THE PUBLICATION IN 2008 of Sven Regener’s Der kleine Bruder (The younger brother) marked the completion of a trilogy of works devoted to the story of a figure named Frank Lehmann, which has ranked among the critical and commercial successes of recent German writing. The initially garrulous but passive Lehmann had first appeared in Herr Lehmann (Mr. Lehmann, 2001; published in English as Berlin Blues, 2003) as a bartender living and working in the alternative subculture of the Kreuzberg district of West Berlin on the eve of the fall of the Wall in 1989. This first novel crystallized central political and literary concerns and was adapted to film by the director Leander Haußmann in 2003. On the one hand, Herr Lehmann offered a Western counterpart to the trend toward Ostalgie (nostalgia for the former East Germany) and a grudging acceptance of the imperative of normalization after 1990. The novel bid a nostalgic farewell to Kreuzberg’s subculture while acknowledging also that this was an anomaly that would have no place in a unified German capital. On the other, it epitomized the quality of “readability” central to recent literary debates, which it furnished with an iconic moment when the normally highbrow critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki declared on the TV show Das literarische Quartett that the work had made him laugh aloud. Despite being published first in the sequence, Herr Lehmann was set last. Named after a housing estate in his native Bremen, Neue Vahr Süd (2004) looked back at Frank Lehmann’s conscription into the Bundeswehr prior to his departure to West Berlin in the early 1980s. Der kleine Bruder, finally, deals with Frank Lehmann’s arrival in Kreuzberg immediately after his discharge from the army and presents him as a more dynamic figure than the previous texts. The novel tells how Lehmann arrives in Kreuzberg in the hope that his elder brother Manfred, who is a sculptor, will help him land on his feet. However, his brother has disappeared. In the process of searching for him, Frank succeeds in establishing himself.

This chapter places Der kleine Bruder in the context of the media interest that surrounded Sven Regener as an emerging writer and it offers a reading of the work as the final part of the Frank Lehmann trilogy.