Aftertime is the story of a young woman's struggle to come to grips with the aftermath of a devastating catastrophe.
In her last year at the university in Kiev and shortly before she is to take her final examinations, the narrator is persuaded by her roommate to go for a cruise on a large lake north of the city. While her friends dance in the ballroom below ship, the young woman stands on deck, enjoying the tranquil evening. Sixty miles away, a nuclear reactor explodes.
In the days that follow, the official version of events minimizes the risks. Conflicting instructions are issued;...

What happens when the world in which people have crafted identities for themselves and lived their lives suddenly disappears? How does a person -- or a nation -- confront such a shock? From 1990 to 1993, at an unparalleled moment in German history, Olaf Georg Klein interviewed almost a hundred fellow former East German citizens, probing their experiences of the sudden collapse of the German Democratic Republic, then crafting that material into twelve first-person narratives. The result is a literary account whose narrators include representatives from the cities and the countryside, from...

Wie kommt es, dass wir von uns ständig behaupten, wir hätten keine Zeit? Wie ist es um eine Gesellschaft bestellt, die sich aus freien Stücken unter das Diktat der Uhr begeben hat und sich dennoch immerzu beklagt über Zeitnot, Zeitdruck und Zeitmangel? Weshalb erliegen wir so oft dem Irrtum, Zeit sparen zu können, indem wir möglichst viele Dinge schneller - und am besten auch noch gleichzeitig - erledigen? Olaf Georg Klein gibt Antworten auf diese Fragen und arbeitet an einer Fülle von anschaulichen Beispielen die historischen, philosophischen und ökonomischen Hintergründe heraus,...