I would like to start by asking you about your literary influences. Which writers have influenced you the most and what did you find particularly striking in the writing of each of these authors?
The writers who have influenced me the most, in alphabetical order, are Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Ferdinand Céline, Uwe Dick, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Eugen Gomringer, Andreas Gryphius, Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, Peter Handke, Isidore Isou, Ernst Jandl, Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, Stéphane Mallarmé, Friederike Mayröcker, Franz Mon, Herta Müller, Helga M. Novak, Rainer Maria Rilke, Oskar Pastior, Arno Schmidt, Claude Simon, Gertrude Stein, Robert Walser, Peter Weiss, Ror Wolf, and Virginia Woolf. I will not discuss all of the above in what follows; I have written essays about many of them. I have certainly left some out as well. If we are not talking only about fiction, others worth mentioning would include Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Roman Jakobson, Immanuel Kant, and Julia Kristeva.
I read Samuel Beckett’s complete works at an early age, studied his films and, whenever possible, attended performances of his plays. For me, he is by far the most important author, about whom I write essays time and again. I am interested in his life and work (James Knowlson’s biography is certainly the best), his linguistic aesthetics (as they evolved over time), his intermedia approach, and the rigorous, increasingly conceptual genesis of his works. There is still a lot to be said on this subject — whenever I revisit his work, I am tempted to write an essay; from engagement with his texts, for instance, through close readings or from “replaying” the Beckett game, at least one aspect always emerges that can be connected to my own work.
With Peter Handke, it is, among other things, the vivid, ever-shifting flow of thought and the narrative voice that can put one into a trance. The periodisation and rhythmisation of his sentences make his prose vibrate; it hardly matters what he is saying, even the most banal observations of reality rise, in his work, into syntagmatic and intellectual, even mental architectures that I can wander through. Peter Handke also knows how to orchestrate the indeterminate, the merely atmospheric. I can recognise a text by Peter Handke after a single sentence. Handke’s texture is an interplay of word choice, theme–rheme structuring, and sentence periodisation. I always read him word by word, with the utmost attention.
What interests me about Franz Kafka is the simple language that creates such complex contexts, situated between a realistic setting and phantasmagorical efflorescences. I have to revisit his texts again and again. While reading, everything appears so vividly before one’s eyes, and yet it is all somehow transparent—until a detail crops up, perhaps just a monosyllable, that suddenly calls everything into question, renders it uncertain. Kafka creates an almost oppressive vividness that lingers in the brain like still images. I am interested in Kafka’s writing workshop, his writing process, the concealment of the mechanism, and his dissatisfaction with it, as in the case of the story In the Penal Colony. Kafka challenges me to write about him, to accompany my reading with writing. Most recently, I published an essay on the text In the Penal Colony and the alternative endings that Kafka ultimately rejected (in Kafka gelesen, S. Fischer 2024).
What fascinates me about Rainer Maria Rilke is his paradoxical thinking and rhythmic gestures, and the fact that the form of his poems often has a homologous effect on their semantic levels. Rilke wrote the most incredible line I know: “Die Vögel fliegen still durch uns hindurch.” (“The birds fly silently through us.”)
Claude Simon’s writing is opulent. Supposedly. He is a virtuoso of description. But for me, that is not what makes his books so fascinating. The construction of Les Géorgiques, for example, which reinvents history through documents presented by the narrator in the book, the intertwining of time levels, reading as part of fiction, reading and writing becoming a single act of creation: I could go on for pages about the distinctive features of Claude Simon’s writing style that appeal to me and were also important for Schattenfroh, such as metafictionality or the fact that a chronology of events cannot be reconstructed. Incidentally, Claude Simon is one of the names deliberately omitted from the integrated bibliography of Schattenfroh; these names and books are hidden in the inner crypt of the book.
The modular interlinking of her sentences into paragraphs, and of the paragraphs into textual blocks, which are in turn assembled into a complete text; the circling around, dismantling, and reassembling of facts, which through these manoeuvres often come into being in the first place, combined with a uniquely modulating aesthetic of repetition: all this drew me early on to Gertrude Stein’s texts. For me, she was always a miraculous antidote to the excess of realism.
