Ballastexistenz (Burdensome existence)

Christoph Dolgan sketches a fantasy of auto-extinction and doom with deeply unsettling words.

The story starts at a housing estate of blue collar, and later unemployed, workers, continues with alcohol abuse and eventually ends up at a mental institution. The narrator accompanies his mother, who, after finishing her day job at a discount shop, spends her evenings and soon also her nights at a filling station’s café. Halls smelling of Sunday roast grease, therapy rooms, barred hospital windows and gloomy areas of self-destruction and self-harming – those are the places this text takes us to.

A grid of fear and death underlies this story which turns out to be a whole bundle of sub-stories. This fear and terror emanate not only from the miserable existence but also from the language, which serves as descriptive tool.