Robin Meisner

Truth, Dare or Lemon is a game played by stupid boarding school kids who don't know what to do with themselves. Before Tim died he was the number one of a close-knit boarding school gang. When the friends engage in a ritual one year after his death a familiar game turns into a sadistic night...

Each year in June, Bavarian housewife Elke Richter visits family in Halle, in the GDR. There she meets family friend Gregor Pohl, a married carpenter, and they begin having an affair. After her family stops the annual visits due to the husband's promotion in the communist regime, the adulterous couple arranges to meet on other holidays. After Gorbachev's Glasnost leads to the fall of the Iron Curtain, everything changes, and Gregor chooses to emigrate to Canada.

The story is set some time in the past, or maybe some time in the future. Given a time-frame, we would say somewhere between the American moonwalk, and Coca- Cola's serious ambition to turn the moon into an advertising logo. Our central character, the young lift operator, is formed by experience into cynicism, detachment, and apathy. The story builds to its crescendo: of public outrage and state crackdown; the banality of commercial interest and the monumental rape of nature. Set in a large newspaper office, the Lift is a place of relative safety. But floor by floor, with each passenger in his or her tableau, the atmosphere of mayhem seeps in. Finally our young character leaves the situation, far-gone in hopelessness and disinterest.