It is the precision of his language, the sharply contoured imagery that captivates me about Peter Weiss, his command of language and the way he approaches his themes. It is a contoured style of writing, a language that completely draws me in. He achieved a kind of political writing that does not eliminate its aesthetic qualities. In this context, The Aesthetics of Resistance is especially important for my new book.
Virginia Woolf’s language is incredibly elegant. She practises admirable wave aesthetics and employs a language that glides through consciousness without marked breaks. Her handling of characters is truly unique. The narratological questions that underpin any act of reading — “Who speaks?” “Who sees?” — become highly relevant for my own writing when she addresses them. Is it perception that is being described, or consciousness? Where lies the difference between the two? Or is there none? These are the questions that, prompted by my reading of Virginia Woolf, accompanied me when I was writing Schattenfroh.
When did you first conceive the writing of Schattenfroh? Could you elaborate on the process of writing this novel from the inception to the moment you put down the final word. It must have been a wild ride.
I’ve lived in East Berlin since 2004. Whenever I talked with my neighbours about the GDR, the conversation on my part inevitably turned to the Stasi. I wanted to know what it feels like to live in a surveillance state. I wanted to know where the informers and the officials lived, who they were, how people treated them after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and how they are treated now. Most avoided the topic, ducked away, insulted me, or gave hardly any useful information. As a result, the Stasi became for me a mysterious phantom. According to the few explanations I received, it was always somewhere beyond reach. I imagined it might still be active, waiting for its next mission, just as there were indeed former members who kept the memory alive, met regularly, and were somewhat conspiratorial. For me, the Stasi became a secret society within society, working to undermine it. Of course, I knew that the facts were much more prosaic, much more sobering and, for those affected, naturally, also terrible. These fictionalised ideas that I developed soon intersected with an interest in the history of psychiatry in the GDR, which also had points of contact and overlaps with the Stasi. This led to the conception of a character who, partly inspired by Wolfgang Hilbig’s novel ‘I’, doesn’t know whether he is being observed and who, out of growing paranoia, “voluntarily” reports himself for surveillance. This character didn’t have a name yet. Was he perhaps just observing himself? I was preoccupied with the Stasi theme, but I didn’t want to write a Stasi novel; there were already enough of those. Nor did I want to write a Stasi-psychiatry novel. The focus of my novel now shifted to the GDR’s university hospital, the Charité, and its psychiatric facility. After reading a few books about the Charité, it became clear to me that it was not my theme either. However, the topic of psychiatry remained acute, and I was also preoccupied with the rather abstract question of what was imaginary, what was real and what was symbolic — a triad of concepts that had already occupied Lacan, who then put me on the right track. According to Lacan, we cannot capture the real in images or words; it resists symbolisation. The real constantly eludes us. For Lacan, it is “that which cannot be endured”: “The real is the impossible.” And, according to Lacan, it is, among other things, the compulsion to repeat. Nobody, as the character was soon called, – in reference to Homer, since my Nobody also has a colossal task to accomplish, and at the same time my Nobody was supposed to be the proverbial blank slate, a character without personality traits – develops symptoms which he himself (one could interpret it this way) collectively names “Schattenfroh”. It remains unclear whether he already has these symptoms when he arrives at the mysterious place where he finds himself in the beginning, or whether he only develops them there. In any case, a programme then runs, which is the written text. Schattenfroh as a non-figure is an axiom; he is unavoidable and can only be escaped if he withdraws himself, that is, if he dissolves. To achieve that, Nobody must thread his way through labyrinths of symptoms. This traversal takes place as an externalisation of memory contents that soon become real. It remains open whether this is experienced or imagined. In any case, that’s my interpretation, one of a series of further interpretations. Who Schattenfroh and Nobody are should remain as open as possible; the book should not provide any explanations in this regard, it should not be didactic. Someone is “thrown” into something, he has to act constantly, he is in imminent danger or he cannot know whether he is always in imminent danger, which intensifies his fear. The central question for me, or rather Nobody, was/is how