This story won Commonweal’s 2026 prize for short fiction. Novelist and guest judge Phil Klay writes:

In some ways, Linda Kinstler’s haunting “Waidmannslust” is a simple story. An American intellectual in Berlin has a dinner party with friends to celebrate his new book on the widening rift between Europe and America. He’s an internationalist, believing in alliances, mutual economic interests, and democratic values. He has his little policy proposals for advancing international cooperation. And like everyone there, he knows his arguments won’t amount to much as the old international order dies, and dies farcically. The narrator tells the story in exquisitely balanced sentences with an absolute mastery of tone. There’s a certain sadness, a certain irony, but also a painful honesty as characters who have devoted their lives to international policy confront the irrelevance of their public rhetoric and their reasonable positions in confronting our globe’s bewildering future. Yes, it’s a quiet story—a few friends discussing ideas and foreign policy. But that’s what makes the story so unsettling. Underneath it is the abyss laid out before us all, which Kinstler’s characters are only just starting to peer into.

It was a last-minute invitation. Daniel called midmorning, from his hotel. A dinner party in the suburbs, in his honor. He had just remembered that I was in Berlin. Was I free that evening? His old school friends were hosting a gathering to celebrate his new book. They could be my guides to the city once he went home, he said. Like host parents. And besides, the conversation should be fun, he said. They may love me, but I am pretty sure they hate my book. 

I was given instructions: meet him on the platform at the Friedrichstraße S-Bahn at 7 p.m., preferably with a bottle of wine but I was not to go to any trouble. The dinner party would be in German, but everyone spoke English in case I got lost. I said I could handle it, that it would be good practice, even though I had only taken one intensive course and had been a terrible student. But I figured I had long ago mastered the art of nodding idiotically along. 

I had rented an apartment in Prenzlauer Berg for the summer, subsidized by a research grant from my university. No one at school had questioned my motives. It was normal for the graduate students to decamp to Berlin come May. We all had plausible explanations for why we had to be there: archives, an exchange, language immersion. But the truth was that we were aimless, and it felt good to be in a place where aimlessness was in the air, where the parks and bars were full by 3 p.m. and youth seemingly eternal. Where it was unfashionable to chase capital accumulation because so much of the city’s capital had long ago been accumulated and destroyed. 

Of course I said yes. We both knew I had nothing else to do. I spent the day preparing, reviewing my notebook from the intensive, refreshing my vocabulary. Come six o’clock I went to the shop around the corner to buy the no-trouble bottle of wine and stopped to get peonies from the old lady in front of the subway station. Their pink petals were still curled slightly inward, their grip on one another just starting to loosen. I thought it would be a lasting gift—the hosts could watch the flowers gently open, day by day, and think of the generous American girl who brought them to their home.

Daniel was waiting for me on the platform. He wore a rumpled linen blazer and had his book—The Atlantic Rift: The End of Internationalism—clutched under his arm. How were things in Washington? I asked. Good, he said, but funding was being tightened at his institute, a center for the study of Eastern Europe and Russia. Every year they hosted scholars from that part of the world, gave them a title and a little money to live on. In December they had made the mistake of putting the Russians and Ukrainians in a room and asking them to identify possible solutions to the war. Daniel had been livid when he found out. It was a disastrous idea with a predictable outcome: as soon as one of the Russians had started talking about peace and reconciliation, about historical truth and accepting one’s fate, the Ukrainians had stood up as a group and walked out of the room. At one of their events the previous year, I had watched as an activist from Kyiv held up a fragment of the city’s toppled Lenin statue before a room full of men in suits. It was his gift to the institute, he said, a reminder that Putin’s regime would collapse just as the Berlin Wall once had. On subsequent visits I had looked for the shard of the shattered Lenin, which I had presumed would be on prominent display. But it was nowhere to be found. When I asked Daniel what happened to it, he said that his boss had gotten it encased in glass and brought it home. 

We found seats behind a suited young man on his commute home. A banker, maybe, though those were rare in Berlin. More likely an MP’s aide, something governmental. His neck was bent over his phone and I watched as his thumb tapped at the screen, news headlines appearing and disappearing with every touch. The dinner party, Daniel briefed me, was going to be somewhat formal. He and his school friends were now well into their fifties. Some with children, all settled into stable bureaucratic lives. The evening’s hosts, Michael and Karin, used to live in Prenzlauer Berg, back before it became Berlin’s Park Slope. He worked in the foreign ministry, she was a teacher. Two kids, ten and twelve, who might at some point make an appearance. 

