Has life become a forgery?
Rüdiger Stolzenburg, 59 years old, has been working as a part-time adjunct at a cultural studies institute for the past fifteen years. His career is flatlining, and on his meagre salary he can barely make ends meet. He is a prototypical member of the academic precariat. Stolzenburg is working on an edition of the complete works of Friedrich Wilhelm Weiskern, an 18th century Viennese actor, librettist and cartographer, but he has been unable to find anyone willing to fund or publish this work. On top of all that, the supposedly sensational new material discovered among Weiskern’s papers turns out to be a forgery.
When an additional tax claim from the government threatens to ruin him, Rüdiger Stolzenburg suddenly realises how precarious it all is: the world, the economy, politics, relationships. Everything falls apart, erupts into violence, and for the most part there is nothing behind the hollow façade. In Rüdiger Stolzenburg, Christoph Hein has created a character who reflects all the symptomatic perils facing our society and our civilisation here at the end of the first decade of the 21st Century. Hein has succeeded in producing a highly relevant, realistic, and finely crafted social novel for the age.
»Weiskerns Nachlass is classic Hein. In a case study at once social and psychological, the reader experiences the protagonist’s bewilderment at contemporary society and anguish as he recalls incidents from his past that have led to his current plight. […] Hein’s work have consistently achieved wide appeal, and this novel also turn a mirror on some universal aspects of European societies: ageing, the crisis of higher education, the plight of older people, rising street violence, generation gaps, and the marginalization of literature in the digital age.« New Books in German
»Christoph Hein’s new book is probably the most distinct novel of the season.« Judith von Sternburg, Berliner Zeitung
»Christoph Hein’s reputation as an incorruptible commentator of our times has been reinforced with Weiskerns Nachlass. […] It celebrates the renaissance for the Leitmotif, a perfection of form, as is the book as a whole.« Katrin Hillgruber, Tagesspiegel
»Weiskerns Nachlass seems to be the artistic unification of dramatist and prose author Christoph Hein’s hitherto separate fields of literary work. […] Christoph Hein has published a finely constructed, finely balanced and cunning novel, exploring the forms of realistic narrative in new ways.« Christian Metz, FAZ
»A social novel with verve and anger.« Janina Fleischer, Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten
»Weiskerns Nachlass is not only entertaining in its laconic descriptions of our social status quo; it is also extremely unsettling.« Jürgen Kanold, Südwestpresse
Christoph Hein, born in 1944, lives in Berlin. He is the author of novels, novellas, short stories, plays, essays and children’s books. His most recent novels were on the Spiegel bestseller list for weeks. His most recent awards include the 2019 Prix du Meilleur livre étranger (for Glückskind mit Vater), the 2019 Samuel Bogumił Linde Prize and the 2017 Grimmelshausen Prize.
Christoph Hein, born in 1944, lives in Berlin. He is the author of novels, novellas, short stories, plays, essays and children’s books. His...
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A brilliant chronicle of the lives of two families in 20th century Germany and Russia. The futile hope for an existence beyond misery and slavery. Encompassing an entire century, reflecting an entire century.
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Leipzig 1968: Historian Dallow is released from prison after twenty-one months. His crime: He filled in as a piano player at a student cabaret and the text that he was asked to accompany with a...
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Thomas was almost a child still at the time, but he remembers the events in sleepy bad Guldenberg in the summer of 1957 very well: how he started working for the gypsies and was punished for it by...
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