Nodody can get rid of Schattenfroh. When writing, I wanted to surprise myself. I decided against a plot that could be reconstructed or retold, which gave me greater freedom in my writing on the one hand, but on the other hand, I had to make sure that digression remain manageable. So, Nobody goes on a journey, but whether only internally or “out in the world” is not clear. Where is the difference, and is a difference even important? First, I laid a trail for myself, with important waypoints that Nobody had to pass through, just like Odysseus; Homer’s Odyssey too is not arranged chronologically. Establishing the macrostructure allowed me not to write Schattenfroh straight through from beginning to end, but to proceed according to the principle of exhaustion and whim: as with reverse glass painting, the outline was there; now the surface had to be filled in. If a passage had stalled, lost its drive, I turned to another. The rule of writing was as simple as it was effective: don’t force anything. Of course, the narrative also led down paths that were not intended. This could be downright refreshing, as new connections opened up, but it could also create greater doubts as to whether I was losing control of the book — the fear that Nodody has all the time. The new connections gradually merged into a mycelium; the contours filled themselves with motifs and colours. From the outset, Schattenfroh implemented an immersive aesthetic: Nobody could enter images and participate in the life inside. In this way, he traversed time and (historical) spaces. In storytelling, all pasts are present at the same time. This ability is nothing other than the drift of inner imaginings, which also has no spatial or temporal boundaries. Therefore, an essential feature of Nobody’s journey is context-hopping. For each passage, I made a note with keywords, so that I always had an overview of the state of Schattenfroh affairs. In addition, I developed a kind of coordinate system from which the thematic connections between the passages also emerged. This initiated the next steps: which conclusions to draw, what needed to be expanded further, and what might already be too long and needed to be cut. There was no writer’s block; I always had confidence in my approach. I sat down to work every day and chipped away at it over the course of four years.
The Great Passage by Doris Ziegler, 1989-90 VG Bild-Kunst Bonn
How much of Michael Lentz is in Nobody?
The hermeneutic moment of empathy, of which Friedrich Schleiermacher speaks, was for me the main prerequisite for staying close to Nobody with every word. This proximity extended to physical sensation. Writing by hand the names of the people from Düren who were killed in the bombing raids was an ordeal that caused days of tension headaches. I actually put myself through what is threatened to Nobody in the book: whenever I made a spelling mistake, I started over from the beginning, and by the third attempt I was so focused on every letter that I was spared a fourth. I saw the world through Nobody’s eyes and thought at times that I only had to “copy it down.” Nobody never left me. At some point I even began to peruse my own daily life to see if my nonfictional experiences might be of interest to Nodody’s world; thus, Nobody grew into my own world, straddling both sides. That also made it easier for me to write the autofictional passages seamlessly. Nobody was the guide to whom I clung kinaesthetically. In Nobody, and consequently in Schattenfroh, my own family history is reflected, though in a more monstrous and exaggerated form. Family is the birth of fear. And fear invents narrative strategies. In this sense Schattenfroh is also a book about fear.
Schattenfroh is a character that is difficult to grasp. It is protean and omnipresent. It is treacherous, cruel, and tyrannical. For me, it is a non-trivial representation of Evil. What did you want to achieve by creating such an elusive character?
Schattenfroh is a menacing presence, a virus. It is a totalitarian non-figure, a delirious hybrid that does not appear in any “personal” form. In Schattenfroh it probably exists only in Nobody, just as the Devil in Doctor Faustus exists in Adrian Leverkühn, with the difference that Nobody erases Schattenfroh, whereas Adrian Leverkühn is consumed from within. He erases Schattenfroh in Schattenfroh, but not in us. As a non-figure that is difficult or even impossible to grasp, Schattenfroh becomes all the more threatening. In Doctor Faustus there are figural manifestations of the Devil; even though the Devil shows himself only to Adrian Leverkühn, his appearance and demeanour are described in detail. I found it compelling to give no description of Schattenfroh and yet make him omnipresent. I consider this approach more contemporary. Schattenfroh is the totalitarian principle, the totalitarian desire to possess and control the last vestiges of human individuality, the imaginary, the inner images that are not so individual after all, but predominantly collective, without invoking Carl Gustav Jung here.
