GERMAN FANTASIA

A deserting soldier treks through the torn-up countryside and abandoned villages trying to distance himself from the atrocities of war.An elderly man sits beneath lime trees remembering his first sexual encounter one summer night with a female stranger who whispered another man's name.A young woman takes up a job in a care home spending monotonous days scrubbing floors and yearning to dance at the local nightclub.The artist Franz Marc lives on in an imagined life as a patient at an asylum before falling victim to Hitler's policy of Gnadentod.Finally a young Jewish girl the life she once knew destroyed holds her memories close as she finds refuge in wreckage of her homeland.And throughout there is the shadowy presence of Viktor - one man or many? A looming figure in Germany's own reckoning with its past.Through these five interconnected stories Philippe Claudel reflects on Germany's complex history and the experiences of its people dismantling the idea of a nation or a people and exploring the malleability of memory.