Our Collection | The Short Story Project

Germany

It was a Wednesday and time for my milk bath. But the light white liquid in angular packs – sucked from udders in farmyards, purloined from bovines, diversely digested from greenest grasses for calves, stirred and...

Milkface

Jan Snela

6 min

Germany

The Sankt Johannesweide Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic encompasses spacious grounds. Patients have access to this Lower Bavarian gem among mental institutions from seven in the morning until six in the evening, five days a week. For the...

It’s Me

Kristina Schilke

9 min

Germany

…and found her sleeping with sadness. The first words in the morning, the underlined phrase in the book with a ribbon marker, a present from Marie, and the sun rises behind the chestnut trees of the...

Gethsemane

Ralf Rothmann

9 min

Germany

Fritz had met ‘that Hilda woman’ in a bar called Paradise Now – sheer chance, really. He never usually went to places like that. For years he had been rotating among three or four pubs and...

Sloth

Eva Menasse

13 min

Germany

You pressed your Nazi grandfather’s signet ring into my hand and asked me to throw it in the sea or some other body of water. Because you couldn’t. And I said: I’m not doing that; he...

We Were Fishing For Rockets

Karen Köhler

9 min

Germany

Mother disappeared on the twentieth of August nineteen ninety-eight at around eleven fifty at night. At around eight thirty in the morning of the twenty-first of August nineteen ninety-eight, Father called and informed me: ‘Mother died...

Motherdeath

Michael Lentz

22 min

Germany

The military school of St. Severin. The gymnasium. The class in their white cotton shirts stand in two rows under the big gas lights. The gym teacher, a young officer with a hard, swarthy face and...

Gym Period

Rainer Maria Rilke

7 min

Germany

NATHANIEL TO LOTHAIRE. Certainly you must all be uneasy that I have not written for so long—so very long. My mother, I am sure, is angry, and Clara will believe that I am passing my time...

The Sandman

E.T.A. Hoffmann

69 min

Germany

We stood with Gerschom Scholem at the grave of his parents and brothers in the Jewish Cemetery in Berlin-Weißensee. It was cold – it was December. Gerschom Scholem and Fania, his wife, were wearing light coats,...

Double Grave

Barbara Honigmann

8 min

Germany

Let’s see if the forests catch fire again. Let’s see if intense heat rushes toward us. Let’s see if smoke drives animals whose names we don’t know out of the bushes. Let’s see if that leaves...

The Onlookers

Kathrin Röggla

19 min

Prenzlauer Berg by Night (Nothing Doing)

Germany

That night I ran into the fox again at the corner of my road, just after one. And like the last time, he stopped and turned his head towards me and we stared at each other...

Prenzlauer Berg by Night (Nothing Doing)

Annett Gröschner

17 min

Germany

I go out in the yard with the dog. Just after two in the morning and the night’s very warm; the summer’s come back again this August after a long cool and rainy stretch. The hottest...

Outside the Door

Clemens Meyer

16 min