Illustration for Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus by Sergey Chaikun. Image Source
There are two Bosches in your book, in a manner of speaking: Hieronymus Bosch and Werner Tübke, the so-called Bosch of the GDR. The main character’s journey is bookended by their visual worlds. What is the significance of either artist for you personally and your novel?
The paintings of Hieronymus Bosch have accompanied me since childhood, ever since I discovered a large volume with his art at my parents’ house. In his works something seems deliberately spread out, the individual motifs laid flat upon the surface of the canvas, or so it seemed to me. Everywhere across this surface, stories are being told. It teems with stories, like a wimmelbild [teeming picture]. The same is true of Werner Tübke: his panoramic painting Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany is a cylindrical 360-degree wimmelbild (123 by 14 metres). Schattenfroh is a wimmelbuch, a book teeming with images. Werner Tübke appropriated the motifs and painting techniques of the Old Masters such as Pieter Bruegel, Hieronymus Bosch, Lucas Cranach, Albrecht Dürer, and Matthias Grünewald. Schattenfroh undertakes a similar appropriation of these artists’ images. I have been deeply fascinated by the arrangement and unfolding of Tübke’s complex motifs and allegorical representations, and I still visit the Panorama Museum in Bad Frankenhausen regularly. The painting is not designed according to the central perspective. I quote myself from Innehaben: “The ‘tableau-like multiplicity of figures’ and the ‘centreless’, yet ‘flat, paratactic arrangement’ of the images ‘with a high horizon’ discredit the concept of the vanishing-point perspective. Werner Tübke called this perspective principle, which he applied in his panoramic painting Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany, a ‘raised horizon’. This arrangement concept is indebted to the rhetorical principle of accumulatio, which produces genuine Wimmelbilder. Even the mere contiguity of the episodic islands that Bosch integrated into his compositions, whose figures and situations he reconfigured and recombined from one work to another, creates a causal nexus between them, giving rise to a sense of action in the viewers’ eyes, even when the depicted events appear mysterious to them.” These aspects, among others, make the works of Hieronymus Bosch and Werner Tübke so appealing. For me, Bosch’s paintings also serve to dispel fear. His figures left an early impression upon me. Along with Paul Klee, he is the most important painter to me.
Interior of the Panorama Museum in Bad Frankenhausen
There are a lot of scenes in Schattenfroh that defy logic. They can be called surreal or oneiric or hallucinatory. What is your personal explanation for these numerous violations of the rational and the customary? What stands behind this approach?
Schattenfroh is not a realist novel, but it does contain realistic elements that can make it all the more threatening. The uncertainty of the question of where Schattenfroh, the novel, is set — in the interior world or the exterior world, or in both — which has always accompanied my writing, spawned from the outset the phantasmagorical deliria that I considered more fitting than a straightforward realism of representation. On the contrary, for me these deliria were realistic in the sense of representing fear. Literature can pass through walls. It can also enter consciousness. It can move between levels effortlessly.
Your novel is pervaded by anagrams. There are also many references to Kabbalah, which is known for the practice of permuting letters. Is there any deeper relation between the two in the context of Nobody’s quest?
