The stuff store of happiness

It was his own youth that provided Franz Hessel with the material for his first novel. In it, he follows the young life of his protagonist Gustav Behrendt - from the first impressions of a toddler to the experiences of a schoolboy in Berlin, and finally to his student years in Freiburg and Munich, where Behrendt enters the circles of the Schwabing bohemia at the turn of the century. In this journey, he dreams of reality more than he lives it. Frank Arnold reads "The Curiosity Shop of Happiness" with exactly the lightness and gentle irony with which Hessel wrote his prose.