There he is, Friedrich Fischer, a true and genuine businessman, who has travelled in the world. He has gathered knowledge and gained experience in the proper sense of the word. He has gained from experience. His true wealth consists in the enlargement of his spirit. The tales collected here possess a convincing freshness. Should he have recorded them earlier? No - for his stories have matured thanks to the quiet breath of time that has passed and shaped them.As a businessman with a profound legal education, as a university graduate with a doctorate, blessed with a quick mind, he is one of these rare people who immediately recognise the vital point, grasp the essentials and leave all that is beside the point in the place where it belongs - at the margins or beyond them. He is not concerned with the periphery. On the other hand he does not need to search long for what is central, as he is already standing there himself: in the middle of things. In doing so he does not strike poses, but perceives the reality. Playing a role is foreign to his nature. The will to put himself in the limelight is not apparent. It is his openness that facilitates objectivity. His stories are primarily characterised by people, loners, business partners, birds of paradise and other persons with their entanglements of power, money and greed, in their struggles against the pitfalls of life, against the forces of nature, as survivors, flotsam, failures, capitalists, exploiters, buccaneers, and fortune-seekers.From the afterword by Klaus Harreuter