Couplings (Phoenix Fiction)

Berlin in the 1980s was a haunting, electric place. With the tragedy of one war looming like the bombed-out church in the central square and the threat of a future war rattling like the anti-nuclear protesters in the street, it stood as a capitalist island in a socialist sea. Such is the setting of Peter Schneider's look at the sons and daughters of Nazism. Schneider, who wrote on Cold-War Berlin in The Wall Jumper and of the collapse of communism in The German Comedy, has constructed a wry tale of the mid-life cafe musings of radicals from the 1960s who carry not too heavily the sins of their Nazi parents.