The Ultraviolet Catastrophe (Zer0 Books)
Susan Finlay

The subtitle of Susan Finlay’s newest novel is ‘A Culturepreneurial Horror’. Readers who find this kind of neologism amusing are in for a very good time; readers who don’t might need to conjure some patience.

The Ultraviolet Catastrophe, in more conventional terms, is a satire, using tropes belonging to dystopian science fiction to parody the tech world. Set in Berlin in 2023, the plot revolves around Hugh Snell, a scientist at AstroLabs™, a space start-up run by the tech bro overlord Lex Ramesses. Ramesses pays his employees in a cryptocurrency called Prosperium, which he promises will work on Proserpina, a new inhabitable planet he has just purchased but no one can get to yet. Finlay has a knack for mimicking the soulless consolations of big tech: to boost office morale, Ramesses sets forward the mantra, ‘Chill, ideate, and enjoy!’

Snell, 37, American, collects old synths and obsesses over his dwindling sperm count. The apartment he shares with his beautiful and more competent wife Petronella has become a nonconsensual WG as it fills up with the polyamorous, the Astro-Marxists, the vegans who serve burned vegetables caked in dirt. Outside, there are gen Z influencers, crypto bros, corporate hacks, gamer bros, Berghain clubbers, drug-addled wastoids. Music is ‘post-instrumental’, the preferred social media channel is called ‘ZeitHeist’, the décor is all Scandi, failed fashion designers might rebrand as a ‘Counter-Productive Arts Practitioner & Facilitator’, and identity is a performance art. ‘I’m not non-binary,’ says a character named Yves, Snell’s least welcome flatmate. ‘I’m Euro-plural. Yvette is my deadname, because the UK is a dead place.’

Finlay is a long-time Berliner. Her investment in the city—her nuanced understanding of its character, its creative promise, and its subcultures—imbues the book’s sometimes hysterical energy with real edge. Berlin here is alive, flat, chaotic, ridiculous, utopian, kind of wonderful, deeply imperiled, and perhaps truer to life than any story about an emotionally distant expat who comes to the city to lose themselves.

Is the plot of The Ultraviolet Catastrophe more difficult to follow than it could be? Are there perhaps too many characters? Can the story drag under so much detail? Do Hugh’s self-conscious asides take the reader out of the action somewhat unnecessarily? Yes. But ultimately, who cares! The book certainly doesn’t, it’s busy having a good time. So you can fight or you can lean in, stop worrying, and light up a Shroomcyclidine cigarette. Chill, ideate, enjoy! – Julia Bosson

Idiots: The History of the Homo Nullus (Seagull Books)
Leonhard Emmerling, trans. Parnal Chirmuley

History, like the motorway, has no shortage of idiots. But the term is slippery, capacious—far more deft than the thickos it describes. Idiot derives from the Greek ἴδιος (idiōs) or ἰδιώτης (idiōtes): the former denoted that which is particular about a person or thing, the latter referred to someone who holds military office but does not participate in politics. Idiōtes, however, was also the name for an amateur speaker who presented their views and demands before the polis. In the protean origins of idiocy, then, we find concerns about privacy, peculiarity, and the participatory ideals of democratic life.

With Christianity came the idiotá, a social outsider embodied by Saint Francis of Assisi, who made ignorance into a form of apostolic fidelity. What else to call a man who rejects his father, his garbs, and a sizable inheritance, all to follow the path of Christ? Whereas Francis abdicated knowledge, the fifteenth-century German Catholic bishop Nicholas of Cusa fashioned idiocy into a via negativa for approaching the infinite unknowability of God. Through intuition and abjuration, the idiotá sidesteps the usual dialectics of inclusion and exclusion, affirmation and protest, and walks a third way all his own.

Who is the idiot not? Other historical dummies can appear similarly asinine, but clowns, buffoons, and such are deficient in their own ways. The fools we know from literature (Feste, Till Eulenspiegel) have more interest in social criticism and carnivalesque inversions of power than our small-minded wantwit. Nor is the idiot entirely flush with the salos: a figure of holy insanity in early Christianity who reflects the lunacy of daily life back into the marketplace. Idiocy, we learn, is closer to Andy Warhol’s art, certain forms of punk music, and the preoccupations of Tarkovsky’s films. Lost to the world, the idiot neither critiques nor endorses. Idiocy is simply indifferent: sometimes radically so, sometimes in the service of ‘unambiguous evil’.

What ultimately emerges in Leonhard Emmerling’s Idiots: The History of the Homo Nullus (2026) is a story about Western secularization. From out of the disenchanted carcass of the Holy Fool—drawn and quartered across the gears of Enlightenment—comes an institutionalized idiot, a cousin in kind to the imbecile and the madman. And this brings us up to our own era, in which the descendants of Ubu Roi have been elected to office, peddling their lack of aptitude, education, and expertise as a form of authenticity and authority. Despite the promise of stoogery, Emmerling’s history is profoundly unfunny. But so too is the trajectory of idiocy. What was once a mode of unknowing tinged by divine grace has decayed into a politics of ignorance, selfishness, and unreason. – Hunter Dukes

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Venus, Vanishing (Picador)
Rebecca Birrell

Art historian Rebecca Birrell’s debut novel Venus, Vanishing begins at the tail end of the Weimar Republic. Hannah Sherman, a young, Jewish seamstress living in Berlin’s Scheunenviertel, has just refused a marriage of convenience and left her family home in favour of an independent life as an artist.

In a nightclub called the Sybil Vane—a cheeky twist on Schöneberg’s Dorian Gray—Hannah meets dancer Charlotte, who becomes her lover. So does Saul, an employee of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum and the novel’s font of art-historical wisdom. Hannah also becomes less happily involved with the wealthy, older Elke, a former customer who becomes her lover, patron and muse, sitting nude as Hannah’s model for the Venuses of the novel’s title in exchange for an allowance.

At first, Elke’s pay cheques seem to be an act of charity, intended to give Hannah the freedom to flourish as a painter. The first sign that something more sinister is at work is a haunting, memorable scene in which Hannah’s work is publicly exhibited for the first time, hung beside a crude painting of a Jewish woman coveting the milk of hard-working Aryan farmers.

What unfolds is a conspiracy to exploit Hannah’s talent by modifying her paintings and selling them under the male pseudonym Answald Dietrich. As ‘Dietrich’ becomes a court painter to the ascendent Third Reich, the novel’s real conflict emerges: will Hannah’s paintings be remembered as the volkish kitsch of an Aryan man, or the sensuous, avant-garde nudes of a bisexual, Jewish woman? This conflict drives the plot: Elke attempts to silence Hannah with bribery and threats of violence, and Hannah and Saul go public, distributing an explosive manifesto declaring: ‘If the star of the Great German Art Exhibition is a Jew, then—contrary to the claims of our nation’s great minds—blood is irrelevant to art.’ It is also central to the form of the novel, which, in Dietrich and Hannah, pits two kinds of fictional painter against each other. The former is an avatar for the erasure of Jewish artistic life, the latter a means of recovering it.

As a historical note explains, Hannah is fictional, but she is a composite informed by the works and biographies of many real Jewish women artists whose careers and lives were destroyed by the Third Reich: Charlotte Salomon, Chana Kowalska, Olga Oppenheimer, and many more. Birrell states in her note that she wanted to write ‘a novel primarily about Jewish life, not Jewish death.’ Venus, Vanishing deftly negotiates the challenge of writing about lives that were full of joys, pleasures, and possibilities while also shadowed by persecution, violence, and the threat of erasure. – Gabriel Flynn

Hot Sauce

Editor’s Note: Our recent search for a new Pan-European Gossip Correspondent produced a dizzying and disappointing number of AI-generated applications. It is thus with particular pleasure that we welcome our new Pan-European Gossip Correspondent, Aminata Persson, to The Auflauf. Her first dossier will be published in September, but in the meantime she has asked us to share this short statement:

There was a vibrant hum in the air on the day I learned I would be joining the gossip team at The Auflauf. My reporting has boasted a pivotal role in fostering, showcasing, and bolstering a robust culture of valuable fact-finding in key industries—thus underscoring my commitment to delving into the intricate relational tapestry whose interplays are a crucial and enduring element of the literary landscape. Additionally, I have garnered praise for meticulously highlighting and emphasizing key players whose work aligns with that of my clients, a testament to my ability to enhance the impact of journalism, criticism, and fiction. For me, it’s not about gossip—it’s about community.

Sally O’Reilly loves to collaborate. ‘I get really bored of myself’, she tells me after our interview (our collaboration?) has come to an end, describing collaboration as getting to try on ‘someone else’s interior wardrobe’. On July 24, she’ll team up with her frequent musical collaborator, Kit Downes, as well as a talented crew of even more artists and musicians—Myra Eetgerink, Hannah Hurtzig, Nina Katchadourian, Augustin Maurs, and Michelle Madsen, among others—to try to create a musical, Hurry, 591 BC–2007, from scratch in a single working day at Berlin’s Lettrétage. The musical draws its name from Hurry: 591 BC–2007, a book that, twenty years ago, promised to be ‘the largest compilation of timeline events associated with Hurry’—composed of ‘bibliographic citations, patented inventions, as well as non-conventional and alternative meanings which capture ambiguities in usage’—and was wholly authored by a computer. The happening is occurring under the auspices of the little magazine, Cabinet, as an extension of its forays into 24-hour book projects, which have seen such luminaries as Brian Dillon and O’Reilly herself take part.

The musical’s time-constrained conceit inspired our interview: 10 questions in 10 minutes. In our hurry, though, we might have lost count of the questions and answers—and there might be a few too many. But, as O’Reilly noted, a constraint is really just a ‘launch mechanism’. A near-verbatim transcript follows.

How did you find out about Webster’s Timeline Histories series?

I was looking for a book about theatrical quick change, and there are no books about it—other than the Webster’s Timeline History on it. And then the whole series all revealed itself from there.

And how did you alight on Hurry, 591 BC–2007 among the 90,000 titles?

Because we knew we had to make this musical in a hurry, and I do like a bit of self-referential thematic tightness.

Well that begins to answer another question I had: will this time-constrained musical feel rushed—

—utterly hurried? Yeah, to the core, it’s going to be atrocious. I mean, for us as makers, it’s going to feel really horrible, I imagine.

Ach, I’m sorry. I understand this also deals with AI. So, does the idea of hurry or of performing under haste or something like that have a correlation with artificial intelligence?

Well, maybe you could say that we’re having to work this quickly because if we don’t make this musical first, then AI probably will.

How do you prepare for something like this?

I am reading the book at the moment, which is 300 pages of extracts scraped from the internet in 2007—anything to do with anything that contains the word ‘hurry’ or ‘hurried’. So I’m reading that, which is horrible. It’s just little scraps of stuff. I’m going to digest that, and then I’m going to feed it to my collaborators. And then at 10am that morning, we will see what we can make from the material.

So you will figure out some way of collecting together and presenting what you found before you begin on the 24^th?

Yes—in a sort of compacted version. I won’t ask them to read through all the absolute dreck that is in that book. I am going to pick out some choice morsels, and then maybe also give them a precis of the historical sweep of hurry, because there are there are moments where certain kinds of hurries are more prominent than others,—there’s lots of armies hurrying all over the place in certain periods, and at other times there’s lots of people hurrying to romantic trysts and bedrooms, so you can map types of hurry through historical epochs. I’ll digest it for them in that way.

Was there anything that tied hurry together in 2007? Or is it too disparate, spread out across the internet, with many too many different genres there to really be able to synthesize a single type of hurry that predominates?

I’m still in the 1930s! I’m still reading. I can’t rush, I can’t hurry reading hurry, because it would make me sick. I think it’s too rich. It’s like eating a meal entirely made of nougat.

I wouldn’t want to hurry your eating of nougat, or your reading this book! Apologies for that. So you have worked with Kit Downes before. How did the two of you decide to work on this project?

Simply, Kit lives in Berlin, and he’s a musician that I know and love and have worked with. He has that jazz improv attitude, where he’s unfazed by anything, so I just knew he’d be a good solid ground to have in there. I know Nina [Katchadourian], but have never worked with her, and she will know a couple of the others, but I don’t know if anyone else will know anyone else. It’s like, getting a team together in a hurry, we’ll end up with who we end up with, and it’ll be great, because it’ll be a right old hodgepodge of talents and capacities, and tastes.

I’m trying to figure out how many questions I’ve asked so far. In my hurry to ask as many as I could I’ve sort of jumped around. Is there any worry that you’ll forget anything in the process of putting the musical together in the 10 hours?

I mean, whenever you’re hurrying—I don’t know about you—but all the doors slam shut, all the mental doors slam shut, and I don’t have access to everything that I have when I’m at my leisure. So, I imagine we are going to forget all sorts of things, we’re going to forget whole chunks of material that we’ve prepared, we’re going to forget our lines, we’re going to forget what we’re doing, we’re going to forget what the point of this is. We’re going to forget everything at every level, I should think, because we’re going to be in such a hurry.

Why did you choose the constraint of it being improvised, improvisational, when you knew that it was going to run up against the possibilities for imagination, and all the mental processes?

Well, Cabinet have a series of books that are written in 24 hours. I’ve done one of those, and I guess time is flavor of constraint. Because I’m a writer, working through constraints is a kind of well-practiced foil, whereby it forces the sorts of decisions you wouldn’t ordinarily make, and I think when working with collaborators, as well, when you’re working within time constraints, people have to blurt, you have to not be precious, and I think, I hope, some really wild stuff will come out. So, yeah, it is a constraint, but it’s also a sort of launch mechanism for a different mode of travel to one that you might ordinarily take.

So this 10 hours, this 10 isn’t important in and of itself…

It’s the venue, access to the venue.

The amount of time?

Yes. Real world constraints as well. The infrastructures of the society you find ourselves working in—it’s good to acknowledge them.

In your research of hurry, have you found that hurry is always bouncing off real-world constraints?

I can dip my toe into the digest. Let’s have a look. There’s hurrying to invade cities and regions, to reclaim them, or for armies, to mobilize them, or in the face of an invasion, or to crush rebellions. So, there’s a lot of politics in hurry, lots of hurrying to court, or to kiss a monarch’s hand, or throw oneself at their feet, and lots of hurrying to governors to warn them of uprisings and revolts. So, yeah, there’s a lot of hurrying around, that kind of structuring of the world. And then there’s the more metaphysical hurrying, where people hurry to their graves, and to conclusions, and to their ruin, and beyond the truth, and into marriage. There’s lots of being hurried into marriage and hurried into mysterious affairs and doom and things like that. On the structural material front, there’s hurrying to bedrooms, and there’s lots of doors, and tons of trains, actually lots of hurrying for trains and carriages—so yeah, a lot of architecture and infrastructure.

I’ve thought of the latter but not as much of the former. Hurrying sounds more exciting than I’ve given it credit for. What can people expect who might come to the performance? We might have gone over 10 questions.

What can they expect? I wish I could say! I have no idea what to expect, but we are going to aim for it to be a musical, in the loosest sense of the word. But there will be music, there will be singing, there are people who can and people who can’t, and people who don’t and won’t sing. So there’ll be all levels of competence on that front. And, I think, there might be something being done in the space in a hurry against the clock. Yeah, there’ll be some real live hurry there on stage.

The debut book of Dženana Vucic—acclaimed Bosnian-Australian author, critic, and editor—has an intriguing subtitle. This work, we are told, is a memoir in poetry, in pieces. It is an apt claim. The poems in after war are personal; they are rooted in the particularity of experience, specifically that of someone who fled the brutality and ethnic cleansing inflicted on Bosnians during the war of 1992–1995 then grew up in Australia, accompanied by sister and mother, before returning to Europe—Bosnia, Berlin—as an adult. (‘Years ago,’ says the speaker of a poem late on, ‘I tried to move home but found only foreign countries’.) The book is also made up of pieces: pieces of literature, sure, but also different kinds of poem, different kinds of voice, all of which reflect the long shattering aftermath of historical trauma. Poems like ‘First Year After War’ and ‘[trigger warning]’ directly address the difficulty of speaking in such conditions; others, like the long erasure poem about Srebrenica, hold catastrophe in their form. Yet the collection’s scope extends far beyond that of any traditional memoir. Constantly, and in many different ways, Vucic reaches out from personal experience into other disasters and other contexts, most prominently the atrocities inflicted by Israel in Gaza. I met up with Vucic in a Neukölln café to discuss her book just after she returned from a multi-city reading tour Down Under. Somehow, she had not forgotten to bring me back a thing of Iced VoVo biscuits.

What we’re having: flat white (DV), flat white (AW).

Dženana, congratulations on this astonishing book. It is out on an Australian press. Will people be able to buy it in Berlin?

Yes, yes, that’s why I couldn’t bring you more Iced Vovos—because I was lugging seven kilos worth of my book in my suitcase. (laughs) It’ll be available at the launch.

How long were you working on the poems in the collection?

I think it was six, maybe seven years. I had actually been working on another book that I kept stalling on. It was supposed to be a memoir about the Bosnian War, about my family’s move to Australia, about myth and history and memory-making and how we tell the story of ourselves. But I found it impossible to write, somehow. All the family stories—all the conflicting stories—and the pain and hurt that attended them… Narrative memoir just wasn’t working for me. I turned to poetry. And when I started conceiving of this as a collection, back in 2021, Israel was bombing Gaza and evicting families from Sheikh Jarrah, and I just felt compelled to do something that also spoke to violences that were happening contemporaneously. Poetry felt more capacious. It offered a way of speaking through us into we, of taking the specifics of our story and threading them into a broader web of specifics and stories in a way I couldn’t quite reach with straight memoir.

