










































Tobias Hülswitt
Angel Pool

Translated from German by Rachel Halverson

Strictly speaking, not a single day has passed without 
such a story, and Katja did not know exactly why this 
bothered her so much. She listened, for example, to a 

Vietnamese war veteran confess that he couldn’t fall asleep 
at night without first emptying an entire bottle of whiskey. Out 
of the blue. Students said such things out of the blue, right in 
the middle of class, when Katja just had explained adjective 
declensions yet again or had introduced Subjunctive II. She 
heard from a Polish day release prisoner that he was going to 
take his case to the European Union’s Court of Justice, because 
he considered it outrageous that seven years after he had slept 
with this abducted underage girl only twice, that my God seven 
years after this rather harmless incident they still had put him 
in prison. She had had an old Fatah fighter sitting in class next 
to an Israeli who had the shrapnel from a Palestinian grenade 
in his head since his childhood on a Kibbutz. Young Afghans 
told how they had walked from Afghanistan through Iran and 
Turkey to Europe: a married couple barely twenty years old, 
each with a bag, and the husband carrying their young son; 
another Afghan, sixteen years old, told in class how he had lost 
his parents and sister two years ago as they were transported 
from Turkey’s Mediterranean coast to Greece in boats owned 



Rachel Halverson    153

by the Turkish mafia and since then had not seen them. When 
they were discussing love, one of the extremely popular topics 
in Integration Courses,1 Katja had heard a Turkish woman tell 
how the women her husband ran off with would notice after two, 
three months at the most what an asshole he was and chase 
him off. He always came back to her, and that’s why she didn’t 
worry about it anymore when it happened. 

The cultural unit on love had an open discussion topic with 
the title “Marriage for Love versus Arranged Marriage,” and a 
Turkish-Indian majority always formed in support of arranged 
marriages. Katja had to confess that the arguments they 
brought in defense of arranged marriages were not the worst. 
Somehow these damned arranged marriages built on reason 
rather than love seemed to last longer. And didn’t the romantics 
on the Internet always ruefully return to arranged marriages?

Despite all the reservations that she herself harbored, Katja 
felt an obligation to make German culture, or the Western 
lifestyle, to a certain extent appealing to the participants in the 
Integration Courses. Ultimately, these people would live here 
provided they weren’t deported again or they already had lived 
here for decades without being able to speak German. Above all 
it was necessary to lead them to an understanding of Germans, 
to show them that not everything about these Germans was 
cold and abrasive and blunt, no, that there also were friendly 
and cultivated Germans among them, like herself for example. 
And because she, as she termed it, was grudgingly doing PR 
for Germany, she found herself on this morning as always 
defending romantic marriages in the discussion “Marriage 
for Love versus Arranged Marriage,” all the while naturally 
paying attention not to devalue the cultural conventions of her 
students. And there this story was brought up again, in fact 
for the second time. The first time must have been several 
months ago in a different course, but with the same discussion 
topic. And she wasn’t sure whether the two women who told it 
knew each other or whether the story was simply making the 

1  The “Gesetz zur Steuerung und Begrenzung der Zuwanderung und 
zur Regelung des Aufenthalts und der Integration von Unionsbürgern und 
Ausländern” [Act to Control and Restrict Immigration and to Regulate the 
Residence and Integration of EU Citizens and Foreigners] was passed in 2004 
and mandated language and culture instruction for those wanting to live and work 
in the Federal Republic of Germany. As of 2005, most immigrants and refugees 
seeking permanent residency in Germany are required to take an Integration 
Course which consists of a language course and a cultural orientation course. 



154    Tobias Hülswitt

rounds in the school. Anyway, it promptly came up whenever 
Katja began grudgingly to do PR for Germany. The first time a 
Russian woman told it, this time a Turkish woman did. The story 
was short and to the point: In the apartment building where the 
woman’s girlfriend lived, a thirty-five-year-old German man, who 
lived alone, had died of a heart attack, and several days or even 
weeks had passed before his body was discovered. No friends, 
no relatives. In the first version, he had died on Christmas Day, 
the second on Easter. “Vhhhhy alvvaays alone?” the Russian 
woman asked, and “Vay alveys elon?” the Turkish woman 
asked.2 “Yes, why always alone?” joined in the whole Turkish-
Russian-Nigerian-Venezuelan-Thai-Spanish-Iranian-Indian class 
und shook their heads in unison. And among all the stories that 
she heard daily from these students and that fascinated and 
moved her, but did not prevent her from sleeping, this one story, 
barely three sentences in length, knocked her socks off. Of 
course, she wasn’t stupid: it was because this story pertained to 
her.

