a pub where filling out lottery tickets earns a glass of wine, only to submit their hopes for luck with their own lottery tickets just before six at the kiosk.