You’ll like them, Daniel said. Their path through life has not been straight. When we were all in university I never would have guessed they’d end up together. I went on a few dates with Karin before Michael came onto the scene, he explained. In front of us, the young man used two fingers to zoom in on an interactive map of nuclear launch sites around the world. They started holding salons at their house a few years ago, Daniel said, an attempt to reclaim the intellectual uncertainty and seriousness of their student days. And probably also to inject a little life into the marriage, to bring their friends back into the picture now that the kids are older. Obviously, I could never make it. But when I told them I would be in town for the book—you know, my publisher expects it to do well in the German market—they made this plan. 

We emerged from the train and Daniel led me toward a hedge-lined street. The neighborhood was called Waidmannslust, which, he explained as we walked, meant hunter’s delight. It was prim and clean, no litter to speak of and no street traffic to observe. We did not pass a single pedestrian along the way.

It was odd to see Daniel on this side of the Atlantic. We didn’t know each other terribly well, had just bumped into each other at events and parties in D.C. enough times that it had seemed sensible to swap numbers. But even I could tell that he seemed lighter, almost buoyant, in Berlin. It wasn’t just that his wife had stayed behind with the kids, that he had been temporarily relieved of the practical burdens of parenthood. He was thousands of miles from home and yet somehow made more sense, both to himself and to others, in this distant city. It was as if his whole body was relieved to be in a place so self-conscious of its own history, a place where he had first learned what all that history was supposed to be for. 

 He stopped walking in front of a two-story brick house propped up behind a well-kept lawn. It revealed just enough of itself to inspire envy in the outside world, a breakfast nook tucked into the kitchen window on one side and the shadow of an airy sitting room on the other. 

Karin met us at the door in a cotton dress and sandals. She was shorter than I had imagined and more boyish, with a gray pixie cut and well-preserved eyes. Soon I was on the other side of the kitchen window, the peonies in a glass vase, the wine breathing before dinner. Michael, a tall man with a conspicuously groomed mane of blond hair, eyed the flowers and asked what they were called. Peonies, I said. He frowned and turned to Karin. What do we call these? He thought they had the same kind out in the garden but couldn’t be sure. They would show me the garden, it was the perfect time of year. But first, I have to show you something else, Karin said. The others were already huddled in the living room, greeting one another with the shock and warmth of middle age. Daniel had disappeared into their embrace. 

She led me to an adjoining room off to the side, where a low couch was pushed up against a floor-to-ceiling window. A circular pendant light hung from above, engulfing the room in a dim glow. Karin pointed up to its porcelain globe. The bulb hasn’t been changed since 1947, she said. Can you believe it? Came with the house. All this time and it has never needed repair. The previous owners told them about it after they had signed the paperwork. The only time the place ever changed hands. We keep waiting for it to go out, Karin said. Every morning I wake up and think, today might be the day. 

She slid open the glass door and led me outside to a terraced yard. I saw them right away: a long line of peony bushes, the leaves thick and the flowers in full bloom, bent over by the sheer weight of their beauty. Karin grabbed one by the head and brought it to her nose. Ah, yes, they are the same kind. Pfingstrosen. Theirs were at least a different shade than the ones I had brought, a deep magenta. These too had come with the house, she explained, and she hadn’t known what to do with them. She herself wasn’t much of a gardener. Yet despite her neglect, the bushes bloomed every year, right on schedule, in the first week of June. They keep time for me, Karin said. Anyway, we should go inside. Michael will want to get the conversation going.

Eight places had been set at the dining table, each one topped with a copy of the German edition of Daniel’s book. With a sweeping gesture Karin indicated that we should sit down, directing Daniel to the head of the table. He thumbed at the copy in front of him and then placed the English version that he had brought along on top of it, pressing their covers together with his palm. 

Thank you all for coming tonight, Michael said. He spoke in English, seemingly for my benefit alone. We are here to discuss our friend Daniel’s wonderful and thought-provoking new book. As you all know, I am a devotee of the transatlantic relationship, and we at the ministry have been greatly disturbed by its negative turn, should we say, over the past several years. Daniel has come to us from Washington to tell us how they are thinking about things over there. We have all known each other for many years, and while we do not agree on everything, I always look forward to our conversations and debates. So let me get us started with what I think you all will agree is a simple question for our author: How bad is it? 

