A coincidence? Life knows no coincidences. In the basement apartment of his boarding parents, Esau Matt longs for his Lower Lusatian heath village throughout the week. The eternal family dispute over the shop does not appear in his dreams. Esau does not quite belong to Bossdom and not quite to Grodk – until the motorcycle arrives, with which he speeds into the most disheveled time of his life. There is no time in which nothing happens, for if nothing happened, there would be no time; but in storytelling, chronology becomes a compost heap for boredom. I do not want to bore you and will forgo chronology. I will explore those of my experiences that seem to me to explain who I am. If you think that I overrate one or another of my experiences, that my account of them gives you nothing, as the modern saying goes, then feel free to turn the page. Erwin Strittmatter.