The poems in this collection really vary in form—in voice, too, and perspective. Is that part of what poetry could offer? A certain shapeshiftingness of the ‘I’?

Memoir was locking me too much into the specifics of our escape from Bosnia—which is very complicated, very narratively interesting, with a lot of twists and turns. But it kept getting in the way of what I really wanted to talk about, which was the ongoingness of violence. I wanted to talk about our complicity in it, about how we are implicated in systems of oppression and intolerance. And I felt that looking too much at myself or at my family wouldn’t allow that to happen. As you say, the ‘I’ of poetry is more shifting, more expansive, it can be many people, many things—innocent on one line, culpable the next. Poetry definitely allowed me to play with form to achieve specific ends in a way that memoir couldn’t… That was really appealing to me, because I could say things without saying them explicitly—I could say them in the shape or structure of the poem.

It felt to me that these poems—like many poems, or all poems, depending how you read—are concerned with the nature of speech itself. The speaker might start then break off, or might circle a traumatic event, or might try to explain but not get listened to. Did you want to not just talk about the war, but talk about talking about the war?

I think so. One of the things that interests me most is who gets listened to, and when. Part of this has to do with the realities of the Bosnian war, where the Bosnian Muslims were saying it was a genocide but everyone else was calling it ‘ethnic cleansing’—the term was popularised in that war!—and we were asking for international help, or at the very least to be allowed to defend ourselves. But the ‘international community’ wasn’t listening and before they started to, the UN allowed a massacre of over 8,300 men and boys because they believed the other side, despite all evidence to the contrary. Obviously this isn’t exceptional. It’s happening all the time. So yeah. I think questions around who gets to speak, who is listened to, whose stories are considered compelling are vital ones for us to be asking.

I think of the poem ‘[trigger warning]’, which is about people turning away from survivors and their stories. It ends: I said look at us when we’re talking to you. There are other moments, too, when one feels a bit of tension between the I and the you. Is that tension a device? Is it something you feel personally?

It’s definitely something I feel personally. I think I have a strong sense of justice. Which is not to say I’m an ethical actor in all circumstances—God knows it’s impossible to be that in this world—but I feel very strongly about trying to be, and it’s something that really enlivens my writerly instincts: injustice, how we are implicated or complicit in various harms, what it means when people are silent on something they should be vocal about, or when people opt to turn away from something they should be looking at. I mean, we live in Germany, so we’ve got a very clear example of that happening with respect to Palestine. With ‘[trigger warning]’ I was trying to think through some complicated feelings I’ve been having about them lately. Increasingly, I wonder if they’re protecting who they’re meant to protect—or if they’re providing a means for others to turn away from things they don’t want to see in the name of ‘self-care’. It strikes me that it’s actually really important to be confronted by something you’re uncomfortable with, something that makes you feel uneasy or shitty, if it would help you better understand the circumstances of someone with a lived experience of it.

You’ve written brilliantly about (re)learning the Bosnian language as an adult. And Bosnian appears throughout this collection—sometimes as fragments of speech, sometimes in poems that are explicitly about learning the language. For me, as a non-speaker, it produced an interesting alienation effect: sometimes I’d look up what certain lines meant. Did you feel close to the language while writing, or was there also an estrangement on your end?

I felt very close to it, which is kind of weird since my Bosnian isn’t great. It’s passable—it’s the language I use to speak when I’m in the country—but it’s certainly not a language I can express complex ideas in. But most of these poems were written as I was re-learning the language, and all the Bosnian in them is stuff I had recently picked up—albeit, admittedly, with some grammatical mistakes. many of which my mother helped me fix. I ended up keeping some of the errors because that felt real to the fact that I don’t speak perfect Bosnian, so it would be absurd if I did in the book. I suppose the mistakes that remain are a way of indicating a degree of my distance from the language, though like I said, I didn’t feel estranged from it at all while writing. Actually, there was a question, during editing, about whether I would provide translations, and whether we would use italics for the Bosnian. We pretty quickly decided on no translations and what probably looks like a very inconsistent approach to italics. But there’s a consistency in my mind. It’s about my familiarity in the moment of the poem. For example, in ‘First Year After War’, the English dialogue is italicised, whereas the Bosnian is left unitalicised, because at that time I was able to speak Bosnian fluently but not English. So the estrangement went the other way there.

I tried to come up with a brilliant question that would justify quoting this part of the poem ‘To Learn a M/other Tongue’: Grammar proves stubborn, / forcing us into the perpetual present. There’s always someone / missing and we can never be sure who did what to whom since / I conjugate poorly and without / regard to grammatical gender. But I think I just wanted to draw attention to how witty and clever it is. Or is there something profound there about the brokenness of language and the brokenness of history?

(laughs) Thank you, firstly, because I thought that was a great joke, but people don’t seem to appreciate it. Or they feel like they aren’t supposed to be amused. So thank you. After my launch in Naarm/Melbourne, one of my friends said he thought the collection was quite funny and everyone at the table gave him a look, like, what are you talking about. But there’s some bangers in there, right? (laughs) But anyway. Language. Yes. I think there’s something to that. I don’t believe that language shapes how we think about history in some sort of Sapir-Whorf type way—but I do think it can offer orientation, it can shine a light on different aspects of a thing. For instance, I’m interested in the lack of the dative case in English. In Bosnian you always say who is doing the action to whom. It’s integral—it’s even there in the way you say someone’s name. When I speak my imperfect Bosnian, it can be very confusing for people when I just say their names in the regular form because it’s grammatically unclear who is doing the giving, say, or doing the aggressing. Which is a fruitful place to linger in the context of the Bosnian War.

At the book’s centre is a long erasure poem about Srebrenica, where you have taken a prosecutor’s report on the case against war criminal Radovan Karadžić and removed most of the text, leaving behind a new poem in the remnants. Like all good erasure poems, it’s an impressive act of virtuosoism. But the method of erasing also seemed to have a deeper motivation in this context.

Yes, I wanted to foreground the idea of erased history—of stories not told. The erasure poetry I’m most inspired by is works like Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, which is a book-length erasure of a legal case report. The case had to do with an insurance claim that British slavers were making over enslaved people that they had thrown overboard because it was more profitable for them to make an insurance claim than to sell the people. I think where erasure is most powerful is when you’re telling stories like these, suppressed histories. I chose to do it for this text because I was really interested in how much time there was between when it became evident that something terrible was going on and when it actually started to happen. So the erasure is actually of all the events, as laid out in the judgment, that occurred prior to the day that the genocide in Srebrenica started. Famously the Dutchbat [Dutch UN peacekeeping] soldiers just stood aside and let it happen, but what I wanted to get at is that the whole international community did the same, just watching the war play out on TV. I wanted to emphasise just how much time there was to intervene, and having this long block of pages in the middle of the book got towards that. The erasure element was also important in that it reflects how this history is being actively suppressed and erased, both within Bosnia (to say nothing of Serbia) and around the world. In Srebrenica, mass graves were dug up and the bodies in them reburied elsewhere in an overt attempt to hide the genocide. These days, the different ethnicities in Bosnia learn different histories from different textbooks, and many kids aren’t taught about the genocide at all—or else they’re told a skewed version of it. There’s a lot of genocide denial in the country and also on the international level—I mean, there’s a very convincing line of critique suggesting that the courts were hesitant to call a genocide a genocide for fear that it would have ramifications for other ‘conflicts’ around the world. So erasure felt reflective of what has been happening in that sense.

Erasure also seemed to change the sense of scale, somehow, or to drive towards abstraction.

Yeah, exactly. Here, for example, I decided to remove all instances of the perpetrator, all of their specifics, from the text in order to speak to broader patterns. Like right now, we only have to look to what’s happening to the Uyghur people, to the Rohingya. What’s happening in Sudan and Kashmir and Palestine and Iran. And I was motivated by the fact that a lot of the violence being committed around the world is being committed against Muslims. We tend to ignore that fact while, at the same time, their being Muslim makes it easier for us to ignore what’s being done to them. After all, violence against Muslims has become something of a norm, one that’s been enabled partly by the USA’s propagation of the idea of the Muslim terrorist, which they didn’t invent, but by God have they done the devil’s own work in spreading. That’s why it felt really important to leave that specific word, Muslim, in—to gesture towards the violences being experienced by other Muslim communities.

One of the most striking things about the collection is its eagerness to draw lines of continuity or solidarity from the Bosnian experience to other experiences—and from the past into the present. Was that always how you wanted to write it?

Yes, yes, I mean, partly the continuity aspect is just because it’s still so much a part of life in Bosnia. In my village, across from me, there’s a bombed-out house. Two doors down is a memorial to the Croats—most of them our neighbours—that the Bosnian Army murdered in 1993. The war hasn’t gone away; it surrounds us, always, in Bosnia. But the other part is that people simply haven’t learned anything from any of the violence. We’ve learned to do it differently—it’s not trench warfare anymore, it’s drones—and we’ve learned to justify it in different ways. But, at the end of the day, we just keep doing this. And in the face of that, I don’t feel like I can write about anything else, honestly. I feel really compelled by the question of why, and how do we stop. Is it possible to be better? That question haunts everything I do.

That continuity, that multidirectionalness, that broader empathy—in the way you’re talking, it seems self-evident to write this way. But a lot of people tell very different kinds of stories about genocide and war, stories that are far less open to other sufferers but aim instead towards solipsism or vengeance. Why do you think your outlook is different?

I think history denies us personal experience because everything is felt communally. And I think I’m just not very interested in myself except in the way that I am in and of the world. I don’t feel you can just take a moment, a story, discretely out of everything that has come before. I mean, the Bosnian War existed in a history of colonisation and European expansion with the Ottomans, the Austro-Hungarians, the Germans, and all of this is part of the story of what led to the war—and it is inextricable from all that, just as the conflict is inextricable from the situation in Bosnia today, which is in turn inextricable from Europe, and the world and on and on. I don’t know. It’s all inextricable. You cannot simply draw a line around history. And I fundamentally don’t believe that it’s possible to tell a story that is only about what happened to us. History happens to all of us. Maybe that is why the memoir was failing.

Silly’s Februar (Bloomsbury)
Michael Rauhut, trans. Noah Harley

Tamara Danz deserved better. One of the most talented rock stars ever to call Berlin home has been memorialised—not by a grand boulevard, Platz, or music venue—but with a piddling little street, which is now one of the most depressing you will ever see, rising as it does from the East Side Gallery (between Uber Eats Music Hall and Pirates) past Zalando and the East Side Mall to end, just north of Matrix, at the construction site for the new Amazon tower. That sentence alone is enough to send indie Berliners of a certain age into a spell of Sebaldian melancholy so extreme it can only be resolved by a twenty-minute angry nap.

Because here’s the thing: Danz was dynamite, and she was only getting better when she died aged 43 from cancer in the mid-1990s. Her band Silly was fantastic as well, leagues ahead of the other GDR rock groups. They remain beloved by eastern Germans, who flock to their revival concerts, put on with new vocalists—but are surprisingly unknown among everyone else.

Enter Michael Rauhut, with his contribution to the 33 1/3 series of short nonfiction books, each dedicated to one album. Rauhut, a professor of music based in Norway, grew up as a rock fan in the GDR. His book is both analytical and passionate, reflecting a deep appreciation for Silly as well as a respect for the nuances of East German life. (Dieser Michael hat den Farbfilm nicht vergessen.) Rauhut makes excellent use of the format, taking Silly’s album Februar—recorded shortly before the fall of the Wall—as his starting point for fascinating excursions into GDR rock history, Silly’s complex relationship with the regime, and the musical influences behind the album, from members’ varied rock and funk backgrounds to foreign acts like Jaco Pistorius and Yes to rival lyricists Werner Karma and Gerhard Gundermann.

We read about band politics; we read about politics. Rauhut weaves an engrossing narrative of the border-crossing manoeuvring that made Februar (an East-West coproduction) possible. We also follow Silly into the post-Wall era, when Danz emerged as an eloquent critic of Western arrogance and of the unequal path that reunification was taking. In general, the band refused to play dissident for Western media, even as they made increasingly bold stands against the Party. Rauhut argues convincingly that, while Februar has often been read as protest music (or as a soundtrack to reunification), the album is more existentially ambitious than it is locally political.

Rauhut also offers individual track notes, well worth reading between listens. This is beautiful, searching, mongrel music; it lives between fury and tenderness, loyalty and solitude, disillusionment and the fear of belonging to nothing at all. Alles wird besser aber nichts wird gut (‘It’s all getting better but it won’t end well’): these lines were written in 1989 but you could equally listen to them today, on your headphones, while walking up Tamara-Danz-Straße, towards Berlin’s newest world-class skyscraper. – AW

Here & Thereafter (Liverpool University Press)
Alice Miller

Over the last decade, Alice Miller has published several collections of poetry concerned with historical, ecological, and poetic crisis. Her newest, Here & Thereafter, is at once a chronicle of early motherhood and a foray into the uncertain terrain of her own family history. What she knows: the location of her family’s shop, ‘some steps / from what is later known as Bebelplatz’; the outlines of her Jewish grandmother’s journey from Braunschweig to London to Norfolk Island to Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington; the fact that her father, traumatized by the Blitz, didn’t speak until he was five. Yet when she tries to picture her grandmother alone in London: ‘How lonely is she? That’s not recorded.’

Is that, then, poetry’s job? One of Miller’s epigraphs comes from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, as the protagonist explains her preference for Gothic romances. ‘That is, I can read poetry and plays, and things of that sort, and do not dislike travels. But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. Can you?’

Miller is more omnivorous than Catherine Morland. There is poetry, plays, and travel here, but real solemn history is what weighs over this collection. Not just the past, but the present that will be the past (Covid, Ukraine, Palestine). ‘Dear Unfinished City’ is an ode to a beautiful, immanent Berlin—to its ‘dear airports masquerading at parks’ and ‘dear coin-coloured light’. That poem is immediately followed by ‘Push Here’, where the past returns in a rush. The cruelties experienced by her family seem to recur, unanticipated, in Germany’s response to Gaza. The speaker is stuck, buzzing:

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Impossible
to sit still on mornings
like this, impossible to hold

a baby, impossible (not)
to leave the house.

That space between ‘hold’ and ‘baby’ is weighty, full of all the things that cannot be done, that itchy feeling that comes from looking into the abyss of one’s own powerlessness. And yet the baby is there, concrete, something to look at and hold, not quite world-historical but incontrovertibly a world. The ghosts of the past live alongside the demands of the living. In ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’:

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It seems somehow wrong
that these worlds are separate: Arendt
thinking through the crisis of the
century and my son taking
my hand at the zoo, pointing up at the owls.

Can there be poetry—can there be childhood wonder—after Auschwitz (after Gaza, after Donetsk, after environmental collapse)? Yes, as Hans Magnus Enzensberger insisted: it is, in fact, a duty. Miller takes that call seriously. Her poems manage to hold the private, the public and the historical together, even when their contradictions can’t be resolved. – MM

Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe (Penguin UK)
Katja Hoyer

After a few decades off, historians are getting explicitly political again. On left and right—in Timothy Snyder’s broadsides towards the Trump regime, say, or the faintly ludicrous pro-Brexit Historians for Britain movement—they are seeking a role in our increasingly divided political discourse.

Katja’s Hoyer’s study of interwar Weimar is an unabashed attempt to make a similar contribution to the contemporary debate in Germany. ‘If we are to avoid the mistakes made by people in the past,’ she writes in the introduction, ‘the first step is to understand why they were made’. A question therefore ran through this reader’s head over the next 400 pages: can a crowd biography of a small but culturally significant town really help us understand why people today vote for the AfD?

Her unlikely protagonist is Carl Weirich, a bookbinder and stationery shop owner who stands as a representative of ‘ordinary’ Weimar. His life is shaped by the tragedy of losing first his daughter then his wife around the end of World War One. Alongside him, more prominent Weimar residents—from the aging Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the philosopher’s sister, to future Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach, among many others—shape their identities in the tumultuous world of Weimar’s eponymous republic. This mixed cast allows Hoyer to shift effortlessly between the macro and micro of history.

But it is in the micro that this book’s power lies. Weirich and his fellow ‘ordinaries’ find themselves confronted by events: initially apolitical, after years of economic uncertainty Weirich celebrates Hitler coming to power in 1933. Hoyer never allows this to be seen in purely structuralist terms, whereby Weirich would not be the master of his own decisions. She later points out that he never once questioned his own culpability in the system, even when he later came to doubt it. That said, she does not condemn him either. What marks this book out and indeed makes it interesting for our contemporary political moment is her alertness to each individual’s unrationalized, often fleeting motivations.

It is in people like Weirich that Hoyer ultimately perceives a real, if sometimes passive threat. They are the route by which dangerous ideas become real. Hoyer writes grippingly, and her ‘bottom up’ approach is elucidating. Yet we never do hear exactly how the danger of fascism could be quelled today. Is that a failure on Hoyer’s part? Perhaps it is instead a perfect example of a good task for history books—to show the past in clear yet nuanced terms and allow others to make decisions about what to do with it. We do need solutions for the mounting fascism of our own moment, but Hoyer’s description of the rise of the Nazis shows us that motivations are individual and influenced by bigger factors. No easy answers follow, but maybe that itself is the point. – John Owen

Hot Sauce

Editor’s Note: There will be no Hot Sauce this month, pending legal action from our former Pan-European Gossip Correspondent, Marguerite McEnnedy. Unfortunately undertakings have been stalled by her lack of response. It is possible she has used all her mobile data playing mahjong on her phone; if any of our readers have a way of contacting her, please direct her to the nearest hotspot.

