The "sleepless days" of Jurek Becker's [Schlaflose Tage (Sleepless Days)] are experienced by a thirty-six-year-old East German schoolteacher, Karl Simrock, who suddenly wakes up to the fact that his life is slipping by all too conventionally. He kicks over the traces, withdraws from his marriage, loses his job and ends up, not unhappily, as a baker's roundsman.

This behaviour cannot, however, be dismissed simply as a premature onset of the male menopause, for the story makes it clear that the cause of Simrock's unrest lies in the social and political environment of the German Democratic Republic. For too long he has had his thoughts and attitudes handed down from above, accepting the role imposed on him by the state as a passive purveyor of the Party line. Not only has this turned him into a bad teacher, concerned to shield his pupils from doubt and critical questioning, but...