On Sunday my family and I had been planning to visit a local National Trust property to look at snowdrops. Unfortunately, the presence of real and actual snow meant it was too dangerous for us to drive all the way to Shropshire on country roads, and so we all stayed at home instead. Feeling at a bit of a loose end, I decided to start one of the books which my sister had bought for me for my birthday: ‘Unvollendete Geschichte’, by Volker Braun.

I chose this one, being honest, because it was the shortest. It’s a long time since I last read something in German – probably at least six months – and I feel like I’m getting a bit rusty. Plus I actually enjoyed the relative novelty of reading in English with my Akunin book (as opposed to months of stuggling through ‘La Lada Tambureto’ in Esperanto), so I felt a bit luke-warm about more foreign language reading. Happily, once I got into it however, German came flooding back to me and I started to enjoy it (more…)