One of the reasons I liked Daniel was because he was an idealist in public and a cynic in private. Early on in our acquaintance, I had asked him why he always sounded more optimistic in his articles and interviews than he ever was in conversation. He told me that after spending his twenties in a mode of constant criticism, he had fallen into a deep depression. The experience was unsettling because for several years he could not identify its source. His life was going well by all external measures, he was just about to get married and had secured steady enough employment in the think-tank world. He tried therapy and SSRIs, committed himself to an exercise regime and took a long vacation. Nothing helped, and when he returned to work after his trip the feeling only worsened. It was like the ground had fallen out from under him, he said. Everyone around him spent their days immersed in one crisis or another, and each person swore that their crisis was the true one that would bring about the end of the world, or at least make life very unpleasant for the people in it.  

During this period, a friend who had gone to work in artificial intelligence—to this day no one understands how he spends his days, Daniel said—advised guests at a dinner party to undertake any bucket-list adventures as soon as they could. He couldn’t say why but promised that he had his reasons, the primary one being that time was running out. After that, Daniel began wondering how his friends and colleagues all found the will to live, to get up every day and go to the office and write reports about this cataclysm or that. And then one day his wife told him to snap out of it, to pull himself together. She had shamed him out of his depression, had pointed out that nothing he was expressing was unique or novel, that it was well understood that the world was an awful place and that everyone else managed to exist alongside that knowledge. It was, frankly, quite embarrassing, Daniel said, a low point for our marriage. But we would have gotten divorced if she hadn’t said something. From that moment, he decided to take on a false outward persona. His new self was hopeful for the future and believed that anything broken could be rebuilt. This feigned sense of optimism made him feel like an upstanding member of society for the first time in his life. To be outwardly hopeful and to try to keep his skepticism of all things to himself suddenly seemed far more honorable than the inverse. 

Daniel laughed at Michael’s question and twirled the stem of his wine glass. It’s bad, my friend, and I fear that it is only getting worse, he began. That’s why I had to write this book. Because I believe that if we act now, the transatlantic relationship and the internationalist spirit—the liberal spirit—can still be saved. After all, our countries have a long history, we have stood together since the end of the last great war and have much still to defend. I have tried to present the causes and consequences of the current crisis, and to offer some proposals for how we might save the global order that has sheltered us all since the moment we took our first breaths. The main problem, he said, is the new generation. The children of the eighties and nineties—he looked at me from across the table—are not like us. They have only lived the good life. They do not know how easily it might vanish. 

His school friends nodded and sipped their wine. Karin got up and said that we should keep talking while she brought out the first course. A serious woman who had introduced herself to me as Renata from Munich turned to Daniel. What do people in Washington say? Can it be that they are okay with this turn away from Europe? For God’s sake, until a few years ago the German army was still training with broomsticks in place of guns. How can they abandon us now? 

Well, Daniel said, in the book I argue that it’s not quite that dire. There will be no sudden withdrawal. But we are at the beginning of a new era. Without a doubt. The Americans cannot be relied upon anymore, that’s for sure. We all have to get used to the idea. He spoke as if he himself were not American, as if he was merely diagnosing an affliction from afar. His dissociation was understandable, given the circumstances. I could grant him that much. He wanted to show his old friends that he shared their dismay, that he was still on their side. 

The new generation, he said, doesn’t care so much about democracy or what we used to call the “free world.” Everything is free for them, online. The free world is everywhere. Things will have to get very bad before they get better. Once the flow of people and goods is interrupted, then they will rediscover what globalism was all about. Renata shook her head. Let us hope you are right, she said. Fukuyama warned us that the end of history would be a very sad time. 

She paused and looked at me across the table. Do you know about this idea, the end of history? She asked in English. Perhaps she wanted the other guests to register the fact that I was a member of this careless generation, a traitor among them. Or perhaps she had a genuine interest in my comprehension of the exchange. Either way, I understood that I was being patronized and that I probably deserved it. Yes, I said, I know about it. Maybe he was wrong about the end, but not about the sadness? 

Daniel smiled at me from the head of the table. I had not embarrassed him, then. He would not regret bringing me along. 

Karin returned carrying bowls of white asparagus soup and asked what she had missed. Oh nothing much, Michael said, though our friend Daniel has surprised us. Despite the title of his book he seems to think that all is not yet lost. 

Yes, I’m sorry for the title, Daniel said. The publisher insisted, they wanted drama in the form of a definitive end. But if you actually read the book you will see that I offer up some proposals for how we might still be able to right the ship. Better trade policies, for one, more defense spending, for another. Coordinated sanctions, more cultural exchanges, that sort of thing. Our countries may have drifted apart, but their separation is still in a trial period. All is not yet lost. 

Karin rolled her eyes in his direction. Come on, Daniel. We are your friends. You are not being recorded. We will all read the book, but we aren’t here for policy recommendations. And we haven’t seen you in so many years. Tell us what you really think, please. 

