hello nobody

In a red Audi A6, our hero sets out opn a trip from Austria to Germany to become the federal chancellor. He pauses at autobahn rest stops and in Penny parking lots, ends up at left-wing and right-wing protests, parks in front of the Bundestag, at a circus ground, and ends up in a police interrogation room. On the different legs of his journey, he encounters bizarre characters that suggest an apocalyptic future, meets priests and rabbis, God and his wrathful Jewish counterpart G-d, and familiar figures from German politics, like Gregor Gysi, Olaf Scholz, and Alice Weidel. In breakneck scenes and dialogues, always carried along by his faithuful red Audi, ever waiting with its motor running, he explores his identity, his faith, and his sexuality, which he always places in the context of current political relations.

Yevgeniy Breyger’s book-length narrative poem hello nobody is a humorous political satire and at the same time a serious interrogation of urgent questions relating to the damaged nature of the body and spirit in times of war and a totalitarian straitjacketing of reality. The stops along this road trip fit together to form a panorama of Germany, and unlike Odysseus, who called himself Nobody to deceive the Cyclops, the name Nobody is forced on our hero – applied whether he likes it or not.