Thursday, January 23rd, 2025

Sylvia Krupicka, trans. Alexander Wells

Berlin-Kreuzberg. Vocational College for Educators.

I remain in the clutches of the end of the semester. Over the last few weeks, I have read three hundred and sixty pages from written exams: a vast manuscript, all told, that comes around to haunt me twice a year. I have graded the exams, returned the papers to the students along with grading criteria, reported the results, engaged in any necessary renegotiations, scheduled makeup exams, and decided on the final marks to be awarded.

As always, during this phase, I feel pushed to my limit; as always I am on the verge of developing a cold, or an eye infection, or some sort of back problem. The body has many different ways of drawing attention to the situation.

The whole process typically culminates in a series of end-of-semester meetings, scheduled back to back at half hourly intervals. Today I had to go to seven. In between was all the paperwork: sorting documents, cross-checking lists, preparing copies, collecting signatures. At noon there were sweets in the faculty room, a chocolate cake, a plate of nuts—nourishment for the nerves.

By 3pm, finally, the last meeting. This one concerned the full-time course. Often these meetings barely leave any time for sharing one’s impressions—but Johann, he insisted on it, and did so at the very beginning of the meeting. The students, he said, had put on a puppet show, and it had left him full of fear. Their show had been about the war in Gaza.

The scraping of chairs stopped. The rummaging in backpacks stopped.

‘It had to do with numbers’, Johann said, ‘and with murdered children.’ And it had to do with the fact that he had not, he said, known what was going to happen—or how he was supposed to react. Johann felt abandoned, he said. One of our pedagogical aims, he added, had been to stimulate intrinsic motivation, which is why the students chose the topic for the puppet show independently. It sounded a bit like an attempt at justification.

During the discussion after the show, Johann had taken issue with the use of the word murdered. Johann—a theologian—who loathes violence in all its forms! I voiced my surprise. I was not the only one. What could be so wrong with saying murdered?

The issue gradually became clear. There were others, too, who had been murdered, he said. Other fatalities. We looked blankly at each other. Was this really the right moment to get into a debate? Nobody knew what they could or should say. Feelings mingled inside of me: discomfort, concern—resentment too. Or rather something like anger, anger towards everyone who was responsible for these deaths in the first place. But who that was seemed to depend on your position. This was something I had witnessed time and again. The dead might be dead, but they are not equal in death; they are subject to distinctions, and even get described in different terms. On the one side: innocent victims, deserving of our pity. On the other side: targets, collateral damage, repercussions. Never the victims, never the fallen, certainly never the murdered.

I stayed silent. Inside me a sense of alienation, the feeling growing steadily, a regular visitor during these times.

I hadn’t caused any of this; I had nothing to answer for. Still, was I supposed to make a distinction between killing that is legitimate and killing that isn’t? And to defend that distinction in front of other people?

All the Cold War rhetoric in the media, back in those days, also took a serious toll on me. War always affects the generations that come afterwards, too. It finds a way in—with its traumas, its mythologies, images living on in people’s minds, damage done to body and soul.

By this point, everyone around me had gone back to poring over the marking and the grade reports; yet I was trying to bring to mind a certain story by Wolfgang Borchert. There is a soldier who returns from war. He has no bread, and when he sees someone who does have bread, he kills him. The judge declaims that you are not allowed to kill someone. And then the soldier asks: Why not?

Was the material that held us together in the faculty room really so strained—yet at the same time so opaque—as it had seemed to me? The material essential to my survival: working as a team, understanding, acceptance. Would the others really not understand me? Or were we fundamentally on the same page?

Perhaps we were with respect to fundamentals: that death is always in the flesh. That all victims should be mourned with whole hearts, no matter which side of a divided heaven. That war is no accident but a personal catastrophe for each individual life. That it leaves behind traumatised patterns of childhood. That those affected usually find no place on earth.

I know that, in the future, it will become impossible to stay silent in public about the things we need to talk about—the things I need to talk about. Eighteen months until my retirement…

I bought two spinach pizzas at the Edeka by the S-Bahn. Plus two beers. With one pizza already on my plate, I put the second in the oven. I was hungry. And I was worn out by reality, by the way it was appearing.

Sylvia Krupicka
23.01.2025/07.02/2026

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Donnerstag, 23. Januar 2025

Berlin Kreuzberg, Fachschule für Erzieher:innen

Das Semesterende hält mich noch fest im Griff. In den vergangenen Wochen habe ich dreihundertsechzig Klausurseiten gelesen: Ein umfangreiches „Manuskript“, das mich alle halbe Jahre heimsucht. Ich habe sie benotet, mit Erwartungshorizont an die Studierenden zurückgegeben, Zensuren zurückgemeldet, gegebenenfalls neu verhandelt, Nachschreibe-Termine organisiert, Endnoten ermittelt.
Wie immer in dieser Phase bin ich am Limit, wie immer kurz vor Ausbruch einer Erkältung, oder einer Augenentzündung oder einer Rückenproblematik. Der Körper bietet viele Möglichkeiten, auf die Situation aufmerksam zu machen.
Den Schlusspunkt setzen in der Regel die Semesterkonferenzen, getimt im Halbstundentakt. Heute musste ich in sieben Konferenzen. Dazwischen der Bürokram: Papiere einsortieren, Listen mit Kollegen abgleichen, Kopien anfertigen, Unterschriften einsammeln.
Mittags stand was Leckeres zu Essen im Dozentenraum, ein Schokoladenkuchen, ein Teller voller Nüsse—Nervennahrung.
Um 15 Uhr endlich die letzte Konferenz, über den Vollzeitkurs.
Oft reicht die Zeit kaum für Eindrücke zum Kurs, aber Johann nahm sie sich, gleich zu Beginn. Die Studierenden hätten kürzlich ein Puppenspiel gezeigt und er selbst sei voller Angst gewesen. Gegenstand der Aufführung war der Krieg im Gazastreifen.
Kein Stühle scharren mehr, kein Kramen in Rucksäcken.
„Es ging um Zahlen und es ging um ermordete Kinder“, sagte Johann. Und, dass er nicht gewusst hätte, was auf ihn zukommen würde und vor allem wie er hätte reagieren müssen. Er habe sich allein gelassen gefühlt, zudem sei eines unserer pädagogischen Ziele, intrinsische Motivation zu wecken und deshalb hätten die Studierenden ihr Thema für das Puppenspiel eigenständig gewählt. Es klang ein wenig wie eine Rechtfertigung.

In der Diskussion nach der Vorführung habe er das Wort „ermordet“ beanstandet. Johann, ein Theologe, der jegliche Form von Gewalt verabscheut!
Ich wunderte mich laut - ich war nicht die einzige.
Was sollte an dem Wort problematisch sein?
Langsam schälte es sich heraus. Es gab eben auch andere Ermordete. Andere Tote. Wir sahen uns ratlos an. Ob das nun der geeignete Moment sei, eine Diskussion zu entfachen? Niemand wusste genau, was er jetzt sagen könnte oder wollen müsste. In mir mischten sich Unbehagen und Sorge - und Groll. Nein, eher Wut - auf all jene, die Tote überhaupt zu verantworten hatten. Die wechselten aber, je nachdem von welcher Seite man schaute. Ich hatte des öfteren wahrgenommen, dass Tote zwar tot sind, aber nicht etwa gleich im Tod, dass Unterschiede gemacht werden und dass es sogar bewusst unterschiedliche Bezeichnungen für sie gäbe. Auf der einen Seite - unschuldige Opfer, bedauernswert; auf der anderen Seite - Ziele, Schäden oder Auswirkungen. Keine Opfer. Keine Gefallenen. Schon gar keine Ermordeten.
Ich schwieg. Mit stetig anwachsender Verstimmung in mir, die sich in letzter Zeit häufig meldete.
Nichts davon hatte ich verursacht. Nichts davon zu verantworten.
Und dennoch sollte ich einen Unterschied machen, wann das Töten legitim ist - und wann nicht? Und diesen vor Menschen vertreten?
Schon die Rhetorik des „Kalten Krieges“ in den damaligen Medien hatte mir enorm zugesetzt. Krieg erreicht immer auch die Generationen danach. Er schleicht sich durch - mit seinen Traumata, seinen Legenden, seinen Bildern in den Köpfen, seinen Schäden an Leib und Seele.

Während sich ringsum alle bereits wieder über Zensurenlisten beugten, versuchte ich mich an einen Text von Wolfgang Borchert zu erinnern: Ein Soldat kommt nach Hause, er hat kein Brot und sieht jemanden der Brot hat, er erschlägt ihn. Der Richter meint, man dürfe niemanden totschlagen und der Soldat fragt zurück: Warum nicht?
War der Stoff, der uns im Dozentenraum miteinander verband, wirklich so zum Äußersten gespannt und zugleich undurchsichtig, wie er mir erschien? Der Stoff, der für mich überlebenswichtig ist: Arbeit im Team, Verständnis, Akzeptanz.
Würden mich die anderen wirklich nicht verstehen?
Oder waren wir uns im Grunde einig?
Möglicherweise in Grundsätzlichem:
Tod ist immer: Leibhaftig. Alle Opfer sind mit ganzem Herzen zu betrauern: Hierzulande Andernorts. Krieg ist kein Störfall, sondern eine persönliche Katastrophe für jedes einzelne Leben. Er hinterlässt verstörende Kindheitsmuster. Für Betroffene gibt es in der Regel: Kein Ort. Nirgends.

Ich weiß, dass es künftig keine Option mehr sein wird, in der Öffentlichkeit zu schweigen, über das, worüber wir eigentlich sprechen müssten...worüber ich sprechen muss.

Noch 18 Monate bis zu meiner Rente…
Ich kaufte zwei Spinatpizzen bei Edeka am S-Bahnhof. Und zwei Bier.
Während die eine Pizza bereits auf meinem Teller lag, schob ich die zweite in den Ofen.
Ich war hungrig.
Und erschöpft von der Realität, wie sie sich gerade zeigte.

Sylvia Krupicka
23.01.2025/07.02.2026

The first thing we end up talking about when Kate McNaughton walks into the empty Goldberg’s Deli in the northern part of our shared Bezirk is the dire state of the world—for everyone but also for people, who like McNaughton, are working with words. McNaughton is a novelist and translator, a fixture in the English-language Berlin scene. She’s lived in the city since 2012 and published her first novel, How I Lose You, in 2018. She’s currently working on another. McNaughton has long translated from German for the theatre but The Village at the End of the World (Granta Editions) by the Romanian-German writer Herta Müller marks her first book-length literary translation. Composed of interviews between Müller and her editor, it presents itself as a kind of early autobiography of the Nobel Prize-winning writer, reflecting on her life in Romania through her arrival in Germany. It is a book full of strange events and details, provoking McNaughton to wonder ‘how did that happen?’—what she names as ‘a sense of a life that's heightened by literature.’ Persevering through the scattered outbursts of my young son, we spoke about Müller’s idea of beauty, the distance between Communist Romania and our capitalist reality, and the task of translating the writer in the wake of her virulent declarations since October 7.

What we’re drinking: Flat white with oat milk (SIB), Chai latte (KM)

What’s the story behind your coming to translate this particular book?

It’s a bit prosaic, I’m afraid. I’ve been writing reader reports for Granta for ages and ages, about 15 years. This was one of those. I really liked it; I thought it was really interesting. I wrote a report that was very positive and said, ‘Well, if you do buy it, could you consider me for the translation?’ They asked me to do the sample, and then the whole book. It’s a book that is both a good introduction to her and, for people who have read her novels in the English-speaking world, a good way of providing some context and going deeper into them. There’s a lot of stuff in here that isn’t necessarily available already in English. They’re also reissuing two of her novels to coincide with the publication of this, so I guess they’re trying to put her out there again.

Do you think there is something about Herta Müller that speaks to our particular moment?

When I was translating it, I felt like, ‘Oh, my God, she’s so relevant,’ in a way that I hadn’t necessarily anticipated. Even the context of my getting the job illustrates this. I have an office in on Mariannenplatz, which I share with other translators. It was June 2024, and I was in the middle of talking to a colleague who’d come to a summer party we were having. We were discussing, ‘Oh, God, everything is so awful for translators at the moment.’ And she was like, ‘I’ve been thinking about retraining as a therapist.’ And I went: ‘I’ve also been thinking [of doing that]!’ And then I was like, ‘Hang on a second. I haven’t turned off my computer. Let me just go and do that, and then we can continue our conversation about what our new career paths might be.’ I go and try to switch off the computer, and there’s the email from Granta offering me the job. And so I thought, ‘Maybe it’s a sign from the gods that literary translation is still worth doing.’

A lot of the work was done under the cloud of the release of ChatGPT and what that might mean for everything. And then the editing process, with a lot of back and forth coincided with the beginning of the second Trump administration, and Elon Musk DOGE-ing around with his chainsaw. What she writes about language, and the way the [Romanian] regime used language to try and control people—and how language was, for her, also a way of surviving this oppression—felt very relevant to our present day.

[Müller] talks at one point about the language of the regime being a language of prefabricated parts—that the ugliness of the way people expressed themselves was a way of dulling people into submission. She talks about ugliness generally, and she’s like, ‘the buildings are ugly and the shop windows are ugly, and the language is ugly as well.’ It’s like AI slop, right? It’s a surge of poor quality stuff that washes over us and beats us into submission. And she talks as well about words being twisted. How someone throws themselves out of a window and it’s an accident—or a member of the party commits suicide, and it’s a hunting accident. When you look at the alt-right on Twitter and this twisting of words and turning them round 180 degrees… There are a lot of interesting parallels there. Our digital world is a structure of surveillance that Ceaușescu could only have imagined in his wet dreams. We have a machine that is meant to control our language in a way that he could only have dreamt of—and yet we’re willingly handing over both our data and our very ability to formulate our own thoughts to that. There’s a cautionary tale in there.

The other side is that she talks about how finding ways to express her own experience is what kept her sane and able to survive the oppression she experienced—the very beauty of language and the unexpectedness of a poetic phrase coming into being. Maybe I’m too obsessed with AI, but again, going back to this thing of what’s happening with this virtual world… She has this almost haptic sense of language. To the extent that she’s now, in her most recent poetry, literally cutting out words. It’s almost as though words are actual things that have their own existence to her. I think you feel that through the way she talks about them: that they have their own being, that you try and hold on to one and grasp it and then put it down onto the page. And I think that’s a really interesting counterpoint to the world that we live in, where everything is virtual. We live in a terrible world, and it’s easy to feel like, ‘what can I do about it? What’s the point of being a writer when everything is [so terrible]?’ But she reminds us that writers are on the front line when an oppressive system is being put into place. She reminds us that words are important, and that they can be a way of surviving oppression just as much as they can be a way of structuring oppression.

I was struck by how Müller thinks about beauty as a kind of act of resistance to the regime—such that even putting on makeup before going to be interrogated is a kind of radical act—and I thought of it as a marker of how different our world is than what she experienced in Communist Romania. We live in a world where the idea, or ideal, of beauty is so often coopted to sell us something, or control our mode of expression. Is Müller’s invocation of beauty some ideal beyond the cosmetic, or is there a way in which it might not work today as it did for her?

There’s a passage [in the book] where she talks about going to Germany for the first time. She’s at this dinner, and there’s the tablecloth and the beauty of a lovely dinner in a fine restaurant. And you’re like, ‘well, that’s, of course, a beautiful and amazing experience.’ But also it’s not the reality of the West that everyone has access to the nice dinner in the fine restaurant, right? There’s a passage as well where she talks about—I can’t remember exactly—cotton buds, or something like that. Anyway, a particular item is available in the shops, in the West, that would have been an exceptional luxury [in Romania]. I guess it’s quite a Jamesian theme as well, isn’t it: do you need wealth to have beauty? There’s a particular kind of beauty that is attached to a certain kind of exclusivity, to which I think she probably is partial.

To read this book was, for me, to feel an incredible estrangement from her experience, to see how—

Alien the reality is? For sure. My partner is East German. He was 9 when the Wall came down, but his parents are very much [East German]. There was a lot in here that I found quite enlightening, although his mother also read the book, and I think that she was a bit offended. Because they were part of the system; they weren’t dissidents. So I also had that perspective in mind, which is maybe why, with the restaurant thing, I was like: it’s not that simple. Of course, it’s nice living in the West if you can afford those things, but there are also a lot of people who can’t. No one would want Ceaușescu’s regime—but there was, in East Germany, an attempt to have a more egalitarian approach. Even so, her idea of aesthetics being important is something that we can draw on. Maybe it’s a question of just not pushing it to extremes: it’s nice to take care of your appearance, if that’s what gives you confidence, but you shouldn’t be forced to inject yourself with Botox every six months when you’re 24 or whatever.

She also applies that to language. [For her,] beauty is truth, truth beauty. Beauty is a way for us to connect to something, to some greater truth. As I was saying, I do feel it is relevant today: because in this digital world that we inhabit, you’re assailed by ugliness, by this poor quality, whether it’s poor quality texts or poor quality images. But I agree with you. The world she’s describing is completely alien, right? It’s not the reality that those of us who’ve grown up in the West have come from. But maybe that’s also an argument to read her, because she’s still alive. She must [only] be around 70 now. That reality is not that far away.

