Putin's mailbox

One morning, in a somewhat unclear impulse, Marcel Beyer drives to the outskirts of Dresden to see a mailbox once again, not just any mailbox, but the one belonging to Vladimir Putin, who lived here in the eighties. He no longer finds it. However, what Beyer perceives and writes down during his search for traces develops into a short portrait of Putin that is more illuminating than any bulky political biography. Whatever Beyer focuses on in his narratives and sketches—be it flowers above Lake Geneva, a classified ad abandoned by Rimbaud, a one-eyed lion in the Dresden Zoo, brought to roar by Dostoevsky, a small painting by Gerhard Richter, or Lessing's umbrella stand in Wolfenbüttel—his reflections on language, culture, and political realities always ignite around concrete phenomena.