Who am I if my experiences have made me someone else?
Hans, an esteemed surgeon, returns home from the battlefields of the First World War – or rather to what is meant to be his ‘home’. What he has been through has pulverised his certainties, leaving only an indelible sense of alienation. His wife Grete and his friends recognise him and he goes reliably about his work, but his dog smells a rat. Has the war turned him into someone else? Or might he actually be another man who has wormed his way into Hans’s life?
This breathless monologue exposing the self-doubts of the protagonist and raising many existential questions turns Peter Flamm’s slender, powerful novel into a thrilling reading experience.
"Writers and non-writers alike are doomed – or blessed – to battle the ghostly bubbles that emerge from the dark, boiling waters of their unconscious." Peter Flamm
"What is a classic? Is it a book that is in the canon and whose plot everyone knows? The condensed expression of a specific era to which the general public can refer back through changing times?
The new classics of our own age are created. Discovered in archives, they show a previously unknown facet of history. They reveal our desire for stories that explain past times to us and provide authentic testimony of how things once were. Me? by Peter Flamm is one of these classics. This debut novel was published by S. Fischer in 1926 and then slipped into decades-long oblivion. Now, though, Me? is available again, every bit as fresh as when it was written, to be read and rediscovered by each and every one of us." Sebastian Guggolz, Classics Editor at S. Fischer Verlag
"[...] like a heavy, deeply concentrated red wine. It lingers for an extremely long time." - Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Maximilian Mengeringhaus
"A significant rediscovery." - Welt am Sonntag, Kathrin Witter
"[...] rousing style and the inner monologue [...] do the rest to create a fascinating, intoxicating flow that does not lose its power until the last page." - Tagesspiegel, Tobias Schwartz
"The struggle for identity makes it interesting again today" - taz, Joel Fokke