Yes, Müller really emphasizes how the regime lives on. There’s this incredible scene, where Müller waits behind her old interrogator to buy eggs after the end of the regime—and confronts him, but realizes that she uses the formal tone to speak to him, just as she had during her interrogations. What was it like translating a book from a writer so attuned to language?

The text itself is a sort of in an interesting form, because it is an interview. So it’s spoken language, but she is still so attentive to what is being said. And because she’s referring to text that she’s written, there’s still that very close attention to every single word, and a very careful choice of words. It’s not like me mouthing off right now. I think she’s someone who structures her thoughts much more carefully.

One thing that was a big question for me was [her German]. Because she’s from a German-speaking minority in Romania, her German has a slightly other sound to it. It’s very hard to pinpoint what it is exactly because, obviously, she’s a native German speaker, but it has a slightly different music than what you hear here in Germany. How do you convey that slightly different and slightly other sound, that foreign-sounding musicality, in English? I think I’m still a bit like, ‘have I actually done this successfully’? I’m not sure. My initial approach was to say, ‘I’m going to stick a bit closer to the original structure of the German than I maybe would if I were translating a different kind of text, in order for it to, slightly, retain a hint of that otherness.’ But then obviously, I’m still trying to smooth it enough that it doesn’t read clunky or like it’s a bad, purely literal translation. So a lot of the editing process as well was back and forth. where the thought often was, ‘okay, is this a bit where things should be smoothed over?’ Because sometimes she just has a very weird use of a particular word. For example, she’ll use a word that just wouldn’t be the word that you would use in ‘German German.’ I think I have a lot of notes in the document with track changes and comments and stuff with the editor where he would be like, ‘this sounds a bit odd. Should we use this [instead]?’ And I’d be like, ‘Well, no, because it also sounds odd in the German, so I think actually here we have to sort of keep that oddness.’ But then in other places, it didn’t. So it was a fine balancing act.

Another thing that she does—which again, was quite hard to deal with—is that she uses repetition a lot. She’ll use a word and then sort of circle round and round it in a way which I think is… I mean, you also notice it in the German, but it’s more acceptable in German than it is in English. So those are also moments where you’re like, how much of the repetition do we leave in? At what point does it become unreadable? It was quite a balancing act. It would be different with another writer, but she has a very poetic view of the world and of language, so she zeroes in on these individual words. This is also what makes her a very interesting writer in German, because she’s really obsessed with nouns. And German is a language where the noun is king. It gets a capital letter, you can stick them together and make new nouns endlessly. There’s an infinite number of new nouns. It’s the essence of the language, which obviously is not the case in English, right? Nouns are important in English, but they don’t have that kind of nature. And nouns are her thing—as we were saying earlier, they’re almost like things that you can grab.

As you were translating this, did you reckon with Herta Müller’s public profile since October 7? Was this something you had to consider in some way?

I have to say, I actually wasn’t aware of what she’d been saying when I started working on this. That isn’t to excuse the things that she said, because I absolutely disagree with them. Generally, the discourse on Gaza in Germany is kind of insane at the moment, but I suppose maybe it is something that I think is worth engaging with, in her case. The tone with which she says those things is so shocking because it’s so bitter. But it’s a bitterness that you find here [in this text], like when she’s talking about the old Nazis in her village, or, like the stooges of the regime. This isn’t to excuse her position, which I find unacceptable, but I see trauma there. Her whipping around on this issue is connected to a history of suffering—her parents having been sent to camps, and this sort of feeling that ‘there are all these old Nazis around’.

So I think it’s something that is worth attending to, because I think that those dynamics are at play in our discussions too. I don’t know what the answer is, because it’s very hard to… But I guess that maybe that’s also part of the point. It’s easy for me, sitting here, having grown up in fairly privileged circumstances and not having experienced anything like that, to take the moral high ground. But I think that there’s a complexity to the path that takes her to this position now, and it has to do with the particular historical experiences that she’s been through. Like the scene in the restaurant: you can see certain reactions that are, on the one hand, completely understandable, given where she’s coming from, but that you could also critique from another perspective. Like, if you’re taking a Marxist perspective, you could talk about the class dynamics that are underneath that restaurant scene. I feel that the virulence with which she talks about Gaza, it’s got to be connected to something else—because otherwise it’s just insane. It’s something I obviously find problematic, but I don’t think that it’s a reason not to read her work or engage with her seriously as a writer. Maybe I’m excusing the inexcusable, but I feel like it’s also important to understand how that happens, because so much of the discourse today on Gaza comes from people who are motivated by that kind of historical trauma in one way or another.

It’s certainly a document that allows us to understand where that intensity is coming from. There’s a lot here that, for lack of a better term, exposes Müller, in interesting ways—politically and artistically. So, are you working on anything right now?

I’m actually co-translating a collection of Austrian short pieces at the moment. And I’m pretty much finished with my second novel—which has taken a very long time to write—but I have a final, final round of small edits that my agent has asked me to do.

Can you divulge what the novel is about?

I can tell you in very general terms: it deals with how people come to do bad things to each other and justify it to themselves. My working title now is This Cannot Be Happening. But my previous working title for it was Banality, because of the banality of evil. Basically, it is about what happens in people’s heads when they’re doing things that harm others.

What Am I, A Deer? (Fitzcarraldo)
Polly Barton

In case you haven’t heard, Isabella Rossellini has been doing great stuff on Youtube. In the ‘Seduce Me’ miniseries, the actress, in outfits and sets constructed with the enthusiasm and sensibility of a primary school art project, reenacts and explains the mating rituals of various animals. One opens with a hand stroking a large kitchen knife against her face. ‘Is he seducing me?’ she asks the camera. ‘What am I, a BEDBUG?’

The unnamed narrator of Polly Barton’s debut novel nervously IMs this video to a colleague one afternoon. She’s the odd man out at the company she’s recently joined, a winkingly-unnamed Japanese video game behemoth based in Frankfurt. Her colleagues are, well, proper nerds: Brits who like video games and anime and more video games. She likes Japan too, but not like that. Sending the video is a bid for connection. It works—they all start saying ’What am I, a WEEB?’ to each other—but only briefly.

Does she want to let these people in, or does she want to keep them out? And does she want to be seduced? The narrator spends much of the novel consumed by an earth-shattering crush on a colleague she refuses to speak to, while continually standing aloof from the affections of another. She likes Frankfurt in part because it doesn’t demand her to really engage. Walking down the street, she muses that ‘In London she had walked down the streets and felt waves of longing to be with people on the inside of the glass, where she was wanted and integral, but here, she felt herself included simply by passing by.’

But the real interstitial zone, the one place where this contradiction can be apotheosized, is the karaoke booth. Barton has previously published nonfiction (in addition to translations from Japanese), and there’s something of informative direct address here too. The book is at its best in its lengthy disquisitions on the ecstasies of Japanese-style karaoke. Both translating and karaoke, the narrator muses, are ways of ‘inhabiting something fully without committing to that thing, living in the luxurious promise and possibility of it and not the isolated, consequence-laden reality.’ In the karaoke booth you can try things on: feel karaoke emotions and cry karaoke tears, never having to admit real desire, real wanting, real need.

In the end, the worst thing to be is a deer, the pick-me girl of the animal kingdom. When she does act on her desires, Fiona Apple’s ‘I Want You to Love Me’ is the humiliating soundtrack to her disappointment: ‘And while I’m in this body / I want somebody to want / And I want what I want / And I want / you to love me.’ – MM

Death in Rome and The Hothouse (New Directions)
Wolfgang Koeppen, trans. Michael Hofmann

Wolfgang Koeppen’s Death in Rome opens like a fairytale—‘Es war einmal eine Zeit…’—and closes with a grotesque comic riff on the closing line of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. In between are roughly 180 pages of savage satire in which Koeppen, axe in hand, hacks away at the delusional amnesia of postwar West Germany. It’s deservedly being hailed as a rediscovered masterpiece, now reissued by New Directions alongside another novel from Koeppen’s trilogy of postwar novels, The Hothouse (the first, Pigeon in Grass, a kaleidoscopic 1951 account of a single day in Munich, was released in translation in 2020).

The set-up is a deranged makeshift family reunion in postwar Rome, the relatives repeatedly crossing paths over a frantic two days. Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath, ex-Nazi bureaucrat, has arranged a secret rendezvous with his crazed genocidal brother-in-law, Gottlieb Judejahn, a former high-ranking SS officer who escaped capture and is now a mercenary in the employ of an unnamed Arab country. Pfaffrath hopes to contrive Judejahn’s return to West Germany: surely a few thousand murders can now be forgotten.

By chance, their estranged sons are also in Rome: Siegfried Pfaffrath, an avant garde composer debuting his symphony, and Adolf Judejahn, a Catholic convert preparing for the priesthood. As in Mann, the characters are at least as much symbol as person. Translator Hofmann suggests in his introduction that the four represent the great strands of supposed German achievement—art, theology, bureaucracy and warfare—and that may well be right. But Hofmann leaves out the third son, Dietrich Pfaffrath, whose craven and vacuous opportunism might just stand in for the spirit of the Federal Republic in the Wirtschaftwunder years.

If that sounds plodding, rest assured it’s not: Death in Rome is a wildly energetic novel, the characters skittering across the page like dancers in a discordant bizarre ballet (for once an excellent match for Hofmann’s often heavy-handed translation style). There’s also a savage humor in Koeppen’s work that recalls Thomas Bernhard—both writers launched furious assaults, unrelenting and yet deviously entertaining, on the respectable facades their countries (West Germany, Austria) erected to conceal the horrors of the past.

The Hothouse, too, is a tight acrid satire on the hypocrisies of postwar West Germany that follows a disillusioned socialist MP as he unspools over a day in the haphazard capital of Bonn. Intriguing, but the tapestry of references and allusions feel more dated and obscure. It’s hard to compete with the hideous and extravagant fascist burlesque of Death in Rome, which fits unsettlingly well the mood of our own low dishonest decade. – Bryn Stole

Conversation in the Mountains: Collected Prose (New Directions)
Paul Celan, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop

This slim collection of the prose of the great poet Paul Celan is, by its nature, a minor work. Composed for the most part of occasional writing—speeches, replies to questionnaires, introductory biographical paragraphs about other poets—the book is a reissue of Rosemarie Waldrop’s excellent 1986 translation first commissioned by the UK’s Carcanet Press. Now being flogged by New Directions at 20 cents a page, it is basically a pamphlet. It could slip through the crack at the back of a bookshelf and disappear as if it never was—which might have been what happened to my review copy. At least, I can no longer find it.

Yet, however incidental these writings might be, the somber and brilliant mystery of Celan still breaks out from them. ‘So strong was his love for her it would have pushed open the lid of his coffin,’ goes one representative line in ‘Backlight’, ‘had the flower she placed there not been so heavy.’ And the gnomic titular essay presents a conversation between two Jews in the mountains, both of whom confront ‘a moveable veil’ into which images enter and begin a process whereby spinning thread ‘begets a child, half image, half veil’.

Within Celan’s notoriously obscure oeuvre, such a tangle counts as the major European poet—born in Romania in 1920, survivor of the Holocaust, and drowned in the Seine in 1970—engaging his Jewishness rather more directly than usual. And the book also offers a glimpse of Celan’s relationship to the German writer Georg Buchner. In ‘Conversation,’ Celan’s Jews are described as coming ‘like Lenz through the mountains’—likening the Jew to Buchner’s famous crisis-riddled protagonist—and in ‘The Meridian’, his speech given on receiving the Georg Buchner Prize, he puzzles over moments in the dramatist’s oeuvre that spoke to him. Even a three-paragraph reply to a questionnaire from Paris’ Flinker Bookstore on bilingual poetry—refusing its possibility—grants us his sense of poetry as ‘by necessity a unique instance of language’.

I might wish they were part of some larger collected volume of prose and poetry, but the writings this slender book offers are, like Celan’s poetry, elliptical and resistant to immediate understanding. Indeed, they also are his thought launched into the world, ‘thrown out to sea with the—sure not always strong—hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on a shoreline of the heart.’ Perhaps that’s where my copy has ended up. Some traces of its words, at least, remain on mine. – SIB

Hot Sauce

ERRATA: The Editors have learned that our former gossip correspondent Marguerite McEnnedy severely misrepresented the nature of her connection to the Limerick Writers’ Centre, and indeed the very mission of that Centre. We would like to offer our sincerest apologies to the Centre and the people of Limerick, and to ensure them and our readers that we have cut ties with the reporter in question.

We are now looking for a pan-European gossip correspondent who truly embodies our commitment to truth. Please send a CV, with cover letter, to theauflauf@substack.com.

Daily Maintenance

Sanders Isaac Bernstein

October 30, 2025

I lay you down on your changing table, sly smile on your impossibly cheeky face as I pull off your trousers and unbutton the snaps of your onesie. Do you already know what you are about to do, you duplicitous ferret? It’s so easy to impute to your steady gaze and general refusal of words a kind of impudent omniscience, that your innocence is feigned, that you know that by pretending to absolute helplessness, you achieve absolute control. I lift your hips and begin to gently wipe you clean of your refuse. Some father figure of artificial intelligence declared that the technology will soon rule us all, because, he said, the only creature on God’s green earth controlled by a less intelligent one was a mother by her baby—and, for that, evolution had to put the work in. Your existence has become the metronome for ours, the day’s heartbeat, if we still knew what a day was. Even as we have counted the days since your birth—they number one hundred and four—you have turned the day as a unit of experience increasingly meaningless. In university, I learned how the medieval Christians conceived of God seeing time spatially, everything in a simultaneity, as, knowing all that was going to happen, time did not unfold. Future, past, present, all were fixed as if on an enormous canvas. I remember too the attempted rationalizations of the creation of the world in seven days from Hebrew School. There are many kinds of days, we were told. The Earth’s day is only one kind. The lunar day is almost a month. And the cosmic day lasts for about 40 million of our years. What, then, might be a day for God, they asked—and who were we to say how long those six days of creation really were? You press your thick little stomach against my hand as I slide your night’s diaper out from under you, its purpose fulfilled, and place it in its depository. What is a day for you, you vessel of intensities? You know no concepts, no time, no tragedy. I turn to find a new diaper, somewhere behind me, as you gurgle happily—life’s a comedy—my hand remaining on your stomach to steady you atop the washing machine. How many times have I done this since you were born, in this day, which goes on seemingly unbroken by night’s slumber? You certainly sleep, enough for the both of us, but you sleep when the sun is out—and when we sleep, in the night, you wake us with all the force of your young lungs. Is it all a spirit of mischievousness, or should we fear that this is a sign of some early trauma, already some errant turn in your development? What do we know. After all, I am fumbling with the diaper in its packaging just as I sometimes fumble for words. My thoughts are always far more elegant in my head than on the page. Perhaps that is why I have not written in my diary for months, though I did write that line today. I could blame your arrival, my little son, for the lack of time, but even before your birth this year’s ledger stood largely empty. Time was already pressing upon me in a new way, and, under its weight, I could not seem to lift my head up for reflection. Perhaps my sense of days was already beginning to deteriorate then, your first shadowy presence dislocating the timescale of my existence. Instead of unfolding before me, my life finds itself leading into yours, a prehistory, a prologue, even the leader of the film whose full reel I will, hopefully, never see. With my hand on your wriggling, squidgy stomach (and the other still deep among the diapers), it’s hard to believe that you once did not exist, that there was ever a life before this, that this great warmth that chills with its intensity did not always bloom across my breast. I can almost even feel the warmth right now, warmly electric and coldly, anxiously pulsating, there it is at my elbow, almost a pulsating current. But quickly, this warmth turns damper, colder. You let out a triumphant screech, you dinosaur with a sore throat. You’ve peed on me again. And what do you do? You lie on your naked back, warm and dry, your sly smile widening. And, like so many times before and to come in this long day of your existence, you laugh at your father.

Many People in Our Country are Very Concerned About This

Marcel Krueger

Pick any day in the long account of calamities that was the German 20th century, and it will be one that, for some, was one of horror and ruin.

On September 17th, 1991, in Hoyerswerda in Saxony, a racist mob attacked a hostel for workers from Mozambique and Vietnam with Molotov cocktails and bricks.

On September 19th, 1991, in an arson attack on an asylum seekers hostel in Saarlouis, Samuel Kofi Yeboah from Ghana was burnt to death.

October 3rd, 1991, was the new Day of German Unity, just announced the year before, and in his address to the nation chancellor Helmut Kohl stated that:

‘Germany is a country that welcomes foreigners—and will remain so. However, this does not mean that we can stand idly by and watch the abuse of asylum law. I know that many people in our country are very concerned about this. Our constitutional state must take decisive action as a matter of urgency, and I will do everything in my power to ensure that the abuse of the right to asylum is stopped as quickly as possible.’

On the same day, in Hünxe in North Rhine-Westphalia, four Lebanese refugee children were injured in arson attacks. In Brühl in Baden-Württemberg, skinheads attacked a group of Nigerians at a funfair. In Gotha in Thuringia, four off-duty Soviet soldiers were thrown out of an apartment window by another group of skinheads.

On March 15th, 1992, in a neo-Nazi attack in Saal in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, 18-year old Romanian asylum seeker Dragomir Christinel was beaten to death.

On May 28th, 1992, a centre for asylum seekers was attacked by several hundred residents in Mannheim-Schönau.

Starting August 22nd, 1992, several hundred rioters attacked the central reception centre for asylum seekers and a hostel for Vietnamese contract workers in Rostock-Lichtenhagen. Over 3,000 spectators protected the attackers and hindered the deployment of the police and fire brigades.