After work she rode her bike from Moritzplatz3 to the Angel 
Pool,4 in order to sit at the edge of the pond and turn the whole 
thing over in her mind. The Angel Pool looked as though it just 
had finished a round of chemo: bald in its new concrete border, 
sparse tufts of seedlings where previously a thick wall of reeds 
had shielded the café from the pond. Small, naked metal heads 
like those from a sprinkler system protruded from the water in 
equal distance from each other. And after Katja had looked at 
the small, silver-gray, somehow also bald waves awhile, one 
of the two turtles, who lived in the pond during the summer, 
suddenly stuck its likewise gray, bald head out of the water 
between the sprinkler heads and paused a few minutes. 

She thought about Mr. Schaaß. And about the young 
Afghanis in her second course, who had discarded their 

2   In the original German, Hülswitt tailors the orthography of these two questions 
and their subsequent occurrence in the short story to emulate the distinctive 
Russian and Turkish accents of the two women learning German. The translator 
consulted with a native speaker of Russian and a native speaker of Turkish to 
capture the same effect in the English translation.  
3  Moritzplatz, located in Kreuzberg at the end of the Oranienstraße, has 
emerged as a creative hub in recent years with the Princesses’ Gardens, 
numerous clubs and cafés, and the opening of the Aufbau Haus Development 
Center. 
4   Angel Pool (Engelbecken) is a square pond located in a park in Kreuzberg 
in Berlin. On one end, there is a café directly on the water. Grassy banks with 
bushes form the other three sides. 



Rachel Halverson    155

headscarves and reveled in their new free lives in Germany, 
and how she, Katja, had seen the lives of these three intelligent 
young girls pass before her eyes in fast motion: the heartfelt, 
cohesive family unit that the three sisters and their parents 
formed would gradually dissolve. Because they wanted to 
leave Afghanistan behind them at any price, in the near future 
they would get to know the first in a series of German men, 
a series which only death someday would end. They would 
begin to feel like their parents were a burden, in the beginning 
because they never really gained their footing in Germany and 
later because they had grown old and were no longer able 
to care for themselves. Then the sisters would begin fighting 
about who should care for their aging parents. One of them 
would be married with three children, but with very little money 
and an apartment that was far too small for her parents to live 
with her. The other would be a single mother going to school 
with more than enough on her plate. And the third would be 
a single doctor, who would be too busy with work, recreation, 
and attempting to have a relationship to take care of her aging 
parents. At the end of their own lives, they would not have seen 
each other for months and years. They had jumped from the 
frying pan into the fire, where they would be slowly roasted, 
so to speak. And Katja thought about how she had wanted 
cautiously to prepare them for everything that life in the West 
entails, and then had left it at that. 

And on the other hand, she thought of Mr. Schaaß. It all 
went hand in hand. Mr. Schaaß, the last German in a small 
Transylvanian village, one of the last representatives of the 
Germans who had been settling in Romania for 800 years, 
one of the last of his kind. After Hans-Dietrich Genscher5 had 
declared in 1990 that all Transylvanian Saxons were welcome 
in Germany, Mr. Schaaß belonged to the five or ten percent 
who did not leave their land and their villages in the Carpathian 
highlands among the hills of Burzenland, of Unterwald, of 
Nösnerland and all the other regions with their Transylvanian 
Saxon names; those who didn’t want to leave this land that, 
as Christian said, always looked like it had been painted 
with diluted watercolors, this land with its herds of sheep, 
its unfenced expanses, wolves, forests, smoked bacon and 
enormous fortresses. While the other ninety percent stuffed 

5   Hans-Dietrich Genscher was Vice-Chancellor and Foreign Minister of the 
Federal Republic of Germany between 1982 and 1992.



156    Tobias Hülswitt

their suitcases into their Romanian Dacias and set out for the 
West over the pothole-riddled sandy roads, leaving behind their 
farms and stalls filled with animals and their houses filled with 
furniture, just as they had been. And with starry eyes this Mr. 
Schaaß told her and Christian in the small house in the village, 
in which he was born and which he essentially had never left, 
of the time when the village was a community with century-old 
customs. There were dances and schnapps and everything but 
prudery, with bawdy jokes and horrible punishments. It was a 
village with communitarian neighborliness, where everyone had 
everyone’s back and no one let anyone fall through the cracks; 
where from one’s first breath to one’s last, whether one wanted 
to or not, personal freedom was sacrificed for solidarity and 
community. And naturally Katja also thought of Christian, who 
had been her boyfriend and whom she had accompanied to his 
ethnographical interviews in Transylvania, and whom she had 
envied because of this project, mainly because she never would 
have trusted herself to begin something like this in a foreign 
country—although it was in Europe! —, and whom she had left, 
when he returned to Germany after two years in Romania and 
she once again was working at the language school. After ten 
years in a  relationship and thorough consideration. Sitting at 
the kitchen table in Moabit.6 With words she could hardly believe 
were coming out of her own mouth. “I think it’s better that you 
move out.” — “And what is that supposed to mean?” — “Well, 
it means that ... that each of us just goes our separate way.” A 
meter-thick curtain of fog descended between them, that’s what 
it seemed like to her. And once those words had been said, 
reality picked up these sentences like new DNA and began 
consistently and relentlessly to construct itself according to 
them. Katja could only watch. She had waited for years to say 
these sentences, and perhaps she had only said them now, so 
that the years of waiting would not have been for naught. 

