Erwin Strittmatter, author of the most popular East German novel, Ole Bienkopp, found his way into literature from a rural working-class background. In his early life he worked (among other things) as a baker, chauffeur, groom, and rabbit breeder. His autobiographical “nightingale stories” explore this colourful background and the way it made him into a writer. They’ve been published in various different combinations: this collection brings together three of them.

“Zirkus Wind” looks — from the perspective of a small boy determined to escape from a village community into a more exciting life— at the career of someone who is trying to do the opposite, the circus performer Wind who wants to settle down to ordinary domesticity with a farm-girl, but can’t help breaking out into show-business again. In “Sulamith Mingedö” the young narrator has already taken a tentative step into creative writing when he sees the fascinating circus child Sulamith humiliated in the village school. In the longest piece, “Tina Babe”, the narrator is a young man sent to Thuringia in the 1930s to work for two “artistic ladies” who are setting up an angora rabbit farm. We watch his efforts to educate himself on the quiet, to escape the clutches of his husband-hunting co-worker, and to get close to his employers’ sophisticated friend Miss Babe, a Published Novelist. Of course it all goes wrong and gets tied up with the political background of those days.

Lovely warm, atmospheric writing laced with irony and a certain amount of gentle mockery of his younger self, a convincing description of the way some people just can’t help becoming writers, even in the most unfavourable circumstances. ( )