Leonhard Beck, woodcut title illustration for the Latin translation of Joseph ben Abraham Gikatilla’s work Shaarei Ora (Gates of Light)
Yes, there are deeper relations The ideas of Kabbalah and Kabbalah as aesthetics are regulative principles for the construction of Schattenfroh. The model of the black and white script is fundamental to Schattenfroh, also with regard to the issue of how Nobody can free himself from Schattenfroh. I quote again from Innehaben: “Nobody can end the process of incessant observation and being observed only by abolishing the script, by gradually phasing it out. Withdrawal or disappearance can only be carried out within the medium of the text itself. Nobody develops strategies of a parallel text that is meant to enable him to think free from control. This parallel text is the white script of space, the empty spaces surrounding the letters. With the gradual disappearance of the black text of the novel Schattenfroh, whose fabric gets, in a sense, exposed to textual moth damage, the white script comes to the fore in a formative way, and Nobody believes that only he can read it. Thus Schattenfroh ties in with the Kabbalistic ideas of black and white scripts or black fire on white fire, in which the oral Torah (interpretation) corresponds to the black fire, and the written Torah (the transmitted holy text) to the white fire. Gershom Scholem attributes one of the most remarkable Kabbalistic fragments to Isaac the Blind, who remarks that the written Torah cannot ‘take physical form except through the power of the oral Torah.’ According to Scholem, only Moses has thus far penetrated this mystical written Torah, ‘which is actually still hidden in the invisible form of white light.’ The fragment suggests that there is ‘no written Torah at all,’ that what we call the written Torah has ‘itself already passed through the oral medium’ and ‘is no longer a form hidden in the white light, but has emerged from the black light, which sets boundaries and limitations, thus already expressing the nature of divine severity and judgment.’ Everything we perceive in the Torah in fixed form, written in ink on parchment, is ‘already interpretations, (…) more precise determinations of the hidden.’ Consequently, there is ‘only the oral Torah, that is the esoteric meaning of these words, but the written Torah is merely a mystical concept.’ The relevant passage in Schattenfroh reads as follows: ‘And thus, Mother says, is all that you write already pre-scribed, pre-thought, and pre-ceded, your book merely makes a pre-book visible, you make its white script black by writing over it, you move about atop a well-cultivated subsoil, the paths you go down have already been written.’”
Baroque poetry plays a major role in Schattenfroh. You refer to or quote some outstanding representatives of the German Baroque. You seem to be especially enamored by it. Was that the golden period of German literature for you?Is Schattenfroha Baroque novel at the end of the day?
Title page of Martin Opitz’s Buch von der Deutschen Poeterey, 1624
Schattenfroh is certainly not a Baroque novel; for that, it would have to be conditioned by the discipline of rhetoric that prevailed in the Baroque period. However, the idea is alluring in terms of the book’s thematic opulence. The striking feature of Baroque poetry lies in the fact that shortly after its founding act in 1624 (Martin Opitz: Buch von der Deutschen Poeterey), it developed into a defining high point of German literature in terms of its linguistic artistry and concetto. I have always been fascinated by the discipline of Baroque material, the happy combination of Formtrieb (form drive) and Stofftrieb (material drive) (Friedrich Schiller). What makes Baroque literature so appealing to me is its aesthetic of representation, with its inventive richness of poetic metaphors, and its somewhat playful use of forms and techniques, which, although being subjected to rhetorical discipline, always challenges, stretches and ultimately transcends the discipline’s demand for appropriateness (aptum). Exploring boundaries at every conceivable level was the writing game of Schattenfroh.
Is there, at least partially, a Faustian motif in the relationship between Nobody and Schattenfroh? Just like Mephistopheles, Schattenfroh confers to the main character the supernatural abilities that allow him to travel in space and time and see things no other mortal can witness.
That’s true. Yet one never knows, even to the very end, whether it is a case of autosuggestion. As readers, we are exposed to this Nobody. It is only through him that we know anything about the ominous Schattenfroh. The paradox of the book lies in its claim to be pure writing, without any intermediary, in the sense that what is perceived and imagined, experiential and fictional, is presented without mediation — that is, unshaped, one-to-one, in the immediacy of the present. Perhaps that is the “diabolical” pact. A crucial departure from the Faustian motif, however, lies in the fact that Schattenfroh ultimately fades away, at least as a name. What happens to Nobody after the end of the book we do not know.
The frontispiece from the 1620 edition of The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
James Joyce’s ideal reader is famously the reader “suffering from an ideal insomnia”. Who is the ideal reader of Schattenfroh? Were you ready for the fact that not a lot of people would be ready to dedicate the time and effort necessary for understanding the book?