On October 11th, 1992, waitress Waltraud Scheffler was mortally injured in a neo-Nazi attack on a pub in Geierswalde in Saxony.

On the 23rd of November, 1992, neo-Nazis threw Molotov cocktails at the house of a Turkish family in Mölln in North-Rhine Westphalia, and murdered Bahide Arslan (51) and her granddaughters Yeliz Arslan (10) and Ayşe Yılmaz (14).

On the 19th of February, 1993, 22-year-old Mike Zerna was killed by neo-Nazis in a youth club in Hoyerswerda.

On May 26th, 1993, the German parliament, the Bundestag, voted on the so-called ‘asylum compromise’, an amendment to the constitution: no one who had previously stayed in a ‘safe third country’ would be able to claim asylum in Germany going forward. 521 members of the Bundestag voted in favour, 132 against.

One of my own days of ruin was just two days after. On May 28th, 1993, four neo-Nazis set fire to the house of a Turkish family in my hometown of Solingen, and murdered Gürsün İnce (27), Hatice Genç (18), Gülistan Öztürk (12), Hülya Genç (9), and Saime Genç (4).

It was a hot day in May, an early onset of summer, and from the TV room in the attic I followed the news about the attack and the subsequent riots when the Turkish community vented their pain and anger in loud protest and smashed shop windows across town. I walked past glaziers repairing those windows two days later on my way to the burned-out shell of the house, where I stood with many others looking at it in shock, its blackened and empty windows looking down on us like an accusation.

Two months later, the house was torn down. An empty plot with a small memorial plaque remains today at Untere Wernerstrasse. On the fenced-off, grass-covered plot, five chestnut trees were planted to remember the victims. Yet the official memorial to the Solingen attack is an unofficial one. It was created in 1994 by teacher Heinz Siering and artist Sabine Mertens together with students of Mildred Scheel Vocational College, and still stands on the school grounds: two metal figures pulling a swastika apart. It is an unfinished memorial, after a fashion. Its foundation is constantly growing as the public can donate metal rings that are integrated into the base to this day. One such ring carries my name.

What is past is not dead; it is not even past, and few things ever change in Germany.

On March 25th, 2024, an arson attack against the house of a Turkish-Bulgarian family in Solingen killed Kancho Emilov Zhilov (30), Katya Todorova Zhilova (29), Galia Kancheva Zhilova (2) and Emily Kancheva Zhilova (4 months). The perpetrator Daniel S., who was cleared of all suspicions of right-wing extremism by the public prosecutor just weeks after his arrest, had the ‘Lied eines Asylsuchenden’, a hateful ‘Song of an Asylum Seeker’ poem that first became popular with right-wing extremists in 1992, pinned to the walls of his garage.

‘In the absence of a narrative,’ the Berlin journalist Hilda Hoy writes of learning to speak, ‘this is what I want to believe: My first word was “mama.” 媽媽, māmā, Mama. I want it to be true that from the first time I spoke, I voiced myself in English and Chinese both.’ The child of a Taiwanese mother and Canadian father, Hoy spent most of her early life in Taiwan, where her appearance marked her out as an a-tok-á—a foreigner—with English gradually becoming her dominant language over Mandarin. ‘When I speak Mandarin with my mother, I am reminded as always of the distance that separates us—my foreignness from the person who made me.’ When her mother was diagnosed with dementia, gradually losing the ability to speak, Hoy began probing the repercussions of her own language loss. In Mother Tongue, released last month by the Taiwan-based publisher Wind&Bones, Hoy sketches out her encounters with Mandarin lessons and Taiwanese game shows, as well as the painful intimacies of love and aging parents. We met up with her to discuss multilingualism, writing, and the disorientations of dislocation.

What we’re eating: oolong tea and Laugenbrezel (HH), white tea and Möhrenschnitte (MM)

In your opening author’s note, you say that you first became a journalist so you could write without revealing yourself. What do you mean by that?

When I went to journalism school, we were specifically taught that your opinions should not be in the final piece—whether it’s TV, print, radio, whatever. As a journalist, you’re the medium through which the story comes, but you don’t put in your opinions and judgments and so on. I definitely internalized that for a long time—and, after all, it’s safer to not put yourself up for judgment. But I don’t want to write like that anymore. That kind of writing serves a certain purpose, but at the moment I’m most interested in telling the stories that only I can tell. It’s unavoidable to put my perspective, my curiosities, my opinions, my judgments, and so on in my work.

There is still that voice in me, the sort of shaming of the personal essay, of autofiction. You know, the ‘keep it in your diary, take it up with your therapist’ kind of judgment that women writers can get when they reveal their emotional landscape in their work. I try not to think about that too much because I think it’s just self-limiting. I’m still pretty private and pretty cautious about what I reveal and what I don’t, but this is definitely the most personal thing I’ve ever written, much less published.

How does it feel to bring yourself fully into the frame?

It does feel vulnerable. But at this point in my life, I’m ready to do that. Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have been. Probably even five years ago, I wouldn’t have been. But now I feel resilient enough to deal with it. I’m also writing about an experience that is very true to me—and I can feel the trueness of it. I’m not going to go out there and read my reviews on Amazon or Goodreads or whatever. But I do feel like, hey, the truth of my experience is here. And if other people don’t identify with it, that’s okay.

How different did it feel to write this, versus your earlier work, in journalism and in fiction?

I want to say it felt quite different. With fiction, I was always second-guessing myself, because you’re creating a story out of thin air. The possibilities with fiction are utterly infinite. Whereas with non-fiction, the truth of my experience defined the framework. There’s still a lot of self-editing that goes on; I don’t want to just have verbal diarrhea on the page. But my experience of writing Mother Tongue was… I don’t want to say easier, because it was definitely emotionally not easy. But of all the things I’ve ever written, this work is probably one where as long as I got out of my own way—as long as I silenced my own judgment and self-censorship—the writing actually just came out.

Honestly, I think what drove this work is that I really just wanted to be seen. I have met many mixed-race people in my life, but it’s very rare that I meet any who grew up in the place of their non-white parent. I’ve spent a lot of time in Canada, and of course, you meet many half-white, half-Asian people there. But their experiences don’t really resonate with me. I’ve read memoirs and essays by half-Asian writers who write about things like being bullied, being ostracized. But they are always framed by the experience of a white-dominant culture. I have what I consider two mother tongues, two native languages. But one is imperfect, my Mandarin is imperfect, which I feel in me as a lack, a loss. That’s something I’m always searching for in other writing, and I rarely find it.

I just felt like: well, I exist. Surely there are other people like me out there. I want to connect with them. And I want my experience to be seen. Not just by readers in the West, but also people in Taiwan. I want them to recognize that my experience is a valid experience.

My experience was not of a white-dominant society rejecting me for being other. My experience was of a Taiwanese society rejecting me for being other, or othering me, or distancing me as a foreigner. I’ve had to do a lot of work as an adult to work through that experience, and to claim a Taiwanese identity for myself. To remind myself that I have the right to do that. I would have loved to read something like that 10–15 years ago, when I was just beginning to untangle my experience of how I grew up.

Was there any writing that did feel like a jumping off point to tell the story you wanted to tell?

I don’t want to write a traditional memoir. I want to make wider connections beyond myself. Mother Tongue is an offshoot of a larger collection I’m working on about language and identity. I’m interested in people like me, who feel pulled to reclaim a relationship with a lost language, with their family’s heritage language. I’m really interested in multilingualism. I think Germany is in the midst of a really interesting transformation, having just changed the law to allow multiple citizenships about a year and a half ago. I think that signals the beginning of a process of recognizing that pluralistic identity is a fully normal thing. You don’t have to choose one or the other. You can be both.

But to answer your question about inspiration, I’m really drawn to the writing of Jhumpa Lahiri. Her fiction is great, yes, but I really love what she’s written about her experience with languages. She has a collection called In Other Words about learning Italian and writing in Italian, which she actually wrote fully in Italian and then had translated into English. She writes that she felt exiled from language for a lot of her life. Exiled from English, exiled from Bengali, her parents’ native language. But Italian was choosing her own path—she’s choosing a whole new medium in which to express herself, and experimenting with that.

There’s also a Japanese writer called Yoko Tawada, who has lived in Germany for many years and writes sometimes in German, sometimes in Japanese. I find her approach really liberating. She’s so free with writing in German, in a way I never gave myself permission to be, because I have this writerly idea that anything you write must be as perfect as possible. But it is a choice, not a fact, to believe that good writing is perfect writing.

After reading both of them, I’ve realized I’m probably going to have to write at least one of the essays in my [forthcoming] collection in German. I’m curious about giving myself the limitations of writing in German, and seeing how that limitation forces me to find new ways of expressing things.

That’s rather unusual for an English-language writer in Berlin: most of us barely learn German, let alone consider writing in it. Why did you feel like you also wanted to master German?

I just really like languages. I find languages in general fascinating. I can credit my upbringing to that, growing up with two languages. But I also have to give my dad credit. He was the white Canadian guy, and he was the one who insisted that growing up bilingual was really important. He would say to us again and again when we were kids: ‘To have a second language is to have a second soul.’ We’d always roll our eyes. He’s really fascinated by languages; he went to Taiwan to study Mandarin and that’s how he met my mom. I absorbed that from him.

I’ve studied languages before: I studied French in high school, I lived in Prague for a year and a half and studied Czech there. So when I came here, I was just like, of course I’m going to learn German. Why wouldn’t I? It’s a bonus: I’m living here and I get to study German. I feed my brain by learning German.

How do you think of these three languages—German, English, Mandarin—differently? Do they occupy different emotional terrain? Do they occupy different intellectual terrain?

The short answer is yes. They do occupy different places in my brain, in my psyche, in my emotional understanding of the world. English is my intellectual language: it’s the language I went to school in, that I started to publish in.

Mandarin is a very emotional language, because when I speak it, I am immediately very young again. It’s the language I spoke at home with my mom, with my family, in everyday, very quotidian settings. And also because my Mandarin is kind of childlike, so when I speak it, I probably act a bit younger or less assured and more goofy.

I find German to be a very structurally rigid language. I feel like writing well in German is a feat of engineering. I can’t say that I, as a writer, personally identify with those feats, but I respect them. I would like to find a way to express myself in German that pushes back, maybe, against the structural rigidness. I’m not sure how German readers would feel about that, whether they would be really annoyed. I think my strategy, when I try to write that essay in German, will be to write shorter sentences. Because I find the nesting, Nebensatz, Nebensatz, Nebensatz structure really… I don’t enjoy writing like that, and I don’t enjoy reading those sentences. I feel like the brain is always kind of going through contortions to try to keep track of everything. That’s not fun to me.

I’m also learning Italian, so my brain is kind of influenced by that as well. It’s a bit of a mindfuck, to be honest. But I really enjoy the chorus of languages in my head as well.

That chorus comes into the book in the way that each of your sections begins with a word: for instance, mā (mother), mùbiāo (goal), a-tok-á (a slang term for ‘foreigner’ in Taiwanese Hokkien). How did you end up with that structure?

I knew Mother Tongue would be made up of interlinked chapters or short segments. The original structure was based around the Mandarin classes I’ve been taking for the past year, through a local Taiwanese organization. Each section was going to be based around a particular lesson. Then last fall, I got my hands on a collection by a Dutch-Canadian poet, Sadiqa de Meijer. She has a collection that’s super great, called Alfabet/Alphabet—alphabet in Dutch and English. Her structure is based on the letters of the alphabet, going from A to Z. Each letter gets a quite short, poetic essay using that letter as a starting point. That inspired me.

I was also aware that I was writing for an audience that most likely wouldn’t know Mandarin. So I kind of wanted to teach a word here and there.

There are also photographs in the book. What was the impetus for including those?

That was the publisher’s idea, and I’m glad they suggested it. Much more than the writing, it was the photos that made me feel... Picking the photos felt fraught. I felt really conflicted. I knew they would enhance the work, so it’s not that I didn’t want to do it, but I just felt the most afraid of, I don’t know, showing too much. My mom is also at the point now in her dementia where she could no longer give consent to her photo being used. So I do feel like I’ve taken a liberty in showing her face. If she were still mentally with us, she would say yes, but I wasn’t able to actually ask her.

I’m still really glad the publishers made that suggestion, because when I get to the last page and I see my mom’s photo at the end, or at the beginning when it’s a photo of my mom and me as a baby… I don’t know, it feels right. But I don’t want to look at them too much.

You talked quite a bit in the book about the role of physical appearance in both connecting you to your parents and also differentiating you. Do you feel like the photographs, by putting faces to names, sort of enhance that? When you talk about your nose and your mom’s nose, the reader is then able to, well, look at them.

I think mixed-race people are so often subjected to this constant face judgment. Non-mixed-race people always give you this, like, ‘Oh, what are you?’ kind of scrutiny. You get this from childhood—at school, in professional settings, dating, all the time.

When my publisher made the suggestion of coming up with a selection of photos, I found one of my family, from when I was probably around five or six. The way we are positioned in the photo, you can see so clearly, like, child one, child two. Parent one, parent two. I’ve been told my whole life that my sister looks more Asian and I look more white. And so when I look at our family portrait, I think that automatically. I’m already making that judgment myself. I’m imagining what someone who doesn’t know me will be thinking, what assessment they’ll be making. What assessment someone who’s white will be making, what assessment someone who’s Asian will be making. All those calculations are happening.

I also felt like I needed to prove certain aspects of the narrative. When I say that I was treated like a white person, growing up in Taiwan, I felt like I needed the photograph to back me up. When I say I want to claim a Taiwanese identity for myself, it’s like showing my Taiwanese mother lends me legitimacy. That is an emotionally fraught thing. Because, on the one hand, what do I have to prove? But on the other hand, I know people will be curious to pick apart my face. Because that’s what they’ve done my whole life. So here you go. Here it is. Take a look.

You’ve touched a little bit on this, but do you feel like this childhood experience of multiculturalism—of being intentional about language, of knowing or realizing that language is a thing with borders—had any bearing on your decision to become a writer?

Maybe. The simple answer is that I do think things are probably interconnected. I think one of the main things that really fascinates me about language is that it is the primary means by which we express who we are, what we’re experiencing, our lives, our families, our loves, everything. So I think my curiosity about people is tied to my curiosity about how people express who they think they are.

That’s why I am interested in people with multilingual backgrounds like mine. What languages do they use to express which parts of themselves? When people have these very hybrid, many-faceted selves, part of that is many different languages connected to many different things, different parts of their family, different parts of their lives, their pasts, etc. It’s so rich. So it’s probably part of why I became a writer, but not consciously.

Are there certain contradictions—the dislocations of being racialized, of not having a unitary background—that being a writer allows you to work through?

I think being involved in any kind of creative work involves a deep level of reflection—I mean, ideally. Not everyone doing creative work is interested in self-reflection. I certainly am. What I can say is that it was in the process of writing Mother Tongue that I recognized that my family’s patchwork language is perhaps incomplete or perhaps imperfect, but it’s ours. It works for us. It’s always worked for us. And my use of Mandarin and how I can express myself in Mandarin and who I am in Mandarin is also incomplete, but also in its own way whole.

The Town I Never Told You About (Seagull Books)
Ghassan Zaqtan, trans. Robin Moger

Ghassan Zaqtan is one of Palestine’s most celebrated poets. Born in 1954 in Beit Jala, he moved between Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Tunisia before returning to the West Bank in 1994. This collection combines new poems written between 2022 and 2024 with earlier poems that Zaqtan has revised for the occasion. ‘In their second writing,’ he explains, they are ‘a world away from the sanctity of first versions.’ As Fady Joudah has written, Zaqtan has shifted in recent decades towards increasingly intimate, tactile lyrical registers. What makes this collection so astonishingly powerful is the way it shifts between, on the one hand, elements of a personal poetics and on the other hand, the constant intrusion of historical pain and political violence. Some of his poems are more explicitly engaged with the pain of exile, dispossession, and war. Others adopt a more existentialist note, as in the eeriness and yearning and ruptured cyclicality of this short poem:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

In the night, strange trees came to the hill 
and the muffled cypress climbed up from the valley.
Ghosts of abandoned houses could be seen,
    advancing through the mist, 
and ancient human voices heard,
    calling to each other by name, 
and there were clouds from the winter before.

Zaqtan’s speakers never lose their tenderness, nor their urge for connectivity; yet their links to the past, and to their fellow spirits, haves been broken. Memory itself becomes a victim of oppression. The disaster of a people—and the disaster of life—leaves each person, daily, lonesome. Names abandon their owners; the dead rise then fall. The Jordan River of his childhood, since dammed by Israel, runs dry. Zaqtan conjures shifting degrees of historical depth, like a ruined house where some corridors go and go and go while others suddenly shut, the family portrait rendered mute, or even falling apart in one’s hands; continuity is never a certain thing, here, and the effort of remembering seems vast. Yet remembering must be done. One later poem ends like this:

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We carried our dear river on our shoulders
    and our precious lakes, 
like one who lifts the miracles of creation
    from the prophets’ backs; 
a miracle in every body of water, 
a massacre in every land.

- AW

Nightmare of the Embryos (New Directions)
Mariella Mehr, trans. Caroline Froh

Mariella Mehr is one of these people—poets, mystics, the brilliant, the mad, call them what you will—who simply see the world differently than you or me. Or, at least, Caroline Froh’s excellent translation from the German of the Swiss author’s prose presents a world of associations and connections that continue to pulse with novelty. Be warned: it’s an intense world, a world of violation and horror, of abuse and injustice, and terrible acts committed against the most vulnerable. It’s also real poetry.

