HIGH-RISE STORY

Abstract

Angelika Mechtel joined Group 61, a union of writers formed in 1961 in an attempt to revive the workers' literature of before 1933. Her interest in this type of literature and in social criticism led her in 1972 to compile a documentary entitled Old Writers in the Federal Republic of Germany (Alte Schriftsteller in der Bundesrepublik), which discusses the plight of older writers in West Germany. Her early publications are poems, including the volume Against Ice and Flood (Gegen Eis und Flut) (1963) and radio plays. The author had been editor of the literary journal Aspekte I Impulse since 1967. Her first novel entitled Ruined Games (Kaputte Spiele) (1970) deals with a group of outsiders, people from the counter culture—her contemporaries. They treat life as a game and finally ruin themselves through drugs, demonstrations, and run-ins with the police. Her two other novels entitled Eat, Bird, Eat (Friss Vogel) and The Glass Paradise (Das gläserne Paradies) are satires of family life among the upper middle class, the so-called higher-ups in contemporary West German society. Another novel entitled The Blind One (Die Blindgängerin) (1974) analyzes the problems of a woman who loses her eyesight in an accident and regains it through a cornea transplant from another woman. Angelika Mechtel has also published several volumes of short stories. High-Rise Story, the title story of the collection High-Rise Stories (Hochhausgeschichten) (1971), which appeared first in Dimension, which takes place in a luxurious apartment house, complete with an artificial lake and balconies for all apartments, gives a critical account of German postwar society using obvious symbolism.