He shifted in his seat, opened and closed the front cover of his book. His eyes darted around the room as if searching for help. Finding none, a flash of despair crossed his face.

I’m being as sincere as I can be, he said. I do believe all these things. At least on some level. But of course, in my darkest moments I do not think the situation is salvageable. Sometimes I can’t help but think that we are heading into an abyss and we will all be left to fight on our own, for our own. That it will become harder to travel, to meet people from other countries and cultures. Rifts will divide nations and people. We will become meaner. In these moments I remind myself that, historically speaking, those who have tried to call attention to the cataclysms to come by describing them as such have not been terribly effective. Remember Štefan Lux, the man who shot himself in the chamber of the League of Nations because he thought it would force them to do something, anything, to oppose Hitler’s rise? No, you don’t remember because no one remembers. So I thought I would try to say what needs to be said in such a way that people might listen. Delicately, that is. In all my years in Washington, one thing I have learned is that if you speak in the vernacular of the imperial center, the empire listens. And I have forced myself to have hope because hopelessness did not suit me very well. So I wrote up my proposals. What else is there to do? 

That’s more like it, Karin said. This I can relate to. Thank you for indulging us. Michael looked aghast at his wife. She had broken the diplomatic tempo of the conversation and had recalled an intimacy he had forgotten long ago. 

Come on Karin, what do you expect of this man, he said. We cannot all go around just saying what we really think. There is strategy to consider, and politics. You don’t know what it’s like at the ministry. It’s true what Daniel says. We have to speak in a certain way, use particular phrases, or risk being dismissed. 

Forgive me, Karin said. I was just trying to get to the point. We only have this evening to be together. I know Daniel doesn’t begrudge me for it. Right? 

Not at all, he said. The problem is just that you know me too well. There is nothing you can hide from an old friend. He looked around the table, searching for agreement. 

Too right, said Renata from Munich. Karin vanished into the kitchen again to prepare the main course. One of Michael’s colleagues whose name I hadn’t caught said that as it happened, he had just been in Geneva on a United Nations visit, in the old headquarters of the League. Sad place, he said. Virtually empty, and we didn’t accomplish anything. Signed what was essentially a blank sheet of paper, shook hands, took a photo, went home. No financial commitments made. But that’s how it goes, right? It’s important to keep up appearances, to keep the levers of diplomacy turning, even if nothing comes as a result. Every vacant hallway has its function. 

I think so too, Daniel said. But there is always the risk that we will forget we are merely playing pretend and begin living inside our own fictions. Or that we become so resigned to this state of affairs that we forget that things used to be different, and could still be. 

I could see that Karin’s question had deflated him. The lightness I had noticed in him earlier had vanished, as if he had aged ten years right there at the table. He had come to Berlin to escape into his youth only to be reminded that it would never return. And Karin seemed to have confirmed his worst suspicions about what his friends thought of the book. Or at least, what she thought of it. Michael may have come to his defense, but her opinion was all that mattered. And Daniel knew she was right. 

We muddled through the rest of the evening from opposite sides of the table. By the time the main course arrived, everyone had quietly slipped their books under their seats. The debate over whether we were living through an “end” of any kind gave way to safer subjects: pension plans, holiday travel, the summer program of the Berlin Philharmonic. Michael and Karin’s children interrupted dessert with their school instruments, delivering a discordant violin and flute serenade. Renata from Munich conducted the recital with her fork and knife. While all this was going on, Daniel only glanced up at me a few times. It was as if he understood that he had been somehow exposed and was embarrassed by what had been revealed. By the despair he had voiced. And by the desire. 

When we said our goodbyes, Karin insisted that we exchange emails. Berlin can be very overwhelming, she said. Write me anytime, and we will have to have you back before you leave town. She kissed Daniel on both cheeks and let her hand rest on his shoulder. Congratulations again, she said. It’s a fine book. 

You see right through me, Daniel said. Thank you for this evening. Finally I know what these salons are all about. 

Yes. Our attempt to stay young, and to stay honest. How did we do? 

Too well, I think. 

We began our walk back toward the S-Bahn through the darkened streets of Waidmannslust. While Daniel pulled up the train schedule on his phone I looked back at the house one last time. Karin was in the kitchen with her back to us, pouring a glass of wine. I watched as she took a sip and went to lean against the doorpost of the small room with the pendant light. Michael came up behind her, wrapped his hand around her waist. I wondered how long they would stay there, together, in their silent vigil. Entangled and estranged. Wandering around their old house, waiting for the light to go out.