Totenfloß

“A country which is uninhabitable, it looks like a foreign planet, but all traces and rubble prove that this was once planet Earth. The ruler over this undead kingdom of the banished and contaminated is a monstrous being called Checker, half-human, half-animal. He obsessively examines his own body all the time for the level of poisoning and even his speech is a hideous mutation. Somewhere on their way to the Rhine, these vagrants [Checker, Itai and Bjuti traveling on the titular raft] come across an old man called Cuckoo, “one from the nineteen hundreds” who has survived the great catastrophe. He has also saved language from the apocalypse. His ceremonious High German and Old German is strangely dissonant in comparison to the “rubble German” of later generations. Cuckoo speaks and enthuses about the old, beautiful green earth (…) but Checker only laughs mockingly at this strangely sentimental old man’s songs of peace and catches flies mid-air and gobbles them up…” (Die Zeit)

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