Yes, I did not count on a large readership and I am quite content that there have been a few readers who have engaged deeply with Schattenfroh, including some in literary scholarship. This book does not fit into the contemporary German literary scene, which has its advantages and disadvantages. The advantage for me was that I had complete aesthetic freedom. The disadvantage for the publisher S. Fischer was that the book, to put it mildly, was not a bestseller. But both the publisher and the author knew that in advance. It is wonderful that such a book can still be published at all. On the one hand, the ideal reader is someone who knows my book better than I do myself. On the other hand, the so-called naive reader is the ideal one: he reads without preconceptions, untroubled, and is not disturbed by occasional incomprehension — in life one does not always understand everything, and reading is part of life. Taking things literally reveals wondrous networks of meaning that appeal to all the senses; it sparks the imagination directly. It allows for a kind of reading that feels almost tactile.
Were you surprised by the positive reception of the English version of your novel (tr. Max Lawton, ed. Matthias Friedrich) in the USA? Not just by the critics, but by common readers. There are group reads of Schattenfroh, discussions on social media, blogs dedicated to it, etc. Do you have your own explanation for that?
Yes, the reactions surprised me. Apparently, there is an audience in the United States that is more accustomed to books of such scope and complexity. Perhaps there is a different reading culture in the U.S., one that embraces the challenge and is curious to see what such a book has to offer. The fact that the novel doesn’t have a conventional plot doesn’t seem to discourage readers; it looks like many even welcome that. There also appears to be a more open attitude in the U.S., and, moreover, within the contemporary literary spectrum there seem to be some who have grown tired of the mainstreaming of literature, of its serial production devoid of distinctive authorial voice. The days when books with such aesthetics were published in Germany are long gone, with writers like Jean Paul and Arno Schmidt, for example, who were not exactly mainstream either. I do not follow social media, as I am not registered anywhere.
In Richard Kämmerling’s article for Welt, in which he summarises an interview with you, there is the following sentence: “The new book, according to Lentz, is probably the first out of three parts.” Could you tell me a little about the other two parts? Are they the continuation of Schattenfroh, or something entirely different?
I am currently working on a similarly extensive book, which I do not see as a direct sequel to Schattenfroh, so Schattenfroh will not be serialised. The new book will revisit some motifs of Schattenfroh, but, as far as I can tell at this stage, there will be no autofictional or autobiographical elements. The complexity that I need to portray in this new book is rooted in the complexity of the national as well as international social and political situations. Without giving too much away, this is the challenge, but also the appeal of my daily work on this book. The “second part” addresses the topics that are touched upon in Schattenfroh without being developed in any concrete way there.
This is an English translation of the interview, which was conducted in German.
I am honoured again to publish on The Untranslated an interview with Mircea Cărtărescu. Like the previous time, the interview was conducted by my Belgian friends Emiel Roothooft and Remo Verdickt, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in Antwerp last year. I am grateful to both for the opportunity to present their engaging conversation with the Romanian author to the readers of my blog. This the English version of Mircea Cărtărescu’s interview which is to be published in Dutch by a Belgian outlet.
The last time we spoke, you had just finished writing Theodoros. You called it your first ‘real’ novel. Do you still feel the same way?
It was a paradox. I meant that this was my first classical epic story. If my previous books could be considered a combination of essay writing, novelistic prose, a little philosophy and theology, and plenty of metaphysics, this time I wanted to write a book that would be like the shell of a mechanism. Theodoros is like a Fabergé egg containing my deepest aesthetic beliefs. I wanted to write a book without any limits, which would be just as literary as all my other projects, but in another shape, with more zest — a sort of mésalliance between very high literature and more popular forms.
Think of what García Márquez did in Love in the Time of Cholera. He used these melodramatic structures embedded within a very modern form of narration. I wanted to create a kind of ‘miracle,’ like in the popular books of the nineteenth century — which were incidentally the models for Dostoevsky and other very highbrow writers.
In Solenoid, the narrator longs for ‘a text outside the museum of literature, a real door scrawled onto the air, one I hope will let me truly escape my own cranium.’ Is Theodoros such a text?
Readers should be able to leave the ‘museum of literature’ in several ways because that museum is always your own skull. You can leave it by cutting an exit with a saw through your frontal bone, but also through some kind of magic — what the old maestros called high art. Think of the cupolas of old churches or the ceilings of Italian mannerist villas. If you see a Tiepolo painting on a cupola, you are so amazed that you feel as if you could fly and transcend the cupola itself.
