Exit

The monstrously repressive world of Ceausescus Romania provides the setting and the subject of Richard Wagners extraordinary narrative written shortly before the Christmas revolution. Stirner the main protagonist is an ethnic German and lives in Timisoara the town which was to be the revolutions birthplace. He works as a journalist - a meaningless job since the Party is the only source of news or comment and no one reads the papers. His wife teaches German but German lessons like many things are dispensable and may even be subversive. Her vocabulary classes - which include words like salt duck and apricot - have been reported to the Securitate. Finally facing nothing but the next humiliation and the one after that Stirner and his wife apply for an exit visa. In fine stark prose and with the scrupulous detail of the best documentarists Richard Wagner has recorded the absurdities the betrayals and the claustrophobia of daily life in one of Europes last dictatorships.