Germany's lost generation

Name a British rock star who has written a novel. Racking the brain until it aches, the only credible, unghosted attempt that comes to mind is Pete Townshend's Horse's Neck (Faber, 1984), an ephemeral rush of short fictions. Rock and writing inhabit separate compartments of the British creative process.

Not so the Germans. Sven Regener, lead singer of a local band, Element of Crime (German bands never go global unless they are led by James Last), has produced a Nick Hornby-like narrative of human pond life in pre-unified West Berlin.

Herr Lehmann is a barman in a noisy dive off the Lausitzer Platz. No one calls him by his first name any more because he is almost 30. Herr Lehmann knows there is more to life than serving beers, but he can't be bothered to work out what. His love life is shallow, even when fulfilled. Nothing in his heritage, education or circumstances has given him the impetus to succeed.

Success is a bourgeois concept, and if there is one thing Herr Lehmann does not want to be taken for it is bourgeois. If Katrin were to tell him to change his life, he would. But Katrin is a drifter like him and she will soon move on. He takes her to East Berlin on a day trip, gets arrested on currency charges and sent back. When the Wall comes down a few days later, he is mildly surprised but not moved in any appreciable way.

Regener captures note-perfectly the disengagement of a German generation that came of age between the crushing of the Baader-Meinhof underground and the demolition of the Wall. Herr Lehmann is not so much a character as an archetype, the kind that historians will feud over half a century hence. He has nowhere to go in unified Germany, except out. Regener's novel is being filmed for release later this year. Read it now, before celluloid distorts the mood.