#RivetingReviews: Sarah Escritt reviews BAD SHEEP by Katja Lange-Müller, translated by Simon Pare

Juli’s glazed green gaze rested on me with unwavering mildness. ‘Oh Soya,’ she said, ‘love is like measles. You only get it once and the later it happens, the worse it is. Tolstoy, I think.’

Soya is thirty-nine when she first encounters Harry, on 17 April 1987 outside Nollendorf-Platz U-Bahn station in West Berlin. By the time she is forty-two, he is dead. Decades later he remains the unstable centre of her life. Black Sheep is her equivocal love letter to Harry, the “wobbly man” of the book’s epigraph. It is also a muted elegy to West Berlin and the uncompliant lives that it sustained.

Soya has not long been in West Berlin when she meets Harry. She has arrived from East Berlin via the Marienfelde refugee processing centre and found herself in a city of refugees, from the two Germanys and beyond, who are at odds with the systems and societies they have left behind. In Harry, although he is from the West and she is from the East, she recognises the energy and attitude of a fellow Berliner. It turns out that he too is on the run: he has been released on licence from Tegel prison. Unlike his fellow refugees he has a clear purpose: to avoid recall to prison. To do this it’s essential that he demonstrate that he is following a drug rehabilitation programme and Soya steps in to organise a team of people, the sentimental Juli amongst them, ready to assume the fool’s errand of keeping Harry under constant supervision and taking him to appointments at a therapy centre on Eisenacher Strasse.

Crisis point is reached towards the middle of the book. After a spectacularly disastrous therapy session, seven members of the team re-group at the nearby Swan Lake Café. Soya is struck by the “Edward Hopper-like atmosphere”. It’s an atmosphere that imbues the book. From the opening image – Soya and Harry on two mattresses, lying head by head but not side by side, a window framing a patch of sky – and their first encounter in a desolate and near-empty square, lit from above by the bright white light of a spring sun, the story is told through Hopper-like scenes. Apparently inconsequential, often seen from odd angles and with unexpected details mercilessly foregrounded, together they amount to a meticulously composed yet enigmatic whole. Not a line is wasted.

As so often with Lange-Müller’s writing, this is a story shaped around absences. Amongst his effects Harry left a notebook containing, in eighty-nine undated sentences, laconic commentary on the last three years of his life. To Soya’s uncomprehending rage and grief, she is not mentioned once in this notebook. This absence is the catalyst for the pages she now fills. Responding to the sentences he left behind, she writes herself back into the time they spent together. It’s necessarily a one-sided conversation, shaped as much by Harry’s absence from Soya’s life in the present as by her absence from his in the notebook. We are left asking ourselves, as we might do if looking at a Hopper painting, was there a connection between them or did they just happen, for a time, to share the same urban space?

The West Berlin that provided the setting for their story is another absence in Soya’s present. Its geography and mood live on in the memories that she replays, like a film, in her head: the rusty bath that takes an hour to fill at 12, Pallas-Athene-Strasse, the Malibu bar with ankle-deep white sand and fake palm trees on Winterfeldtplatz, the shower cubicle in her kitchen in Moabit, the flower stall at the entrance to the defunct Halensee station, the drunken mug stuck out of the window of the bar on the corner of Waldstrasse and Turmstrasse. It is also evoked in the language, a challenge to which translator Simon Pare rises with a light touch: as soon as Harry speaks, Soya recognises the vocabulary of a West Berliner.

The loss of the protective cocoon that the Berlin Wall provided is a source of ambivalence to Soya. Harry’s reaction is more surprising. He weeps at the sight of Honecker being returned to prison and recognises, in the way he governed, the vindictive distrust of a former prisoner who knows that some, amongst those over whom he now has power, betrayed him. It follows that Harry has few true friends but the former Tegel inmate, Elmi Kling, is one of them. Elmi outwitted prison authorities by sending messages in plain sight to the outside world, by inking them with tiny pinpricks of colour into the design of postage stamps. The prison guards, intent on deciphering the letters inside the envelopes, missed the artwork, but on the other side of the prison wall, these stamps have become valuable: the selection hanging on Soya’s wall provides her with a reassuring nest egg.    

Soya and Harry, schooled by the experiences of their respective childhoods in West and East, instinctively suspect that rules are hypocritical and conventional value-systems irrelevant. With small adjustments to the projector, Lange-Müller shows it’s a view that could apply equally on either side of the prison wall and either side of the Berlin Wall. For Soya and Harry, when drink, drugs and sex no longer function to dull the pain of reality, oblivion is always there as a way out. But then, suddenly, there is an unexpected moment of connection, kindness or beauty – and life is worth living. It is by chance that they share a surname – Krüger – but it is perhaps not by chance that Krüger is not so far from Müller.  

Bad Sheep was short-listed for the German Book Prize in 2007. It is now making its way in English thanks to the eloquent advocacy of Simon Pare, who has also translated Lange-Müller’s more recent Revolving Door. Bad Sheep is a short work with the resonance of an Edward Hopper painting. It lives on in the mind; scenes re-order themselves long after the book is finished. I continue to reflect on the Harlequin that Harry gives Soya. What do other readers think it means?

Reviewed by Sarah Escritt

BAD SHEEP 

Written by Katja Lange-Müller

Translated by Simon Pare

Published by Seagull Books (2025)

March 2026 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

---

Sarah Escritt was the runner-up in the 2025 Goethe-Institut Award for New Translation.