If you had lived her life, you too would see the world differently. But perhaps that is a disservice to her exceptional talent. Born in 1947, she spent most of her life until she was 20 institutionalized, targeted by the Swiss state for her Yenish heritage—a campaign the state admitted in 2025, three years after her death, was a crime against humanity. After surviving this forced abduction, the electroshock therapy that began at the age of 6, and so many other indignities, Mehr worked in a factory until, in her mid thirties, she convinced an editor she met by chance at a bar to read her debut piece: ‘Nightmare of the Embryos’. It gives this volume its name—and is a haunting story across sixteen years of abuse and rape at the ‘Highway Children’s Home’ where Mehr grew up.

Like Paul Celan, Mehr is a poet of suffering. ‘It is screaming again, albino-life in the process of dying’, begins one short piece. But Mehr does more than dramatize extraordinary suffering and violation. The pieces in this collection also reflect on Esther Altorfer and report on Holocaust remembrance in Berlin—always ingeniously integrating fancy and fantasy. And there are no screams in pieces like ‘Came down to the valley, leaving now’, which tells of the end of a relationship with stripped-down psychological precision. And yet, even there, Mehr’s final line leaves the reader in the surreal, if quotidian, moment of dusk, a time that might be emblematic of Mehr’s work overall: a moment where, despite the fading light, something new is also becoming if not visible, at least imaginable. ‘Dusk is her time, the time of night-shadow animals, of monks, of lion plants.’ - SIB

Sanders recently wrote about the present and future of Berlin Roma/Sinti Holocaust remembrance for Cabinet.

Lázár (Hachette UK)
Nelio Biedermann, trans. Jamie Bulloch

The back cover of Lázár, a new novel about an aristocratic Hungarian family in the first half of the 20th century, wants you to know that it is ‘inspired by the author’s own family story’. As a reader, that proclaimed angle feels increasingly bizarre—I’m sorry to be prudish—given how much time is spent describing its characters’ sexual encounters. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: the horny awakenings of various adolescents are a way to mark the passage of time. But there is a point when you realize author Nelio Biedermann is writing about his grandpa (or great-grandpa) jerking off that it all becomes a bit too Freudian.

The 23-year-old is German-language literature’s latest wunderkind-for-export, and although his precociousness is a great marketing tactic, it also offers less-than-impressed reviewers some low hanging fruit. (NDR has noted that Lázár has zu viel Schlaumeierei.) Despite or perhaps because of his age, Biedermann is keenly aware of the power of literary legacy: for instance, there are at least three Thomas Mann Easter eggs—four, if you count the entire premise of the novel.

Lázár begins with the birth of Lajos, a ‘translucent child’, in the family’s countryside manor at the ‘dying’ end of the 19th century, and moves impressionistically through the political and familial tumult of the next 50-odd years: ‘For Lajos, the end of the Monarchy was the only logical outcome; he had always regarded the physical and mental decay of his father as its embodiment.’ The narration flits between characters major and minor; in one especially odd moment, the perspective shifts to Stalin.

Ultimately, the novel reads like a lightly fictionalized amalgam of family legends, and Biedermann seems hampered by his episodic structure. We don’t spend enough time with any single character for emotional stakes to be realized or motives to be interrogated—or really even established. This effect is perhaps intended to tell a story of history happening to a family, its members making no decisions of their own. But more likely is that Biedermann is just too green and too close to his material to really analyze his characters. This becomes crystal clear when the Lázárs are faced with the reality of the Holocaust: as an adult, Lajos’ complicity in the ghettoization and deportation of Jews becomes little more than a vague sense of guilt. Biedermann goes no further; there is no actual reckoning with his relative’s role, and the lack of emotional depth here and elsewhere trivializes the horrors the family faces at the end of the war.

Biedermann’s family history undoubtedly contains elements one might call “novelistic,” but his version of them could have used a deeper treatment—and perhaps a few more drafts. - Nora Biette-Timmons

Hot Sauce

This month’s edition comes out of our Pan-European Gossip Correspondent’s recent residency at the Limerick Writers’ Centre.

A Berliner once drove to Hyères
and there she hooked up with an heir
But she wrote autofiction,
which created some friction:
soon there may be an end to the affair.

An expat got banned from the Stabi
(for flirting too much in the lobby).
“What’s a fellow to do?
Deutschland’s rules got me blue!”
Now he’s living it up in Abu Dhabi.

An Angelus’ stuff is still hot,
so we took a quick look at the lot
Re: mechanical reproduction,
he had some real gumption,
because all were the work of a bot!

– Marguerite McEnnedy

Got some more sauce for us? Shoot Marguerite a tip at theauflauf@substack.com.

Jane’s Day

Katy Derbyshire

Four months into her stay in Berlin, she’s got used to being an au pair. Jane’s German is improving, she’s found a routine: make coffee for the parents, lay the breakfast table, slice firm brown bread in the special machine, dress the baby while the dad drives the two older kids to school, make the kids’ beds, followed by a laboured conversation with Frau Kuczinski, the cleaner from the East, whose accent she has trouble penetrating. Put the baby in the buggy to pick up some shopping—make sure to leave the receipt and the change on the table—then make lunch for the kids, home from school by one, from the small subset of dishes she can cook and they will eat: fish fingers, frozen potato cakes with apple sauce from a jar, pasta, pancakes. Put the baby down for a nap, clean up the kitchen while supervising the kids’ homework, then release them into the garden or the playroom. Tidy up some more so Frau Kuczinski doesn’t complain she’s making extra work for her, keep the baby busy until the mother comes home, and then she’s free to go to her language class at four thirty.

But oh, that time with the baby. The baby’s a toddler really, but she still has those chubby wrists and the waddle. She can point to her nose on command, and her knees and her feet. Eyes and ears are more difficult. Jane and Frau Kuczinski are potty-training her, on the mother’s instructions. It’s one of those long Berlin summers, so the baby can roll around the garden naked and pot-bellied, succumbing to a nappy for her lie-down after lunch. A picture book read in halting German, snuggled together on the rocking chair in the baby’s room, eyelids drooping, time slowing, then she lets Jane put her down in the cot. The babyphone is on while Jane wipes the table, sweeps up the dropped food underneath it, scrapes the plates and loads the dishwasher.

The boy is still struggling with his numbers; Jane helps him to write his 4s the right way round. The girl is supposed to draw a dog, which she attempts in deep concentration, chewing her bottom lip. It gets a collar and a lead, making it more recognisable as canine, but the ears won’t work out. They’re either too big or too small, requiring much rubbing out and blowing of wormy eraser crumbs across the table, then all the pencils need sharpening, and then Jane has to wipe the table down again. Now the boy wants the sharpener, but the girl refuses, and Jane points out that he has one of his own. At which he starts sharpening the rainbow of pencils strapped into his pencil case, glad of the distraction.

The boy and girl are squabbling over elbow space as the babyphone crackles to life. The usual disgruntled cries, and then a word: Shane. All three of them freeze: What did the baby say?

Frau Kuczinsky bustles into the kitchen. The baby’s calling your name, Dschähn. Better go and get her up.

Jane sends the kids outside to play, then rushes to the baby. By now the call has risen to a wail: Shääää-aaane. Jane slips into the room and discovers the baby standing up in her cot, gripping the bars like a Pentonville prisoner, a picture of rage. Shane! A reprimand still. Then her scowl lifts, her arms rise, her face fills with light. Shane! Now in a tone of joy. And Jane scoops up the baby, swings her out of the cot and around in a wide, wide circle, prompting chuckles and smiles. You said my name!

In the garden, they play at naming people. What’s your brother’s name? What’s your sister’s name? What’s your name? And what’s my name? They play it many times over, and every time the baby says Shane she gets a hug, or a tickle, or a kiss. The baby bakes cakes in the sandpit, holds them out for Jane to eat. Shane! For me? Danke schön! They play peek-a-boo, each reveal eliciting a Shane!

And then it’s over. The mother arrives home, and the baby’s face lights up and she toddles towards her with a delighted Mama and gets picked up and carried inside, and Jane is free to go to her language class at four thirty.

I Am Its

Roxie Perkins

This isn’t my plant, but this is my favorite plant out of all the plants that aren’t mine. I don’t know its name. This plant eats sunshine like it owned it, and wiggles in the air like it was made of it, and when its leaves are new they are thin and shiny and react to everything: a spritz, a pat, a cloudy day—and when they are old they harden and never notice my spritzes, my pats, my cloudy days, and I don’t want to be like that—that’s not why I like this plant—that sucks—some kids are soft and stupid and not just on Spring Break—and some old people have to harden and shut down when their world ends. I’m sorry. I’m not judging the plant—or anyone—but especially not the plant for having soft, young leaves and hard, old leaves. That’s insane. It’s not even my plant—Mandy trusted me. She trusted me to take care of her plants so that we could stay here, and to be honest, when she said we could stay at her place while her roommate was quarantining in New York and she was hiding at her boyfriend’s parents’ mansion in the hills, I thought she was joking. Not about the mansion—I knew that his parents had a mansion—though I do have questions about it—but about the plants. Mattering. Or not mattering, but, I guess, like—thinking of plants as actual THINGS that need care like a kid, or an old person—I just. Yeah. I didn’t. Think of them that way. Before. But after the bomb I was grateful for anywhere to stay that had enough space for two, so we’re here now.

My girlfriend doesn’t take care of the plants. I point out new leaves to her and she smiles—but I know she’d rather sit at the window and watch the masked neighbors take their dogs on walks every day before curfew. I prefer it inside with the plants. And not cause it’s calm or, like, some stupid home catalog shit, but ‘cus they are fighting, and trying not to outgrow their pots, too.

This isn’t my plant, but this is my favorite plant out of all the plants that aren’t mine. I don’t know its name. The first day I called it Roberta. Second day: Shaw. Third day: Kissy.

Fourth: Gorf. Fifth: Windslit. Sixth: Chad. Brad. Mad. Bad. Bad. Bad.

Last night I couldn’t take it any longer. Careful not to wake my girlfriend, I snuck out of bed and crawled—buckling inside my own skin—clammy with thirst and sweat—pulling myself—hands and knees—down, down, down the hall to ask the plant its name.

In the dark living room, I could almost hear the plants breathing around me. Please, I whispered—I know you aren’t mine—but I can’t keep loving you and not know who you are. Tell me what to call you. I lay on the floor beside the plant to show it that I was serious about my servitude.

On the cold floor the plant loomed above me, seemingly enraged by my forward question. Outside a siren squealed, and a car alarm sang, and a neighbor screamed in Russian at his wife—but the plant said nothing. I raised my fingers gently up its spine, said a prayer to the wilting leaves, leaned close and whispered to the dirt: help.

Suddenly leaves swayed, roots stirred—dirt on dirt—air in air—leaves to palm—stem to eye—rip—stretch—shoot—the plant stepped out of its pot like someone who hadn’t talked in many, many, many days. Silhouetted in the moonlight, the plant towered over me—no longer mine to care for, but mine to fear. It leaned close—closer—closer—eyelash to leaf—teeth to root—how easy it is to snap a bone when you think about it—closer—closer—you can’t call 911 if you aren’t a “you” anymore—closer—closer—what will my girlfriend think when she finds me here—alone—sweating—overtaken by dead earth—laying on the ground beside an empty pot—closer—closer—maybe the plant has no name—maybe it needs mine—maybe

Mandy knew what she was doing when she invited us here—closer—closer-

Suddenly the plant kneeled at my feet, whispered its name into the hole in the bottom of my sock, and sat back down in its tiny ceramic kingdom. There has never been a name so perfect in all the days of the world. But I’m no fucking snitch, so you can get bent if you think I’m telling. But I will tell you: this is my favorite plant—not because it is mine—but because I am its.

‘I Am Its’ was first published in “Theater Artists Making Theater With No Theater: Spring 2020,” a collection of works compiled by Sheila Callaghan, Kelly Miller, and Meg Miroshnik.

Stay updated on future Immer Schon events – and check out the texts inspired by previous events about Joseph Roth, Friederike Mayröcker, and Walter Benjamin – on their website.

To explain his approach to writing biography, Ken Krimstein, the New Yorker cartoonist and graphic novelist, offers an anecdote about Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt’s mentor. ‘When he introduced his philosophy class at Marburg University’, says Krimstein, ‘he said something along the lines of: “Hello, today we are going to study Aristotle. Aristotle was a man. He died. Okay, now let's talk about his ideas.”’ Krimstein happily declares that he does the opposite. He’s interested in how ideas emerge not simply in conversation with the history of philosophy, but with lived experience. ‘What you had for breakfast, the weather, you have a two-month-old baby—all of this affects you as much as some abstruse Wittgenstein tractate.’ It’s an approach that Krimstein has brought to bear across his three award-winning graphic novels, and which drew him to Berlin as a fellow of the American Academy in 2025. His debut, The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt (2018), has now been adapted to the Berlin stage, directed by Theresa Thomasberger at the Deutsches Theater. We spoke about the limits of a cartoonist’s knowledge, the challenges of translation across language and medium, and what Arendt might say to us now.

What we’re eating: chicken tikka and mango chutney (KK), boiled chicken and pickle (SIB)

What brought you to Hannah Arendt?

I have always wanted to try and tackle heavy subjects within the comics or graphic novel medium because I’m very interested in philosophy and history, and I think everyone else should be too! I felt it would be a really interesting challenge to use the tools of comics, which are humans—people, stories, a little bit of humor, the ability to break the fourth wall—to try and communicate a complex subject. One of my mentors in cartooning, the late great Sam Gross, said two things to me [when I was thinking about doing this project]. One: go for the heavy stuff. I found a lot of ideas [in this way] even when I was doing cartoons for The New Yorker. I’d pick up a medical journal and think ‘oh, wow, that’s weird’—and get an idea. And the second, and even more career-defining thing was ‘You’re a cartoonist, Ken. Cartoonists know everything.’

I was also fascinated by this person that, growing up in America, had always been in the ether. People kind of knew her—the ‘banality of evil’, things like totalitarianism—but no one really knew her. I was a history major and I studied philosophy, but I was especially curious about her creative process. I wanted to look at a philosopher as a creative person. Where do their ideas come from? The minute I scratched her biography, I found all these incredible connections to things that I’ve always been very interested in: whether it’s Weimar Germany, the Café Romanisches—which I didn’t even know about, but I was familiar with the people who were habitués there—New York City, Greenwich Village, the Cedar Tavern, the Upper West Side where I lived, or the University of Chicago, the area where I now live. And then as I dug into her ideas, I found them so challenging and so refreshing and so connected to her life journey. And then I thought, what an arc of life! From pre-World War I, when there were horses and carriages still running around, to after the Ramones started playing at CBGBs and Nixon had resigned.

As I was reading the book, I was wondering how you think about the relationship between image and text—in particular, how do you translate the difficult conceptual thought of Arendt into the world of cartoons?

The core of writing a biography, for me, is: who is the person—as much as we can ever know who a person is. So I had to figure that out, by reading and rereading and rereading. And then rereading again. Also, since she didn’t pass away that long ago, there were a lot of people around who knew her. I got to interview some people who studied with her and worked with her. I picked up little nuances in the life story that didn’t fit. When I find one of those, then I know that there’s something behind that. So those are the things that I’m trying to unravel.

But then it’s complicated. Her writing is all over the place. She prided herself on not being doctrinaire. She stood for that way of thinking that said, I don’t want to be ‘in any school that would have me’. I was studying Leo Strauss, a philosopher at the University of Chicago who supposedly dated her and was rejected. Strauss was completely opposite to her. He had a whole cadre of acolytes—you know, ‘light my cigarette’, ‘carry my briefcase’—which is how I think Heidegger might have been too. That was the thing [to do]. And she didn’t have that. She didn’t have a circle. So I had to figure out what her ‘North Star’ was, or the unifying principle that I could drive to in the narrative. For me it was her distinctive notion of thinking: thinking through, thinking without banisters, thinking as a dangerous activity. I kept coming back to that. Once I had that throughline, I had to ask myself: what in her life gave her that insight? And then the pictures just came [from there].

One image I found that was quite striking was that, when she was a little girl, the Great War—or World War I, as we call it—was happening right over her head. She would go out there and see airplanes. I mean, they didn’t even know what airplanes were. It was horrifying and scary to a little girl. So I had to show that. I had to put myself in the position of the people at the time. They didn’t call it World War I. They didn’t know there was going to be a World War II. They thought it was the Great War, the war to end all wars. They were being confronted by an industrial war and it was absolutely horrifying to them. This image popped into my head of her as a little girl with her mom in a field looking in the sky, seeing warplanes flying over them.

What do you think about the translation of your work? The German and French translations of the text, for example, choose not to go with a literal translation of The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, but instead make it into The Three Lives of Hannah Arendt. Is there something lost in that choice?

A very big, important part of her thinking is she’s very action-oriented. She’s like ‘action action action’, and it’s hard to think of a dramatic incident more action-driven than an escape. So I liked ‘escape’, but once I had come up with the hook, I had to deliver on it. It took me a long time.

I remember reading Aristotle’s Poetics, his book about the rhetoric of writing tragedies. Everything was a three-act structure. Three is a magic number. I had the first two that were very neat. The third one, which is the ultimate one… That took a while for me to figure out. The book has been translated now into something like 12 languages. I keep hearing about different countries, thank goodness, that keep translating it. And there are nuances in every language.

