A writer in East Germany has stalled after his first sentence. He goes out into the woods around his town seeking some kind of inspiration. The decaying forest and its inhabitants, the Garbagemen, are a metaphor for the collapse of his country. Nothing happens and yet his life changes. It is a nightmare image of a failed state, delivered in an extraordinary, poetic voice.
I'd have to tell how I searched for them even while they existed in reality ... later, long after I knew of their disappearance, I searched for them still. Reality, in nearly every instance, I thought, has been debased to a worthless product of language.
