Berlin, dein Tänzer ist der Tod! Berlin, halt ein, du bist in Not!
Berlin, du wühlst mit Lust im Kot! Halt ein! Lass sein! Und denk ein bisschen nach …

Berlin, your dancer is death! Berlin, hold on, you are in distress!
Berlin, you dig with lust in feces! Hold! Let it be! And think a bit …

Friedrich Holländer: Fox macabre. 1920

Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it is awfully hard to get it back in.

Harry Robbins Haldeman. Watergate and Related Activities. 1973.

The year is 2010. More or less unintentionally, Jack Boulder, in the meantime a well-to-do middle-aged man, delves deep into the changes of the social fabric and their consequences of societies in Germany and at another locations in this world — and tries to find his place.

Some high-ranking diplomat in the German Foreign Office seems to have an eccentric hobby: vintage and an­tique stamps, mostly of the times of the German Reich, between 1871 and 1945 — and the period fol­low­ing until 1990. He steals them together with old envelopes from the archives of the Foreign Office. Jack Boul­der gets a helpless telephone call from Berlin:

“We don't know what to do. That’s where you would come in. His office was searched se­cret­ly, no trace of these stamps could be found. Nor does he sell them — anyway, they are not very valuable. But the people working in the ar­chive have seen him slipping them in an en­ve­lope — several times. We have cameras there. Our security is excellent. So — what happens to them? You would find out, wouldn’t you?”

Jack Boulder thinks: “Who cares? Some pleasant paid days in Berlin …” Then other people sud­den­ly care for him — in Ber­lin and at the other end of the world, in South America.

Boulder meets Amanda Prutz, a charming, well-preserved woman of mature age and small stature who some twenty-five years ago had left her hometown Bytów in Kashubia in Eastern Pomerania. She finally reached Ger­many after a de­tour via Winona, Minnesota, in the United States, but now she spends a lot of time elsewhere; nobody knows where.

She speaks German and wanted to live in Ger­many. Now a provincial hamlet in the middle of nowhere seems to attract her — ap­pa­rent­ly a closely knit German-speak­ing com­mu­ni­ty. But why does she carry old stamps from the archives of the German Foreign Office to that god­for­saken place?

This book is part of a cycle of books. The first installment, Unnamed Forces, plays in 2002, the second one, Berlin Export, in 2004, and the third one, Occident Express, in 2006. The story of The Stamp Collector is set in 2010 (preliminary date of publication: late 2024).

Although each work within the cycle presents an inde­pendent, self-contained tale, they are all connected by the characters of the protagonist, his friends and some other persons, and the outcome of the events of earlier plots. Still, each individual installment of the cycle can be read on its own.