With Theodoros, I wanted to paint such a sophisticated door that readers would turn the doorknob and leave ‘the museum.’ I tried to be as artistic as I could. I was not interested in painting surrealistic and ‘hard’ landscapes. I aimed for very skillful painting in clair-obscur and trompe-l’œil. Trompe-l’œil is the most important artistic device that I use in this novel. I’m very pleased with the book — it is at the same time similar but in many ways also very different from what I did in my earlier work.
Could you tell us more about the book’s origins?
Ion Ghica, Romanian statesman, diplomat and writer
Right now, I’m re-reading my old journals, which have been published in five big volumes in Romanian so far. I re-read them very attentively because I want to go over my old references to the art of literature. I’ve kept a journal for fifty-two years now — it’s one of the longest in our national literature. To my surprise, I found references to Theodoros in entries spanning almost forty years.
The first entry is from when I was a young assistant at the university in Bucharest. I had to teach some very boring parts of our national literature — decades where practically nothing happened. At one point I discovered Ion Ghica, who is now mainly remembered as a political figure rather than as an author. To my surprise, Ghica was actually a very good prose writer. Some of his memorialist writings are magic realist — he gives life to a pseudo-reality and makes it shine on the page. In one of his letters, he describes how his Romanian childhood friend Theodoros supposedly became the Ethiopian emperor Tewodros II.
Of course, all of this is pure fantasy, historically speaking. But what cannot be true I wanted to make real in literature. I invented a clockwork mechanism through which it would become possible that the Wallachian Theodoros has several stages of metamorphosis — like an insect — until he becomes emperor.
It was at the same time an immense challenge and a great pleasure to write this book — and to make it end as I wanted to. There are four big cogwheels or worlds — each with their own sense of meaning: the world of Wallachia, the Greek Archipelago, Abyssinia, and the world of ancient Israel during the reign of King Solomon. I had to outfit them with springs to make them work together — to create a pseudo-historical novel that is a work of fantasy.
Did you do a lot of research for these historical components?
I never do research for a book. I’m not that kind of writer — not like Thomas Mann, who would fill a whole room with useful books before he started working on a novel. I love to improvise — to let my mind wander and to be surprised on every page that I write. Even though Theodoros seems to be a historical novel, it isn’t. I intended it to be a complex work of art. Sometimes it is steampunk, sometimes it is surrealist, and so on.
While your previous books have been mostly centered around biology, mathematics, and metaphysics, Theodoros is impregnated by religion. Why is that?
For me, theology, mathematics, and poetry are not in opposition to one another. They go together, as different branches of the tree of knowledge. Everything we experience is knowledge. I have always been fascinated with the works of old maestros who present the action on several planes of existence. For example, in The Iliad, the gods and men fight together on earth. The same happens in Dante’s Divina Commedia, where the world is like a house with several stories, from Inferno to Purgatory to Paradise — plus a fourth one: the realm of the people, that is, Florence.
I wanted to adopt a similar frame, a theological frame, not a religious one — there is a big difference. I used a very specific world which has a similar meaning to the jungle’s in García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The religious elements in Theodoros do not express my own inner beliefs. I used this theological content because of its exoticism and strangeness. When you enter Eastern churches, you see that they are painted all over. There are very strange images of archangels, scenes from the life of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, etc. Everything is surrealistic — there is nothing there that you experience in your day-to-day life.
I wanted to give my book a Byzantine, Coptic, Armenian, Syrian, and Ethiopian coating — to imagine a world impregnated by the imagology of the Eastern Orthodox religion. These old varieties of Christianity are very expressive to me. Take the churches in Ethiopia. Only the top is at the ground level. The actual church is carved underground, in the shape of a cross. It’s like a science fiction landscape from Mars. It’s the emanation of other kinds of thinking, of other forms of religion — of other values. I wanted to wrap my book in this strangeness of Oriental Christianity.
