Who steals lower legs?

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Who steals lower legs? , also with the subtitles and other unbelievable crime stories or criminal cases from the 21st century , is a 1977 collection of eight short stories by the German writer Gert Prokop , which are integrated into a common framework through a prologue and are unmistakably based on George Orwell's 1984 lean on. The stories about the dwarf detective Truckle continued with eight other stories in The Sperm Bank Heist.

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The protagonist is the dwarf detective Timothy "Tiny" Truckle, who solves strange criminal cases in the USA of the 21st century, a dystopian society. Truckle can barely acquire a detective license that puts him in a better social position than most people in the United States. Together with his advanced computer, which he calls Napoleon, Truckle usually solves his criminal cases from his apartment.

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  • Who steals lower legs?
  • The death of the immortals
  • Snow White and the 20th Century Man
  • The dead don't steal, do they?
  • A friendship service
  • Samuel the monster
  • A game of life and death
  • The thrush

The future

It turns out that the 21st century United States is in short supply. Ice in the polar ice caps is melted, distributed around the world and processed into drinking water there. Good food, such as fresh fish, meat or game, is also only available if you manage to be included in the distribution lists of major corporations.

The future is dominated by large corporations, which also have a considerable influence on the political formation of the USA. Wealth and prosperity are only found sporadically among residents of the states. In the city where Truckle lives, tightly guarded high-rise buildings (some over 1,000 stories high) dominate the cityscape; the price of the apartments depends on the location and height (above the smog layer). The inhabitants of the dystopian future only know blue skies from stories; They watch the sunset in bars in the high-rise buildings above the layer of clouds.

Medically, however, the future seems to have developed progressively, obviously organ transplants are the order of the day, because as you can see in the eponymous short story Who steals lower legs? experiences, these are no longer major problems.

The big Brother

The meaning of the big brother is completely changed (knowing Orwell's 1984 ) and - as it turns out at the end of the book - also positively documented, since the big brother - unlike Orwell - is the contact person to an underground movement that tries to unite To preserve the remnants of humanity and to subvert the overwhelming power of the conglomerate of government, NSA and big bosses.

Here Prokop ends the story, but lets the reader know that Truckle is a supporter of this underground movement. However, it remains unclear (until the follow-up stories) what happened to the detective - whether he went underground voluntarily to fight the system or whether he was identified and "wiped out" by the government as a supporter of that movement.

useful information

The last story, the end of which was designed openly, is continued in Prokop's collection of stories entitled The Sperm Bank Robbery .

The first story about Timothy Truckle was written on the occasion of a competition for utopian narratives organized by the publishing house Das Neue Berlin in 1971. It was the story The Death of Immortals , which appeared together with other stories from the competition (among others by Günther Krupkat and Klaus Möckel ) in the anthology Der Mann vom Anti (edited by Ekkehard Redlin ).

The short actor Peter Brownbill has acquired an option on the film rights from Rowohlt Verlag. He will then play Timothy Truckle in a movie or a series.

The basic idea of ​​a detective who lives in the 21st century, likes whiskey, has a talking computer and solves his cases in a darkly threatening future, was used by Michael Koser from 1982 for his radio play series The Last Detective on Bayerischer Rundfunk.

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See experiment and correction , editor's afterword in Der Mann vom Anti , p. 364 f.