The protagonist, Paprika, is a self-described sociophobe who lives in an "anonymous" apartment building in Daimler City on Potsdamer Platz that is "wall-to-wall autistics", celebrates her birthday with the one person with whom she is close—herself—and operates a successful advertising agency almost entirely by means of SMS exchanges with her assistant.
One of the two men with whom she associates, Dietrich, a bartender whose prime motive appears to be finding "something fuckable", describes her as "a consumer cripple with an amputated soul", which she admits to with pride.
He summons her by SMS and abuses her, until suddenly he does not, and she falls apart from thwarted addiction, throwing her cellphone into the toilet, ripping the phone cord out of the wall, and drinking Laphroaig from the bottle.
Buschheuer conducted an effective marketing campaign for the book[5] while deprecating it: she described it as "this garbage I coughed up"[6] and posted her own one-star review from a fictitious incensed East Berliner at an online bookstore.
[8] The Berliner Morgenpost described it the next year in a review of Buschheuer's next book, Massenberg, as an "action-poor collection of deliberately provocative statements, hate lists and sex scenes, sneezed onto the page".
[13] In 2007, it was the subject of a doctoral dissertation by Oliver Benjamin Ham in which he argued that it presents the "gendered body" of the protagonist as "the main mediator and battle field of the divisions and tensions in Berlin between East and West Germans".
[14] In 2010, Tabea Dörfelt-Mathey saw it as an incisive portrait of the 1990s, built up out of details and lists in a manner reminiscent of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho, with a protagonist who problematizes the female role: she acts like a man until in playing the part of Eugénie to "Valmont", she becomes weak.