Andreas Stichmann

Former East German martial arts champion Claudia, now East Asian representative of a German cultural organisation, is in North Korea for the official opening of a new German library. As official minder and assistant during her stay, she's assigned Sunmi, a young postgrad who is writing a bizarre doctoral thesis on Korean influences in German Romantic poetry. Claudia knows how life in dictatorships works, and Sunmi has had plenty of previous assignments where she's been ordered to become intimate with a foreign visitor, so the two are wary of each other, but despite everything it starts to look as though a genuine romance is developing between the two women.

It's probably going a bit far to call this an LGBT novella: much of the time it reads rather as though Stichmann originally wrote Claudia as a man and only changed the gender to make it more interesting when his publisher complained that there were already too many susceptible westerner/mysterious Asian stories out there. But it's still a worthwhile little story: Even if Claudia is rather flat and passive, Sunmi is an attractively complex character, and her mix of 21st century Asian communism and 18th century German romanticism is fun to listen to. We get to go (slightly) beyond the tourist surface of North Korea, and the plot has enough ambiguities to keep it interesting.… (more)