When the book was translated into German—and Hans Zischler did a beautiful job—there’s a German expression called ‘thinking through’ as in, ‘I need to think this through’, and all the Germans seem to know it [durchdenken]. But when it was translated into French, I got a call from the French translator. She said, ‘What does “thinking through” mean?’ She had no idea. There’s no such concept. And I make a little joke about translation in the book, when I compare the different ways that the word butterfly is said in German and in French. So, these kinds of nuances of language are very, very important.

Were you thinking about the possibilities for this to be staged or adapted as you wrote it? The text feels like it’s bursting with so much energy that it’s ready to enter into other mediums as well.

Well, I couldn’t really think about that when I was making it. Every medium has its own possibilities, which are often defined by its limitations. I [structured it as] a dramatic incident, which is [a narrative] where somebody has to slay a demon, or they’re flawed, or they have to learn, or they have to grow. I think that probably makes it feel like it could work on a stage. I was [already] thinking about it when the Deutsches Theater approached. It makes a lot of sense, because Hannah—and forgive me, I sometimes refer to her as Hannah, I know her so well—was very much about showing up in public space. I think she would be horrified by the anonymity of social media, where you could have a fake name and say fake stuff and have fake bots. Her philosophy is very much about performance, being face to face, mano a mano. And theater is like that. You’re in a room with human beings—in time. So I think the encounter with the experience is very fitting.

Having said that, if it were done in a film or a television show, it might be done differently, because those media have different powers. I liked the fact that—as opposed to a documentary film—in the book, you can have a narrative drive, but then you can also stop and go back and flip through the pages, or you can look at footnotes, or you can just go to Google. I like the fact that people can address the book in any way that they want.

How much are you involved in the process of adaptation?

I’m a creative artist. Theresa, the director, she’s a creative artist too. She’s a master of her medium—I do the best that I can. (laughs) I find that when you let people go, that’s when they do their best stuff. But I just wanted to give her as much of my understanding into who this person was and how she dealt with the world, because I felt that Theresa was responding [to it]. She’s a philosophy major too. I could say I’m just a cartoonist—or I could say, like Sam Gross, ‘I’m a cartoonist. I know everything.’ I wanted to make sure that we were on the same page and that we were trying to answer the same mysteries. And I felt that we were.

But when I started seeing some of the character design sketches and some of the ideas, my mind was just blown. I like comics because it’s kind of a bastard medium, and I think graphic narrative theater is too. It’s the vision. David Mamet, a Chicago guy who became a director, often says: On the stage it’s about the dialogue, but in the movies—and in cartoons—it’s also about the pictures. I think a good theater director knows how to use the limitations of the stage to spark the imagination. Theresa got the fundamental thing. I wanted to look at Hannah from the other end of the telescope, from the life to the ideas rather than, as typical, from the ideas down to the life. And I think theater at its best is about life.

You’ve now seen the play. Was there anything that it brought out about your work—or Arendt’s thought—that was surprising to you?

Seeing ‘Hannah’—or, spoiler alert, ‘Hannahs’—strutting and fretting, speaking German, alive, in Berlin: it gave me the chills. Not to mention the incredible performances. I was stunned, and delighted, that some of the things that I wrote and drew that made me laugh in my studio in Chicago made an audience full of people in her one-time home of Berlin laugh too. Writing a book is a very private performance—my words and pictures are at play in the mind of one person. When humans inhabit the tale in front of other humans, it sort of takes off into a new social, public realm—as Hannah might have said.

Obviously it’s been a wild time, geopolitically, close to your home, in Chicago and Minneapolis. What do you think Hannah Arendt would have made of what’s going on? There’s been a bit of an Arendt-naissance since the first Trump administration, but do you think there’s some aspect in her work (or her life and work) that’s been overlooked and that we should pay particular attention to right now?

She believed in people showing up and talking to each other and debating each other with respect and dignity. Dignity—the concept seems almost quaint, yet to her, it was so core. She would be horrified, I think, at the narrowing of political views: she always felt that politics and truth were always somewhat at odds. She was skeptical of government funnelling truths that suit them into the public discourse. One thing that really resonates now is her saying—and I paraphrase but it’s her meaning—‘the real danger of lying in politics isn’t that people believe the lies, it’s that they begin to believe in nothing at all.’ I think she’d be the first person to wish that all of her thinking on totalitarianism and evil would have been rendered obsolete by now, but, as she wasn’t prone to wishing, I think she’d realize that, alas, her thinking is still more than relevant.

The only possible good thing is that she might have cut down on her smoking, and that might have given her a few more years with us.

Die drei Leben der Hannah Arendt is currently on at the Deutsches Theater.

Gran Partita (Moist Books)
Matthew McDonald

This month, for the very first time, I read a book with one of those dancing tube guys on the cover. Matthew McDonald’s Gran Partita returns twice to the big purple character in question (‘an inflatable / dancing man / a.k.a. Tube Man / a.k.a. Air Spinner’), an unusual image but one surprisingly appropriate for the sensibility of the book. These poems are cheeky, gorgeous, strange; their speaker—a performer on the road—lets himself be tossed about in wind, shaken head to toe by vibrations, never quite in sync between his body and his breath. In other words: a poet.

McDonald, who was born in Australia, plays double bass for the Berlin Philharmonic; he is also founder of the online poetry journal berlin lit. Clearly he has many strings to his bow (sorry). Mixing high with low, lyrical with chatty, his excellent poems wander wisely between meditations on love and loss, classical musical history, scenes from the life of a traveling performer, and associative riffs driven on by language itself. Their tone is both tender and ironical, often lightened by moments of wry mockery and by intoxicating moments of equivalence or image: ‘Envy as the taste of lime // in the first mouth to taste lime.’ Or: ‘My eyes are small jacuzzis of news.’ Or: ‘Leaves drift onto my yoghurt / like pop-up ads for ad blockers.’

At the collection’s core, it seems, is the unsteady relationship between meaning and sound. There are vibrations, notes, and anagrams; one fine poem delves explicitly into the question of metaphor and music. Some poems are short, some essayistic. But the multipage poem sequences show McDonald at his best as he gathers up raw materials then varies them, inverts them, recombines them, transforms them. The title sequence, for instance, begins with Mozart and the mason jar: then it turns, and turns, and turns, and by the end, we’ve covered thousands of miles, and changed completely.

These are poems filled with feeling. They made me want to spruik them instantly. O Tube Man, o Air Spin Man, I would dance on the street dressed in purple all day if it made the people of Berlin buy your book. – AW

Worlds Apart (Moth Books)
Julia Franck, trans. Imogen Taylor

​​‘Had I never thought about writing about real life?’ This question confronts the narrator two-thirds of the way through Julia Franck’s autobiographical novel, Worlds Apart. The novel’s Julia is thirteen, living in her mother’s friend’s attic in West Berlin, and an avid diary writer. The friend, who knows the unique circumstances of Julia’s childhood—a precarious existence in East Berlin shuttling among foster families, her erratic actress mother, and her bohemian artist grandmother, followed by a radical transplantation with her mother and sisters to rural Schleswig-Holstein—offers Julia Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes as a model for her own writing. The thirteen-year-old Julia, though book mad, doesn’t read it, rejecting the very premise. ‘What would I want to write about any of that? Autobiographical writing—it seemed to me perverse.’

Thankfully Franck, now an acclaimed German novelist, has since reconsidered. Throughout her career, she’s mined her life and family history for novels like The Blindness of the Heart, which won the German Book Prize in 2007. But no novel is as deeply autobiographical as Worlds Apart, which, translated with evident industry and ingenuity by Berlin’s own Imogen Taylor, takes on Franck’s early years and the family history that shadowed them in minute detail—and in micronarratives. It’s a novel that has as much interest in plot as the narrator Julia has in John Updike novels (i.e., none). Its interest lies rather in people, in its characters, against whom Julia defines herself (finally a reason for autobiography!). As Franck writes on the novel’s first page: ‘In discovering others, we assert our individuality. I am the unknown. We are all in flux.’

And perhaps it is this flux that is Worlds Apart’s governing principle. For all the keenly-rendered characters and intriguing episodes, there’s something slippery, almost evanescent, about the novel’s account of Franck’s first two decades. The diaristic level of detail doesn’t ground the novel as it shifts unexpectedly across time, refusing an easily discernible rhythm or logic. Instead, the details that Franck notices only emphasize how this novel is her own idiosyncratic reality. Truly: ‘our stories, our perceptions, are often worlds apart.’ We might mourn such distance in politics—but in literature like this, that’s a good thing. – SIB

Hyper (Coffee House Press)
Agri Ismaïl

Agri Ismaïl’s debut novel Hyper opens with Rafiq Hardi Kermanj, the scion of a wealthy Iraqi Kurdish family, haggling for a radio in Tehran. It is the late 1970s and Rafiq, a founder of the Kurdish Communist Party, has just arrived in exile. His timing is terrible: the shopkeepers already sense change is coming and soon the family will be fleeing again, escaping the revolution.

They manage to reach Britain, where Rafiq and his long-suffering wife, Xezal, raise their children in poverty in the south London suburbs. Rafiq clings to emigré Kurdish politics, while Xezal grows bitter with the thankless task of keeping the family afloat. The novel then refocuses onto that family’s three children as they scatter across the great financial capitals of the 2010s—London, Dubai, New York—with Ismaïl leaping between both characters and literary modes. His fractured, frenetic style bombards the reader with information and overlapping narratives, slowly tracing a finer and finer picture of the family’s dissolution.

As Rafiq fades pathetically into depression after a forlorn and feeble fight for communism and a homeland, his children struggle to accommodate themselves to the forces of unrooted globalized hypercapitalism, unable to see any possibility beyond it. The eldest, Siver, winds up a stifled housewife to a rich Iraqi businessman in post-invasion Baghdad, but runs to Dubai with her young daughter when he announces plans to take a teenaged second wife. There, she scrapes out a living selling luxury designer handbags to expats. The middle brother, Mohammed, hustles his way into a finance job in post-crash London despite having no degree, unsure at any moment if he’s a charming dealmaker or starting to lose to the cutthroat, desperate competition. Laika, the youngest, embraces a hyperonline cynicism, making a fortune from a pointless meme app called ‘Money to Burn.’ He lives a bizarre, lonely existence housesitting a Manhattan penthouse, trying to create an algorithm to mimic Goldman Sachs trades while watching Occupy Wall Street protesters on the street below.

It’s a brilliant depiction of dislocation and alienation, and not just through the Kurdish experience of statelessness, oppression, struggle and exile. The siblings’ world is also one of relentless global capital flows, where Rafiq’s ideologies—Marxism, nationalism—seem ridiculous and frustratingly immaterial. For them, financial fortunes are all that matters; yet what makes and breaks those fortunes is also inscrutable, capricious and incoherent. It takes an immensely talented writer to draw us through all this material and keep the story humming with dramatic tension. Ismaïl delivers. – Bryn Stole

Hot Sauce

A particularly explosive scoop just in. Last month, the media lit up when a young Frenchman was checked into a hospital with a live WWI artillery shell shoved up his… But rumor has it that this is an initiation rite for a certain elite group of bro-dernists. All is NOT quiet on the Western Front… Remarque-able!

From Kent: A certain giant of Scandinavian literature stopped over at a country house belonging to a British writer of some repute. But sources say the visitor overstayed his welcome. Between relentless moaning over bad reviews, endless dwelling on every slight misfortune, and a fondness for daily vices, the visit—which lasted an astonishing and unappreciated five weeks—‘seemed to the family AGES!’ Talk about a Struggle…

A best-selling novelist, who publishes their books under a now famous pen-name, and whose identity has long been the source of fevered speculation, has finally been unmasked: The Auflauf can now EXCLUSIVELY reveal to its readers that this writer is a surprising figure, well-known in their own right: the notorious and impressive [REDACTED - Ed.] – Marguerite McEnnedy

Got some more sauce for us? Shoot Marguerite a tip at theauflauf@substack.com.

For this semi-regular feature, we will be texting our local colleagues, friends, and crushes to ask them a question real quick and then publishing the answers. Call this a round of short solos from the big band, or some sort of literary Meinungsforschung. To celebrate The Auflauf’s first month, we asked people (and each other) to nominate an all-time literary opening: be it for story, book, or poem.

Vijay Khurana (novelist and translator)

A good story opening: something riptidal, a sentence into a blind corner, a voice that demands a hearing. Donald Barthelme: I know you think I’m wasting my time. You’ve made that perfectly clear. But I’m conducting these very important lunar hostility studies.

Patrik Gräb (writer and cultural programmer)

Yesterday I flipped through Stefan Zweig’s Die Welt von Gestern, which my mother had taken from our bookshelf during a recent visit and left lying face down on the guest bed. I ended up reading a passage in which Zweig witnesses Emperor Karl I. leaving on a train after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in 1918.

Zweig’s memoir deals with the shock of one epoch ending, the absolute break with the past that was brought about by the Great War in 1914. So does my favourite book of all time: Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities – but it does so in a very different way. The famous opening is striking for its tone, evoking both the overwhelming scale of the cosmos and the banal predictabiliy of its laws. Musil’s composition seems to almost deny the book’s importance: in this grandest scheme of things, what is even a World War? The very Musilian tragic irony of starting the novel talking about the weather, about a beautiful day in August 1913, points to what makes this book so great: Musil is writing about the Vienna before 1914 not as belonging to a world of yesterday, but one that is entirely part of an exciting, chaotic, funny, stupid and unstoppable continuum leading to the catastrophic present that is his vantage point.

Tessa Sinclair Scott (poet)

1. Saga by Hannah Mettner

Saga
In the tradition of my people, I come to you
with a long and winding story that neither
starts at the beginning nor finishes at the end.
There is, however, a lot of middle, which is 
the way with all the best sandwiches. I mean
sagas.

2. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones)

“I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night.”

There’s nothing really to add.

Mathilde Montpetit (Auflauf)

“At beauty I have gazed so much / that my vision is filled with it” (Cavafy, trans. Daniel Mendelsohn).

Rebecca Rukeyser (novelist)

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns! The whole first part describes the aftermath of a flood in terms of an inventory of farm animals—ducks (happily swimming) pig (swimming in panic) hens (committed suicide because they were “depressed and hungry”) sitting hens (”they sat on their eggs in a black broody dream until they were covered in water.”) Subsequently, the entire village goes mad. She’s a genius. “It’s a bad thing for the sun to shine on a flood, it draws the dampness back to the sky.”

Alexander Wells (Auflauf)

The first lines of the first poem of Jorie Graham’s Sea Change, the first collection I ever fell in love with:

“One day: stronger wind than anyone expected. Stronger than
                                                             ever before in the recording
                                                             of such. Un-
natural says the news. Also the body says it. Which part of the body—I look
                                                            down, can
                                                            feel it, yes, don’t know…”

Alexander Lin (scholar)

The last chapter of the Decline and Fall opens with Gibbon elegantly paraphrasing the “melancholy picture” of the End of History glimpsed by Poggio Bracciolini from a deserted Capitoline Hill in early 15th century Rome; but I’d like to draw your attention to the footnote to this first sentence, where the English historian supplies the original Latin text of De varietate fortunae (On the Vicissitudes of Fortune):

“Consedimus in ipsis Tarpeiæ arcis ruinis, pone ingens portæ cuiusdam, ut puto, templi, marmoreum limen, plurimasque passim confractas columnas, unde magnâ ex parte prospectus urbis patet.” ([I’ll give it a try:] We sat among the ruins of the Tarpeian Arx, behind the enormous marble lintel of the gate of what I took to be some temple and everywhere endless crushed columns, whence the prospect of the greater part of the city opened.)

We perceive in this excerpt Gibbon’s “native capacity for choosing what is picturesque,” as Arnaldo Momigliano put it; his appropriation of the Florentine humanist’s act of hunkering down and gazing out to claim his own spot on the rock; and even the moment when he first caught sight of the ruinous prospect and arduous project to be written. (Poggio himself had made the effort of the climb up the Capitol in order to look through Virgil’s eyes and “invert his verse” (Ut quidem is uersus merito possit conuerti) on the founding, into the rotting, of Empire.) The last line of the labor of nearly two decades ends with the timestamp “Lausanne/ June 27, 1787” but glimpses the light, and hears the echoes, of its own beginnings: “In my Journal the place and moment of conception are recorded; the fifteenth of October 1764, in the close of evening, as I sat musing in the Church of the Zoccolanti or Franciscan friars, while they were singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter on the ruins of the Capitol” (from the Memoirs). Twenty years’ toil it may take to ascertain the precise time and place that will have motivated and justified all the work ahead, as though it were a battle worthy of the annals; but this moment, in all its awestruck sighing (suspirans stupentique similis) and semblance of effortless citation, would soon fade and peel off the wall, if it were not already under-painted and varnished with world-inverting nostalgia.

Sanders Isaac Bernstein (Auflauf)

“He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet” – Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

Errata

The recent release of certain emails has alerted the Editors that a number of statements in a report written by a freelance gossip reporter for The Auflauf are, or may be, false. The Editors apologize for these errors and assure our readers that we have cut ties with the reporter in question.

Tobias Ryan wants to gross you out, at least a little bit. In his novel, Glantz, recently published by Equus Press, the eponymous character roams the city, fascinating and disgusting the people that encounter him. ‘You prey on people’, Glantz’s sister says to him. Sometimes, the reader feels like another of his victims. Ryan—who is, along with Yanina Spizzirri, Editor-in-Chief of minor literature[s]—is explicit about his desire to unsettle his readers. We called him at his home in Paris to talk about relatability, intrusion, and a Berlin event to look forward to.

