The Property Owner

Claudia Erdheim returns to the places of her childhood. The building and apartment, idyllic background for the bizarre and eccentric life of mother and daughter in "Have You Gone Mad?", now become objects of speculation and business. The decayed and rented fortress is redeveloped with public means. Money is involved, a lot of money - at least for people of little importance, who clumsily imitate the practices of the property sharks. Builders and drunken workmen, magistrates, lawyers, superintendents and tenants - all are involved in constantly changing alliances and oppositions. And, while they are concerned only with the booty, the building sinks into chaos and squalor. The narrator, a naive writer, is forced to learn the hard way - she gets to know the cynical reasonings of business. She does stand her ground, however - until, ironically, the unreason of motherly love becomes her undoing. The trivial happenings that are here told in few words, prove to be intricate. Humor and comic reveal that which lies behind the sociocritical topic of ubiquitous corruption: the madness of everyday life and the ambivalence of struggling one one's own.