Deutscharbeit - Trilogie

DEUTSCHARBEIT - Trilogy

Two new novels are in the works:

DEUTSCHARBEIT

Volume 2: Experimentelle Zeit (Novel)

Volume 3: Feind ist, wer anders denkt (Novel)

No one knows exactly when a person begins to ask questions. Questions about their origins and family, about this Germany that divided itself during their childhood, rearmed, and reunited in 1989. My first volume of the trilogy "Deutscharbeit – Mein Leben als Sohn" dealt with the post-war period from 1945 to 1968.

DEUTSCHARBEIT Volume 2:

In the second volume of my German thesis, subtitled "Experimentelle Zeit", I now recount my own life and whirlwind love in a time that reflects the central promise of peace, reconciliation, prosperity, and economic growth. This time forms the engine for the founding and expansion of the European Union and the foundation of German reunification. We are somebody again. But who?

In an autofictional family history, I write about navigating the thicket of young life in the late 1960s up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Life teems with extravagant behaviors and society's fear of abandoning old role models and embracing new ideas. My life as a young adult begins with the realization that societal norms are not permanent, laws are subject to change, and life requires courage and love for others—for the new and the unfamiliar. My subject is the love story and life story of the transformative years from 1968 to 1989: I tell of student protests, enlightening LSD trips, and the liberating struggle for housing, and how the greatest fear and hardship can forge bonds and how the upheavals of the time are reflected in people's hearts. Aesthetically new forms of demonstration and my own undogmatic protest in my poems and radio plays characterize this era of playful guerrilla action. So too does the confrontation with the state apparatus. As a journalist and art curator, I was caught in a dragnet in Italy in the spring of 1978 and arrested on baseless charges, facing unwanted media attention. In Poland, I experienced new loves and encountered the Solidarity revolutionary movement during martial law. The turmoil of the times is reflected in the dramatic zigzags of my love life.

DEUTSCHARBEIT Volume 3:

The increasingly essayistic third volume, "Feind ist, wer anders denkt", recounts the period from 1989 to the present day and deals with the expression of egoistic personalities in East and West. Germans are not at peace with themselves. And what does it even mean to be German?

The fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification came at an inopportune time. They delayed the socio-ecological modernization of West Germany by many years, resulting in societal stagnation. The unification process was fraught with resentment and damaged lives, with the East constantly expected to adapt to the West. When the necessary modernization was finally implemented in 1998 under Gerhard Schröder, it met with fierce resistance in the form that would have been possible in the early 1990s.

A multifaceted retrospective on an era brimming with optimism and faith in the future, but also full of revealing contradictions. The nineties were not simply the joyful post-fall-of-the-Wall era, when the West felt victorious and "eternal peace" was proclaimed. A time when the European Union and NATO expanded eastward without a care, and irony and a hedonistic society triumphed as if the world were one giant Love Parade. For me, it is also a time of newfound love, this time not a temporary alliance. In terms of cultural policy, I am concerned with the failures of the bourgeois parties and established media amidst the simmering polarization in Germany, and with why the hopes of 1989 were not fulfilled, and why, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine—the end of "eternal peace"—Europe must abandon cherished and comfortable notions of a parasitic pacifism and reinvent itself strategically. For me, it is also a time of newfound love, this time not a temporary alliance. With the two new volumes “Experimental Time” and “The Enemy Is Whoever Thinks Differently”, I not only make my life tangible, but they are also “incidentally” a chronicle of the state of mind of the generations and a portrait of cultural-political change.

With the two new volumes “Experimentelle Zeit” and “Feind ist, wer anders denkt”, I not only make my life tangible, but they are also “incidentally” a chronicle of the state of mind of the generations and a portrait of cultural-political change.