EDUARD’S HOMECOMING

A German biologist, long resident in America, learns that he’s inherited a half-share in an apartment building in the former East Berlin—beginning a comedy of misfits he narrowly escapes with his life, though without all his dignity.

The building, Eduard Hoffmann learns, is worth perhaps two million Deutschemarks: certainly enough to repay the inconvenience his brother Lothar in New Zealand isn’t willing to take to settle the paperwork. On leaving his teaching job in Stanford for a research position in the new Berlin, however, Eduard finds that the graffitied palace is full to overflowing of unapologetic and militant squatters, that he hasn’t a chance of evicting them unless he commits to costly renovations, and that meanwhile (the time limit for renouncing his inheritance having past), he’s getting dunned for their water, power, and trash pickup. Nor is there any guarantee that Egon Hoffmann, the unknown grandfather who left Eduard and Lothar this mare’s nest, had any more legal right to it than the squatters, who, with the help of an obliging press, paint Egon as a Nazi functionary who purchased the property from its fleeing Jewish owner for a song. Will Eduard’s claims stand up in court? Does he even want them to, when he’s distracted not only by his ever-ready guilt, but also by his beautiful wife Jenny’s confession that he’s never given her an orgasm, then by a new affair with a dispassionately forward colleague who clearly doesn’t share Jenny’s complaint? As Eduard rushes helter-skelter trying to prop up his house of cards, it becomes clear that Schneider (Couplings, 1996, etc.) has cunningly devised each of the traps he’s caught in as metaphors for the problems of reunification between Ossis and Wessis.

It all makes for a kinder, gentler Kafkaesque nightmare, one whose nondescript hero almost deserves his rather convenient, even hokey, denouement.