She thought about Christian sitting alone in his small new 
apartment, physically present, but in reality caught in some 
European intermediary world, thirty-five years old. He had 
survived Easter, but Christmas was in six months. Katja didn’t 
want to be responsible for his solitary death. And Mr. Schaaß, 
seventy-five, suffering from cancer and nearing the end of 
his life, an end that practically was one and the same as the 

6   Moabit is a rather sedate district in Berlin, not as trendy as Neukölln or 
Kreuzberg, where established Berliners as well as newcomers, couples as well 
as small families, make their home. 



Rachel Halverson    157

end of an entire lineage. He still told of his life with stars in his 
eyes. Without ever having left his damn village, he seemed 
to be happy in his damn house with the little windows and the 
vegetable garden he had put in the yard. And Katja had tossed 
back all the shots of schnapps Mr. Schaaß had shoved across 
the table at her, as he told of earlier days, of the neighborhood’s 
strict governance and the very sexy brides in their traditional 
garb, of the Maypole and of the burial ritual of pleading for 
the dead to be brought out of the house to be taken to the 
cemetery.7 Katja had drunk all the shots, because she suddenly 
thought she knew that in the remaining forty years, or whatever, 
she would not be able to make her own eyes sparkle that way. 
She thought about what she had that could hold a candle to Mr. 
Schaaß’s life of local magnificence. A few beaches. The one in 
L.A. with the dolphins, and the one in Lagos with the palm trees, 
in addition the Bund in Shanghai and the Williamsburg Bridge in 
New York. The Cape of Good Hope. The cliffs of the West coast 
of Ireland. The southern tip of Sweden and by sailboat through 
the archipelago off the Swedish coast, and the Alps, Venice, 
Rome, Lisbon, even Iran, Azerbaijan, South Korea, Egypt and 
Mexico. Yes, she had seen all of that! Yes, she would love a fifth 
shot of schnapps. And Christian carried her to the car. 

She continued to look at the gray surface of the Angel Pool 
in its new concrete border, and the lawn where she was sitting 
smelled like dog piss. “Vay alveys elon?” Exactly. What would 
it be like if things were to change? And if they were to change 
now? She grabbed her cell phone just as it began to ring, 
exactly at that moment. It was Anatol. 

Anatol was a sweetie. An aristocrat who had worked for 
the Bild8 newspaper until his personal burnout. Now, after an 
extensive treatment at a health spa and a long vacation in 
Thailand and Indonesia, he actually did nothing more than 
ride around on his bike. She was happy whenever he touched 
base, and their relationship could have become so much more, 

7   “Ausbitte des Toten” is a Transylvanian Saxon burial tradition that is still 
practiced in some communities today. A designated member of the community 
enters the courtyard of the house of mourning to claim the dead. He first 
expresses condolences to the family and then requests permission to bring the 
dead to the cemetery for burial. For additional information, see online resource 
“Ethnographische Sammlung. Siebenbürgisch-Sächische Bräuche. Begräbnis” 
(http://traditionen.evang.ro/fe/tradition/view/14). 
8   The Bild-Zeitung is a German tabloid newspaper published by Axel-Springer 
AG. 

http://traditionen.evang.ro/fe/tradition/view/14


158    Tobias Hülswitt

but she feared it would have been such a big deal if they ever 
got together, and that was simply too much for her. And if it 
weren’t a big deal, it would be a disappointment, because she 
always had believed that it would become a big deal if they got 
together. And if it were only a partial thing, she would hurt him, 
and after having hurt Christian, she wanted to take a break from 
hurting people.

“Do you know where I am at this very moment, and why I’m 
calling you?” His voice came over the phone bright and ready 
for action.

“No?”
“I’m here in Friedrichshain right in front of Katja’s Cake 

Kitchen and just wanted to know if you go there sometimes?”
“Because of the name? Nope, never.”
“As usual I got lost, I was just in Treptow, and suddenly I was 

biking right by here and then I thought, man, what a great time 
just to give you a call.” 

