The item was stolen by Jenny ErpenBeck

Open borders, and people from the west bowing from their tailgate and give gifts to their poor sisters and siblings from the East: Christmas will come, and they give free wrapping paper in the excitement of reunification. But now here they come, evil sisters from the east, highly educated girls who take piano lessons at home, who know the last monologue faust with their hearts, and they put the west into their pockets, they slipped sunglasses from their schleckers into their sleeves around their wave Their jacket, they tied the sweater they had not paid around them around them around them Wai. their body heat. Well, that’s just outrageous, these young ladies don’t know what gratitude is (clearly they were completely ruined by the russians), they come along and just toss cheese, sausage, and coffee, even champagne bottles and chocolate, into their shopping bags, Maybe they pay for the three rolls at the top, but then they stroll out of the shopping hall, which is calling a supermarket nowadays, with all those other, stolen things that boungs around underneath, and those girls don’t even blush. At home they practice drawing in a perspective, but in Ku’damm they wore an expensive fur hat and then left a shop with a face -a holy face. These same girls had to line up at dawn to get a copy even Aesthetics of resistance By Peter Weiss – And now they can buy whatever books they want, they start stealing! The factory in the East is so reported that people can be happy if someone buys them for one mark: if you want to be able to afford expertive underwear, you have to work first, work until you turn over and gray Down the front of your pants until you have a belly, nothing free anymore, Christmas is over, but they don’t listen, those brash young things, they drive out of the hardware store on riding with grass cutting machines, right past salesmen, and even give him friendly nods, if we are not careful, they will rob west blind. Anno 1990.

Translated from Germany by Kurt Beals.

From Missing thingswhich will be issued by New Directions in October.

Kurt Beals is an Associate Professor in the German Language and Literature Department at Washington University in St. Louis. He had previously translated a book by Anja Utler, Regina Ullmann, and Reiner Stach.