The hit of Leipzig’s 1998 Book Fair was Ingo Schulze with his novel »Simple Storys: a novel about East-German provincial life«. Schulze tells in 29 stories what happened to the residents of Altenburg, a small town about 40 km south of Leipzig’s city gates, along their way to the newly gained freedom.

All people in the »Storys« are loosely connected with each other, they are related, in love or bitter enemies. In many short, every day happenings we find out that those events, which scarcely were taken notice of west of the river Elbe, either changed or even erased whole biographies on the river’s eastern bank.

»Schulze’s model Altenburg is the long overdue detailed study of society’s change in the East« (Hundspost, Literaturzeitschrift, Hamburg, 1998). »Ingo Schulze wrote the long awaited novel about the reunified Germany« (Wolfgang Höbel, Der Spiegel).

Ingo Schulze, born 1962 in Dresden, studied classical philology in Jena from 1983-88. Afterwards and until 1990, he worked as literary manager at the Landestheater Altenburg after which he became employed of in a newspaper’s editorial department. For the last few years he lived in Berlin as a freelance author. Ingo Schulze received several awards in 1995 for »33 Moments of Happiness«, his first book.

A half year after the book’s debut, the novel’s theatre version has its opening night at Schauspiel Leipzig. Here, director Lukas Langhoff already introduced himself with »Clown and Bandit« by Alexander Galin as well as in the setting of Andreas Marber’s »Dschungel L.E.« with »That’s what they once were, those better days«. (Schauspiel Leipzig, programme season 1998/99)