“Well, that’s nice of you, super, it really makes my day.”
“Mine too!”
“Sooo ... how are you?”
“Super! Absolutely excellent! If I were to die now, everything 

would be fine, since the last two months of my life were simply 
the most awesome two months of my life, and even if everything 
goes down the tubes again, I always will know, it was the 
most awesome time in my life. I share the coolest apartment 
with the coolest people, I bike all over the place, the sun is 
awesome, the city is awesome, nature is awesome, everything 
is awesome!”

Katja was suddenly filled with rage. Although she actually 
liked Anatol, and regardless of the fact that she currently didn’t 
have a particularly large group of social contacts, she decided 
to ban him from her inner circle for the time being. Impossible 
to be friends with someone who is doing so awesomely well. 
Even though she knew he had earned it, had had difficult times 
and been really down. Underneath the surface of his euphoria, 
he was most certainly the saddest person in Europe, and 
that really spoke in his favor. Whatever! She hung up before 
he noticed anything. “Vay alveys elon?” She couldn’t take 
care of everyone. She leaned back on the grass and then sat 
immediately bolt upright. Dog piss must be in the grass right 



Rachel Halverson    159

behind her. She jumped up and put her hair to her nose. Now 
even her hair smelled like it. “Fuck. Damn. Why was everything 
always such a shitty pile of crap?” She was talking to herself. 
She saw other people who were lying on the short piece of lawn 
in front of the water. Who were they? What did they all want? 
How did they explain the reasons for their existence on the face 
of the earth? Did they ever even think about it? What did she 
herself even want? Why had she even taken her cell phone 
with her again? Exactly! What if everything would change due 
to her own initiative? A message to Christian, unaltered, direct, 
without indecision and hesitation, simply throw everything into 
the ring, completely expose herself? She decided to send him 
the ultimate text message, now: “Christian” or “Dear Christian”? 
A difficult decision since they had broken up so many years 
ago—, “Christian, you are the only person I wasn’t lonely with.” 
Lonely. She considered it a bit. A big word. But the truth. Okay. 
Or should it be: “With whom I wasn’t lonely?” Of course she 
didn’t actually send the text, but she had never really expected 
that she would. She didn’t even type it into her cell phone. And 
she didn’t write it down anywhere either. She got on her bicycle 
and rode home, to Moabit. The sun was shining, and she could 
understand Anatol a tiny bit now, since it all actually was a bit 
awesome. 

*****

For German writer Tobias Hülswitt, it is the very ephemeral 
nature of human existence that relegates storytelling to a unique 
position in society, and the way in which stories are told reveals 
as much as the stories themselves. His short story “Angel 
Pool” (2011) is set in contemporary Berlin, the capital of unified 
Germany and home to a broad spectrum of humanity. In fact, 
the city’s international diversity, with residents from around the 
world, furnishes the multicultural context in which Katja, the main 
character, works as a language instructor tasked with teaching 
German to the city’s ever increasing immigrant population. 
Exchanges with her students from a variety of different countries 
and their difficulties comprehending the recurrent story they hear 
of Germans dying alone force Katja to contemplate her decision 
to end a ten-year relationship with Christian and her current single 
status. The short story’s omniscient narrator artfully interweaves 
the life stories of Katja’s students and of Herr Schaaß, one of 



160    Tobias Hülswitt

the subjects of Christian’s ethnographic research project in 
Transylvania, to establish a narrative frame to which Katja’s 
reflections on her own life stand in stark contrast.  

In many respects, “Angel Pool” is representative of Hülswitt’s 
growing body of work. In his four novels (Saga [2000], Ich kann 
dir eine Wunde schminken [2004], Der kleine Herr Mister [2006], 
and Dinge bei Licht [2008]), a co-edited volume of interviews 
Werden wir ewig leben? Gespräche über die Zukunft von Mensch 
und Technologie (2010), and numerous essays and short stories, 
Hülswitt, a 2001 graduate of the German Literature Institute at 
the University of Leipzig, explores the human condition, and 
the characters in his works grapple with all dimensions of life, 
ranging from love and loss to life and death. Central to each text 
are explorations of how stories are told, whether it be through 
direct comments by the protagonist on the narrative itself or the 
introduction of nonlinearity into the text reminding readers with 
each page they turn that they have entered a constructed world. 
Characteristic of Hülswitt’s approach to narration, the open 
ending of “Angel Pool” leaves readers with the sense that Katja 
has discovered happiness in that one moment on the banks of 
Angel Pool, but it offers no conclusive indication of the course 
she will choose to take in life. Her story, like those of the readers 
themselves, is one of a life in progress.9 

R. H.

9   See Hülswitt’s personal website for examples of his past, present, and future 
projects: http://www.tobiashuelswitt.com/. 

Note from Delos: The photograph of the Angel Pool in Berlin is 
the work of Rachel Halverson, and is reproduced with her kind 
permission.

http://www.tobiashuelswitt.com/

