Über treiber

Stories and Stuff

This page collects a few choice (read: the least bad) stories that happened to be penned by someone who happened to have been me.

Most of these have been written sometime between 2008 and 2012. Though after 2010, there hasn’t more than some minor editing, according to my notes. Guess I ran out of steam rather quickly.


Nur einen Satz, bitte!

[PDF Link]

This sentence heavily abuses how the German rules of syntax, especially the so-called “verbal bracket”, where you keep only the first word of the predicate near the subject and shove everything else to the end of the sentence (e. g. “I have by the dog been bitten”) and thus are able to split the sentence, by shoving in more and more embedded clauses, into ridiculous lengths that defy all common sense and are practically impossible to read, don’t encourage, but definitely enable you to make your sentences illegible, and goes on for one and half a page describing a small story of several people who happened to meet each other at various points in time.

Nanciesk

[PDF Link]

“Nancy-esque” means “nihilistic”, “misanthropist” or “having death and revenge as leading motifs”. It’s not a real word, but it inspired what we can see here. The story is short mediocre and, all in all holier-than-thou. But it’s still better than what I’m not putting on-line, so there’s that.

Zum Nikolaus

[PDF Link]

A small, not too exciting story about the St. Nicholas Day of 2009.

Zweiter offener Brief unbekannten Datums

[PDF Link]

This is the second of two public letters an unknown author wrote to his “beloved tyrant”. However, he actually addresses his fellow citizens and replies to critic his first letter received.

He further makes the point that he doesn’t want democracy for democracy’s sake, but rather because he thinks monarchy is not flexible enough to deal with the country’s problems in an acceptable amount of time.

This letter has gone the way of all sequels and hasn’t nearly reached the quality of its predecessor. However, despite it’s inability to get to the point, I am still somewhat fond of that point; at least, in comparison to the rest of the stuff I tended to write.

Gewitternachtstraum

[PDF Link]

Another one of those “masterpieces”.

“A Stormy Night’s Dream” is a classical five-act play or rather wants to be one. It’s easy to summarize. A student, who totally isn’t a self-insert this time, gets abducted by a bunch of cliché satanists who plan to sacrifice him to their Dark Lord in a few days.

These satanists are: the (male) leader; a woman who only thinks of herself and doesn’t do much beside being ominous; an emotionally unstable girl who thinks she’s the leader’s favorite; and a lonely bookworm desperate for human warmth who actually is his favorite.

The abducted student wins this bookworm’s trust by being all ~wise~ and ~rational~ (and very sarcastic) and, after the mandatory showdown, she actually saves him and calls the police and all is good.

The whole thing is based on a weird dream I once had. It’ not an excuse for the shallow characters, setting, and plot, but it’s an explanation.

It’s not even an explanation, however, for the even more awful sequel I couldn’t stop myself from writing.

Der Andere

[PDF Link]

Hooh boy, this one’s a doozy.

Okay, let me try this approach: First, the summary, then some explanatory stuff surrounding this, well, short story.

The title can mean “The Other One” as well as “The Different One”. This story of 22 pages begins with a self-insert character waking up in his own basement. He meets a timid McGuffin girl called Mary who claims this were her family’s house. It turns out the protagonist magically woke up 200 years in the future.

They go into the city and talk about how bad the future is. All world is one country, there’s only one language left in the whole world, people learn nothing good in school, everything is geared towards consumerism, yadda, yadda.

They meet up with four guys who spend all day talking about how great the past was. It turns out the future is even worse than the protagonist thought, because the democracy they have is totally fake and under the veil of the “war on terror”, the government gets rid of all opposition. (no sarcastic comment here) The very next thing that happens is police raiding the house and arresting everyone except the protagonist. Because war on terror.

The protagonist goes to an office to file a complaint and meets an official who secretly likes the past, too. The protagonist is totally excited and has an epiphany about how evert oppressive system will eventually go down due to the people working for the system getting frustrated with it. Then it turns out everything was a dream and the protagonist watches the sun rise. Because watching the sun rise is totally clever and symbolic and cool.

All in all, this story might have turned out more or less decent. However, I decided to write it in Gothic print and use really weird grammatics and oldish expressions and gosh, it was the most ridiculous thing. I could get rid of all that stuff, revamp the story and proudly present it as something embarrassing I did when I was young.

But, well …

It just wouldn’t be the same. All those quirks that make this text painful to read are part of its … I don’t want to say “message”, but this might be the best word.

Despite its superficial message about post-democracy and evil capitalism, this mess is more about being “The Different One.” It is about being hard to read; about sticking out like a sore thumb; about the question if things that are hard to deal with are still worth being dealt with just because they are unique. And most importantly, in hindsight, it’s probably so autobiographic that I couldn’t have possibly done it on purpose.

That might well be reason I still feel so attached to this otherwise less-than-mediocre short story.

Gedicht

[PDF Link]

“A poem”.

The joke is that the German word for “poem” sounds as if it were derived from “condensed” or “summarized”. And this poem is as condensed as it get’s: “I love her/ And she loves someone else.”

Erster offener Brief unbekannten Datums

[PDF Link]

This is the first of two public letters an unknown author wrote to his “beloved tyrant”.

The setting is kept vaguely socialist, with commonly needed goods being scarce, an enormous unemployment problem and general lack of democracy. However, political comedians are hitting it big and their shows attract large audiences. The author reflects on whether these comedians, who harshly criticise authority, aren’t actually supporting the tyrant by calming the masses and letting them blow of some figurative steam.

This letter probably is one of my less embarrassing pieces of literature. It’s short, it’s clear about its setting, and about its point.

Yeah, I don’t feel too bad about putting this online.

Brainstorming

[PDF Link]

A silly piece of conspiracy theory about how THEY make everyone believe global warming was man-made.

Looking back, I don’t even know anymore whether I actually believed that nonsense. Probably not? But on the other hand, I most definitely wrote this mess.

Anyway, the pretty much only reason this piece is still online is because it happened to be the first time I ever wrote something on my own for my own sake and thought: “Hell yeah, I’m gonna be the greatest author ever!”