In die neue Zeit

'It's hard to keep your hands off it', Philipp Felsch wrote about Michael Rutschky's 'Mitgeschrieben', the notes from the early eighties. Here comes the sequel, set at the end of that decade, at the time when Mikhail Gorbachev could be marvelled at as a saviour in German lands, when the GDR was transformed from a walled-in Soviet enclave into an anarchic territory, only to disappear shortly afterwards into Helmut Kohl's Federal Republic, when Michael Rutschky travelled the world with his wife Katharina, but above all through the so-called German accession area, from which socialism disappeared by the minute. These notes, with which Michael Rutschky has created his own poetic style, are seismographic inventories of mentalities from the last of the great German periods of upheaval.