BY THE TIME HE WAS THIRTY, the dramatist, poet, and prose author Gert Loschütz had lived in three different cities. The first ten he lived in Genthin, Sachsen-Anhalt, where he was born in 1946. There, despite the restrictions of East German life, he experienced the security and warmth of home, the fullness of childhood adventure, the certainty of belonging. In Dillenburg in the Westerwald region of Hesse, to which his family fled, he was exposed to deprivation and, unfamiliar with the social rituals in the West, also humiliation. Above all, at age fourteen he suffered the loss of his mother. Making his way without her, at school and play, and in his growth to young manhood, he painfully realized his loss of Heimat, that he had become, irrevocably, an outsider. In 1966, at the age of twenty, he moved to Berlin, where he began his studies at the Freie Universität, later worked as a publisher's editor, took part, critically, in the revolt and turmoil of the late sixties, and in 1970 became a freelance author. In 1977, he moved to Frankfurt, where he still lives.

Gert Loschütz already enjoyed widespread recognition when in 1984 he published his first longer prose work, the novella Eine wahnsinnige Liebe. In it, the first-person narrator Lukas Hartmann, an emotionally stunted pharmaceuticals salesman, escapes his isolation by involving himself with his newly bought desk computer. He makes it his constant companion and, exploring its vast interactive capacities, literally falls in love with it. What before had simply been “my computer” becomes, gotten up as a life-size doll, “my girlfriend,” and after the two marry (!), “my wife.” As Hartmann drifts into madness, Loschütz's calm and lucid prose accentuates through contrast the fluid boundaries between illusion and reality. Meanwhile, the novel has proved itself to be farsighted. Giant leaps in media technology and, coupled with them, the steady shrinking of the imagination threaten to turn Hartmann's bizarre fate into an everyday and perhaps more than just momentary event in the lives of high-tech addicts worldwide.

The double loss that Gert Loschütz sustained, with his displacement to the West, and the loss of his mother and what he had once known as Heimat, echoes throughout his work, most clearly in the novel Flucht (1990) and in the prose collection Unterwegs zu den Geschichten (1998).