Hans-Ulrich Treichel: Lost

Hans-Ulrich Treichel is professor of German literature at the University of Leipzig. He has written five volumes of poetry and his flair for words is strikingly apparent in his writing. The ironic narrative voice of Lost, his first novel, that of a young boy, provides a darkly comic edge to a story emanating from the displacement of a family in Germany following the end of the Second World War. At first the young narrator believes his older brother starved to death when his parents fled the invading Russians in their flight from Prussia to Westphalia. But when he is old enough, his mother informs him she gave his brother away to another refugee when she thought she and her husband were about to be shot by the Russians. "I didn't have a dead brother. I had a lost one. That was hardly a plus for me," the narrator notes. His mother laments that she didn't even have time to tell the peasant woman to whom she entrusted her son his name, Arnold. The narrator suggests that maybe their baby boy was lucky and they named him Arnold again.