• Artful Waiting
• Friendship Shop
• Comrades

Grischa Tannberg, a recent graduate of the Bruno Leuschner University of Economics, arrives in Berlin to take up his first post at the State Planning Commission. He is highly motivated and determined to devote his energies to socialist progress. However, at first there is one thing above all else in his department: nothing to do.

Yet he ignores his superior’s instruction to practise the art of waiting. He reads, calculates, thinks – and devises a plan for economic cooperation with the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

Afghanistan needs goods from the GDR. The GDR needs foreign currency. And Afghanistan possesses an agricultural product that officials would rather not speak too loudly about in their offices. A daring idea becomes a project; the project becomes a working group; the working group becomes a pilot project. Soon, not only the State Planning Commission but also border troops, ministries, West German authorities and top political circles find themselves grappling with a question for which no one was prepared: what happens when an absurd idea suddenly works?

Jakob Hein, born in Leipzig and raised in East Berlin, has a special gift for this sort of historical absurdity: he takes the grand systems seriously enough to reveal their humour. In his novel, history is not corrected, but tentatively reassembled.

A German-German comedy about files, border crossings and high politics. About an idea that works all too well. And about the question of whether world history sometimes arises not out of conviction, but out of responsibility, chance and the wrong person at the right desk.