What we’re eating: cassoulet from the tin (TR), kimchi pancake (MM)

Congratulations. Has the book been a long time in the making?

I finished the manuscript in 2023, but this character had been on my mind for a long, long time in different variations, and in different guises. He had appeared there, and was being dealt with, for the better part of a decade. But I would say this version happened relatively quickly, once certain decisions had been made. And once this version was done, he stopped bothering me. That was why there had been so many versions before: he had hung around. But with this one, it felt like the story was done and so it was possible to move on.

Something that quickly becomes clear when you start reading the novel is that it’s written from an unsettling perspective—definitely not Glantz’s, but also not an omniscient, external voice. How would you describe this kind of consciousness?

Any time I’ve successfully completed a manuscript, regardless of whether it’s good or bad, the thing that allows me into it is a very clear sense of who the narrator is. There’s this kind of voice beyond, this external voice which is not my voice as Toby Ryan living in the world—and very often is not a voice from a character. It’s this other, external, thing. I think of it as a voice of literature. It’s a voice which says, ‘this scenario is the scenario of literature’, or, ‘we can make literature from this scenario’.

I’m sure you could say, ‘Well, if you read enough, you develop a fine sense of what a novel could look like, or be like, etc.’ But I’m not super interested in breaking it down in that much detail. I quite like the feeling that it has a mystical element to it, even if I don’t believe it’s mystical (laughs). I would like to say it’s like a thing that [Maurice] Blanchot does. I don’t feel very qualified to say this, but when I read him, I feel this same sense of, ‘This is not a human voice. This is a voice of, or from, literature.’

It sounds to me like part of what you’re interested in is a sense that that narrative voice, or that narrative consciousness, resists the reader a little bit.

Yeah, definitely. But maybe that’s a bit of just a reaction against how you sometimes see literature talked about, with this big focus on relatability, on sharing a digestible view of the world. That view of the world might be one that you haven’t experienced before, because it’s coming from a perspective you haven’t known, but the idea is that there is something about it which is integratable. I think an element of estrangement is more satisfying. I like to read a book and be like, ‘Where the fuck has this come from?’

I love Gabrielle Wittkop; I think she’s maybe one of my all-time favorite authors. I met someone who had known her and worked with her, and I expressed that feeling: that when I first read The Necrophiliac, I was kind of like, ‘Jesus, how do you do this? How do you come up with this?’ And this really lovely person was like, ‘Well, you know, she was influenced by X, and she had read Y, and she wanted to do Z…’ (laughs)

For me, there has to be something which is not just the sum total of these identifiable elements. And so writing is the attempt to locate that thing. It’s following the feeling of being always just a little out of your depth, or a little unsure. To sound like a twat, maybe it’s like writing towards something rather than writing from something. That sounds awful (laughs). But there’s that part of it: estrangement, seeking out the estrangement in the writing, seeking out the estrangement in the sensation of relationship. Fundamentally, I don’t understand anything about life or other people. So how do you replicate a feeling in a way that doesn’t seek to make it relatable? How do you enact it instead?

Glantz the character is in fact almost aggressively unrelatable to the average reader: he’s old, he’s gross, he’s possibly a sex pest and at the very least cruel to animals…

Part of my interest with this thing from the beginning was—this sounds gross—intrusion. The idea of being forced into the company of someone who has no redeemable qualities. This thing has intruded into your life, and you have to deal with that now. How you deal with it is going to weigh on you, but not dealing with it will weigh on you more. And I think if there was any mitigation of his relatability or likability, it would give you an out. You would be able to say, ‘Okay, well, I can frame it like this, I can put it in this box. He’s a terrible person, but he had a traumatic childhood’, or whatever way that people can find to justify it. But no, he just exists now, and he’s awful, and now you deal with it. I dealt with it for ten years—now someone else can have it.

He’s also a landlord.

Yes. He is most at ease in places where he shouldn’t be. His perversion is that although he is unable to relate to the people around him, put him in someone else’s bedroom, and he’s suddenly relaxed and just being himself.

And he’s very religious, though not in the way we might like. That aspect of him would be redeeming, at least for your sake, because confession is such a narratological hack. But you foreclose that—we never actually get to hear him confess.

In early attempts at writing a novel, I would always have a scene with a therapist or in a confessional where a character could sit and talk about stuff. It’s a very handy, if blunt, narrative tool. But one of the main impulses behind the whole thing was to figure out how to write a novel where there is zero, or as close to zero, interiority as possible. And that decision affected so much about what happened. Down to the sentence structure: all the would-bes, would-haves. ‘He would have been able to hear it.’ That’s all come from that desire to not give Glantz’s interiority away.

We really only get clues to his interiority from this extremely abundant detail we have about his exteriority…

Part of the importance of him being huge is that he’s so visible. He’s very seen. He would love to be invisible in the world. Hiding in the rocks, just poking his head out. But he’s this fucking huge guy that imposes himself regardless of whether he wants to or not. His visibility is what makes him so disturbing for people. They don’t know who this guy is, but they see him everywhere.

And we end up seeing too much, especially of Glantz’s body. It means that this is a gross book. Glantz is gross. The world around him is gross. Why make art about disgust?

I think people are disgusting (laughs). No. I mean, there is a little dirty part of me that’s got this edgelord stuff in it. I want to push buttons—or rather, to be someone who feels they’re strong enough to confront all that. Daft ego stuff. But then a lot of the more disgusting stuff just arrived as I was writing.

The first emergence of Glantz as a thing in my mind was a long time ago. But it was really over the pandemic, and especially during lockdown, that the thoughts of him started occurring more pressingly. At the time, I was being influenced by fin-de-siècle visual arts: Léon Spilliaert, Odilon Redon, Félicien Rops… That type of decadence was really pressing in on me, going through various degrees of refinement or distillation. So whereas this is a relatively realistic novel, the compost was all this more extreme, disturbing, or perverse visual art. More than any particular writing, I would say.

I want to talk about the setting, which feels at once very specific but also placeless. Glantz and almost everybody else have Germanic names, but then you refer to ‘arrondissements’, then they’re eating English breakfasts and speaking to each other in quite British cadences. What sort of place, or non-place, or half-place is this?

For me, it was very important, or very desirable, that it felt like a European book. All my life, the idea of a European intelligentsia—of someone like a Beckett—was always very aspirational. For instance, there’s a series of novels, ‘The Kingdom’, by the Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares. He’s writing in Lisbon, but when you read them, it’s just a European city. We recognize it’s European from the atmosphere and all the signifiers, but it is undefined by precise cultural references. And that was something that I aspired to. There was an earlier draft of this book where it was more intentionally not Paris. It was just a dilapidated post-colonial European capital. But I wasn’t committed to developing a fantasy city, so…

I live in a very grand apartment building. The apartments cost millions, but I’m in the attic in this dinky little hole. These substrata of experiences in the city, the presence of poverty, especially in comparison… Well, it’s a very European experience, I think. I had an experience years ago living in Chile, where I found that I missed Europe, but I didn’t really know what that meant. There’s a frequency to Europe that I missed over there: this historical feeling, this quite dark, shadowy resonance. Those fin-de-siècle artworks have that. The word in French is glaque: a kind of sleazy, grimy darkness.

Yeah. One of the things that I quite like about European cities—many, not all—is that sort of post-colonial, ‘our brightest days are behind us’ feeling.

Well, that’s exactly it. ‘Best days are behind us’ is one way to put it, but ‘the rot has set in’ is the other. It’s also… I wasn’t thinking this at the time, but so much of this is a pandemic book, a lockdown book. We had a curfew here, where nothing was open except supermarkets. No restaurants, no cafés. So there was this very heavy sense of being in the place where you wanted to live your life, but it’s not here anymore. There are police around who will pull you up. I have the fortune to live in a place where that was not too pressing, but if you were living in poorer neighborhoods, or in the banlieues, they weren’t fucking around. As is the structure of these places in Europe, and in France especially.

There was this definite sense that the best days are behind, the rot’s set in, there’s repression occurring. Something is being enforced, something that is anti-life, anti-community, anti-sociability, anti-solidarity… And that’s just France, I think. It’s gotten worse since the book was written. The world opened up, post-COVID, but repressive tactics are never far away. Everything to do with Palestine and the protests. There’s an LGBT+ bookshop, Violette and Co., that has been attacked multiple times by right-wing thugs. This week [on 19 January], the police arrived to search for copies of a pro-Palestine children’s coloring book. So, it’s under the surface, but not far under the surface. And I think that’s the post-empire, post-whatever, post-post society that we’re in.

The quote-unquote nationality of the book was unsettled in its language as much as its setting. If I can quote you to you, there’s a sentence that I highlighted in the prologue.

He stoops leaning, peering into the middle of his hands, searching, perhaps, from habit, maybe, orienting himself towards some barely scrutable unknown, in perhaps, a prayer, slipping and wished, drawn or poured, spilt there. whose presence, nonetheless, he is invested; some form, perhaps, some expression, cupped there, his breath now also held there, a mutter perhaps, a prayer, slipping in wish, drawn or poured, spilt there.

Which is a wonderful sentence that feels quite French to me in its rhythm and its mode. Was that an intentional effect, or do you think it follows on from your reading, your life in Paris, your life in French?

It’s partly a combination of all those things. Taste, influence… But I’ve also been here a long time. Fourteen years now, this year. And although I was always or mostly reading in English for the majority of that, I was also separate from everything that was going on in the UK and Ireland. I had a decent ten years of just being left to my own devices, and I think that the payoff of that is that feeling exists of having unclear origins.

The other part of it is that, for me, writing is a transcription of something that I’m hearing. It’s not me. It’s just how this voice speaks to me. It’s so wanky (laughs), it’s ridiculous, but that’s what the thing was saying. I don’t think it would take a huge amount of effort to be like, ‘Okay, well, you read this, and you read this, and you read this, and you triangulate, and blah blah blah.’ But I was never very interested in doing that kind of excavation work. I’m just happy to consume a lot of stuff: I’m going to digest it, and stuff’s going to come out. It’s all just going to be in there.

Do you feel like your work with minor literature[s] affected the language or shape of the novel?

Getting involved with writing people has been really great. Like I said, I had ten years of just doing my own thing, so obviously it’s a huge benefit to be mixing with people, seeing stuff that I wouldn’t have seen if I hadn’t been involved with it. In terms of actual writing influence… Not to be a prick, but just being on the receiving end of submissions is very instructive, to see why things work and why things don’t work. The difference between reading a submission where you feel like the voice is strong, and when it’s not, it’s a very indefinable quality, but you know it immediately. So that’s clarifying.

Do you guys have anything exciting coming up?

Always. We’ve just announced that we’re adding a music and sound section, which will be run by the composer and musicologist Max Ardito, who’s here in Paris. That’s really exciting, just because it opens up a whole new range of possibilities for what we can do.

And then in late September, we’re hoping to come to Berlin. We did ‘Minor Incident’ in Paris in 2024, and the goal is to have these Minor Incident events all over. Our next target is Berlin. In Paris, our topic was the avant-garde. Finding a topic for Berlin is still under discussion, but we’ve been thinking about the topic of contemporary bohemianism. Berlin would be an interesting place to talk about that, because it’s been so famous-slash-infamously the place where that had been happening for a solid… twenty years, I guess?

I mean, it depends on who you ask (laughs).

The goal would be to have some readings and have a panel with people who know the place, and who can give us a perspective on it, and possible futures. So a bit tentative, but this can serve as the official announcement of a minor literature[s] event in late September in Berlin.

Eiscafé Europa (Hela Press)
Enis Maci, trans. Damien Laing

When Eiscafé Europa came out in Germany in 2018, it was a rare object of critical consensus, garnering praise across the political spectrum. Playing with confession and collage, and coupling critical investigation with theatrical gesture, Enis Maci’s debut essay collection offered German readers not simply analysis of the internet-riddled contemporary, but engagement with its texture—a compelling representation of the environment where the writer had grown up and which the alt-right had learned to cultivate for its own power. Now, with the book finally available in English thanks to Damien Laing’s fine translation, one could almost think of it as a relic. For, as Maci herself acknowledges in the translation’s added postscript, ‘much of what’s described here had already disappeared by the time this book was published’. And Anglophone readers might not find anything formally here that they haven’t already encountered in the growing corpus of Internet literature, from Tao Lin through Patricia Lockwood. Still, one perceives an undeniably alive and unique intelligence attempting to trace the constellations and contradictions that still haunt our present.

If the book does not quite achieve Maci’s declared desire for novelty—to develop a literary equivalent of the theremin, that strange musical instrument of pure vibes—its essays do deftly capture the vertiginous, paradoxical diversity of a rising online fascist culture made up of (u.a.) makeup tutorials, hashtags, asylum seeker beatings, Tumblr, Bhagavad Gita citations, and CasaPound. In these seven highly associative roving essays, the voices of relatives, rappers, childhood friends, and writers swim together; metaphor turns unstable as Maci slips across lived experience, family history, translations and mistranslations, emails and search results, world literature and micro influencers as she reckons with the strange becoming of herself and the nation of which she became a naturalized citizen. Within this collapse of registers, Maci’s style and form insists on particulars—not necessarily as the only things one can hold onto, but the only way to conjure, for an aesthetic moment, the evanescent vibes felt by those who were once there then. – SIB

Woman in the Pillory (Penguin Classics)
Brigitte Reimann, trans. Lucy Jones

This novella’s title gives away its end: Kathrin Marten, an overworked and underappreciated farmwife, is on her way to a public shaming. It is World War II; her crime is love. Love for Alexei, the Russian POW who works on her farm—and maybe also love for a new society just glinting over the horizon…

Reimann’s Siblings, from 1963, made a splash in English translation a few years ago for its portrayal of a woman stuck between love for her brother and commitment to an increasingly shabby state socialism. That disenchantment seems only more poignant in contrast to the starry-eyed, girl-meets-boy-meets-tractor idealism of this earlier work, published in 1956 when she was only 23. Reimann was never a state artist, but here is socialist realism at a propagandistic pitch, suffused with an almost painful ideological earnestness. Before they first make love, Alexei and Kathrin sit together and discuss the future. ‘You say you’ve started to do everything differently in Russia’, Kathrin says to him, enviously. ‘You’ve collectivized your land, and have started to create a new kind of person. But we’re in Germany.’ Wait: could socialism be possible in Germany? When the war ends, Kathrin’s village lies destroyed. The last line of the novel: ‘We’ll have to start all over again.’ Auferstanden aus Ruinen!

Still, the novella’s sincerity is winning. Reimann conveys genuine horror at fascism’s justifications for violence on the battlefield and at home, without ever abandoning the possibility of redemption. I wouldn’t necessarily have expected Penguin Classics to be in the business of publishing GDR propaganda—but then why not? All that mid-century Iowa Writers’ Workshop stuff is still on the shelves. – MM

A Scandal in Königsberg (Penguin Press)
Christopher Clark

In 1835, two Lutheran ministers in the sleepy city of Königsberg found themselves at the center of a salacious headline-grabbing scandal: the two were accused of leading a sexually deviant and subversive sect inspired by the theosophical teachings of an eccentric poet-preacher. According to shocking accounts from embittered former members, their cult included strange sexual initiation rituals and free love—and had even caused two young women to die from ‘excessive sexual arousal’.

This minor historical episode is taken up by star Cambridge historian Christopher Clark, who packs a lot into a slim book of some 150 pages. Clark deftly paints a picture of provincial Königsberg (now Russian Kaliningrad) and the intersecting upheavals that set the stage for the scandal: Post-Napoleonic ferment, consolidating Prussian state power, shifting gender politics, Kantian rationalism versus religious revival. Strange theological currents also play a role—like the influence of Johann Heinrich Schönherr, whose pseudoscientific inquiries supposedly showed that God created the world from two giant primordial eggs, one of light and the other water, that embodied the twinned energies of male and female.

Clark, best known for his authoritative works on far broader topics, stumbled upon the case while digging through Prussian archives in Berlin in the 1990s. As he explains in his foreword, he returns to it now because the story—of a purportedly impartial, progressive and liberal state apparatus latching onto ludicrous allegations—seems freshly relevant in our era of fake news and deranged politics. This angle has been picked up by more excitable reviewers, with the FT honking that the book ‘has as much to say about our own time as it does about 1830s Königsberg’.

Beyond some broad thematic resonances, however, there is a limit to the contemporary insight gleanable from an obscure church scandal from nearly two centuries ago in a place that no longer exists. The author himself is too diligent an historian to push the parallels too far, and as microhistories go, A Scandal in Königsberg is brilliantly done: a short and lively volume that uses a single obscure event to tug at the many animating threads of Prussian society. Just don’t go seeking the key to MAGA here. – Bryn Stole

Hot Sauce

Sources in Poland are telling us a famous autofictioneer has been caught in an embarrassing on-tour vape explosion debacle … Schadenfreude much? The giveaway is in the text, of course.

Meanwhile, rumours of adultery continue to follow a certain well-known London Kleist scholar. We all knew the Colonel was keen as mustard—but with a candlestick, really? And in the library?

One last morsel comes express from Brussels. Look: it’s one thing to plagiarize a personal essay. But an amorous sonnet must be all your own work. No wonder this poet is well known for waffle—well-sauced, perhaps, but still waffle. – Aubergine Fritz

Got some more sauce for us? Shoot Aubergine a tip at theauflauf@substack.com.