Glückskind mit Vater

Ironic-humorous, touching, without sentimentality or sarcasm, Christoph Hein tells an unprecedentedly exemplary life in more than sixty years of German conditions. What does a son who is called "lucky child" by his mother owe to his father? Since his birth in 1945, Konstantin Boggosch, living in the nascent GDR, has been trying to step out of the shadow of his war-criminal dead father: He takes on another name, wants to become a foreign legionnaire in Marseille, enters the GDR again shortly after the building of the Wall, is not allowed to take the Abitur there, but nevertheless manages to take advantage of happy circumstances - Glückskind, that is - and in the late years of the GDR he almost reaches the headmaster of a secondary school. In the end, he realizes that emancipation from general and personal history is doomed to failure. Through such a concatenation of past and present, the past is transformed into the present.