This is one of those books you either put down after reading ten pages or you read in one go. Author Michael Runge talks about his youth in Hamburg’s St. Pauli district in the 80s. In staccato-like sentences he tells stories of himself as the “Bordsteinkönig”, or the sidewalk king; his coming of age experience, the violent gang life, sex with a prostitute for the first time and the unfulfilled longing of his first love. Ruge manages to depict the pimps, teens in bomber jackets, and both magic and filth vivaciously. The reader becomes a voyeur on a journey with the protagonist. A novel that’s in between a Christiane F.-like report and the search for the self in “The Catcher in the Rye”; it is painfully honest like statements by Klaus Lemke and authentic and driven as adolescence itself.
(Bordsteinkönig – Meine wilde Jugend auf St.Pauli” by Michel Ruge, Knaur, 2013 — this book is not yet available in English).
Antje Drinkuth has lived in Berlin since 1987 and works as a professor of Fashion Design at the Akademie Mode + Design.
Published in Cee Cee #92 on 17.1.2013
