»Dear Sonja,« David writes in these enlightening and desperate letters to a revered classmate from days long gone, »looking back isn’t always the best idea: Then the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the Lord out of the heavens. Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities—and also the vegetation in the land. But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.«
Nevertheless, he does look back:...
»Dear Sonja,« David writes in these enlightening and desperate letters to a revered classmate from days long gone, »looking back isn’t always the best idea: Then the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the Lord out of the heavens. Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities—and also the vegetation in the land. But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.«
Nevertheless, he does look back: long ago, in the »sticky Seventies«, Sonja wanted to know what he found fascinating about Heavy Metal, about zombie and porno movies and horror comic books. Now, in the letters, he goes way back, quotes atrocious things and finds a theoretical definition for the drastic, which is »the culture-industrial shape modern man’s ideal and his feared self-image takes when the social promises of modernity are not fulfilled…« But his explanation is driven by his own story: a broken home, his fixation on Sonja, experiences with drugs, a collapse.
No, love for the drastic is no game, says the author of the letters, and the love for Sonja, to whom he wishes to explain the drastic and the lucid, certainly isn’t either. How do the two belong together? In search of an answer, Dietmar Dath’s bold novelistic essay digs deep into the history of a youth.
Maybe there is a god after all. What if he doesn’t like us?
A German movie director flees from an exhausting love affair. His sister is suspected by the government of being a radical Islamist planning an attack. His best friend from childhood days is a priest fighting the devil. And a woman who knows all three of them, but is more than a mere human, opens the door to the...
Tomorrow, everything is going to be better: Since the Age of Enlightenment, this slogan identifies disciples of social progress, while those of the dark ages bark about how everything was better in the olden days. Some bank on science and technology to enhance freedom, wealth, education, and beauty, others on tradition, blood, land, family, fatherland, and other such ancestral chatter so that...
Dietmar Dath, »the most productive and most radical writer in Germany« (Thomas Lindemann, Die Welt) on the revolutionary democrat Rosa Luxemburg.
Denmark (Rosenkilde)
Turkey (Yazilama Yayinevi)
US paperback edition (DoppelHouse), Italy (Nero Editions), Serbia (VBZ), Turkey (Is Kültür)
Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: English world rights (Seagull)
Russia (Text)
»I only produce shit nowadays,« reads a diary entry by Arno Schmidt, meaning: journalistic texts for newspapers. Since 1990, Dietmar Dath has published heaps of – well: journalistic, satirical, and essayistic texts and by doing so has created his very own fan base.
Like very few others, he manages to connect Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Bourdieu, pop culture to...