Rock-hewn church in Lalibela, Ethiopia. Image Source
There is a beautiful parable in the book about Ingannamorte, the creator of all original stories. Do you see yourself as an original creator or as an adapter of what came before?
Well, I don’t see myself in any way. I just love to write — it’s the engine of everything that I do. I don’t want to compare myself with other writers. I don’t want to prove anything, I’m not an ideologist. Something inside me sometimes tells me what would be pleasant for me to write next.
I never intend to write books. If what I start to write develops into a book, that’s okay, but usually I simply write pages. At a certain moment, sometimes, I feel it’s time to stop and to give the manuscript to my publisher. But I’m not trying to write a story or an academic novel or a children’s book. I just start to write and when I’ve finished ten pages and I feel it’s okay, I continue.
When I was young – younger anyway – I wrote in the way that the Surrealists call écriture automatique. I never erased a word. My whole trilogy Orbitor is written like that; everything derives from the first draft, from the first to the 1,400th page. Unfortunately, now I cannot do this anymore [laughs]. So, I write on the computer, which gives me the possibility to change certain things. But the pleasure of writing is the same.
You’re saying you didn’t have any outline for the massive Orbitor trilogy?
Roughly until halfway through the second volume, I really wrote like that. I opened lots of stories in the book. After that, of course, I had to bring everything to a close. It turned the structure of the book into a diamond shape. There are about 40-45 stories in that book, all intertwined. In the third volume you can almost hear the clicks as I close a story — click, click, click, click, click, click — until a very big click at the end. So, it’s not only uncontrolled fantasy. At a certain moment, you have to control it.
I am the jockey and my mind is the horse. The horse is the one who wins the race, not the jockey. The jockey is small and light, and it’s best if he doesn’t try to control the horse too much. But from time to time, you have to touch its left ear or right ear to guide it onto the right trajectory. That’s how I write, in almost every book: a very light, very tender touch. Most of the time I let my mind do its job. Because I trust it. It has very seldom betrayed me.
It would be very stupid for me to write another Theodoros or Solenoid. I want to write something different every time. Right now, I’m writing something that amuses me very much. It’s something that’s out of this world, like Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings. There are some quite kinky pages, and some bagatelles — as the French say — but I love them. I’ve written some big, heavy books but also a lot of short stories. Even when they are minor, I love these short stories. This love of writing is the hot engine of everything that I do, I don’t care about anything else.
Could you tell us more about what you are writing right now and what it has to do with de Chirico?
It’s a pity — but it can be resolved — that my book Melancolia isn’t yet available in English. It’s a kind of pendant to Nostalgia, which was published thirty years earlier. If I ever wrote something close to perfection, it’s Melancolia. I love it very much, though it was an implosive book, not an explosive one: it never had huge success. I love everything about it. I love the way I made phrases there. I think they are the most beautiful phrases I ever made.
Melancolia is deeply influenced by de Chirico. It started from a painting of his that I saw, if I’m not mistaken, at a surrealism exhibition at the Albertina in Vienna, fifteen years ago, when I lived there. I was interested in one particular painting, which I never found again in any catalogue. It showed a box of chocolate candies wrapped in tinfoil of different colors — green, pink, gray, and so on. It was so beautiful. It was a box of chocolates, but so beautifully painted. As a kid — maybe all the kids in the world do this — I used to straighten the wrappings with my fingernail and keep them pressed between the pages of a book. I had hundreds of them.
Seeing that painting, I never thought I would write a book beginning from that motif, but in my subconscious, it developed into the whole imagery of Melancolia. In what I am doing now, I am going farther — not only following de Chirico but also Surrealist writers. I’m thinking of the author of Impressions d’Afrique and Locus Solus [Raymond Roussel, ed.], along with painters like Delvaux and of course Magritte. This is the world I love to immerse myself into. I love to recreate the things that inhabited my dreams, my fears, my hallucinations. So far, I’ve written several texts — long stories, let’s say. My favorite length is about a hundred pages. That’s when I’m at my best. I’ve finished a few of them and started others, and if I feel like it, I’ll give them to my publisher in Bucharest to make a book.
The Entombment by Paul Delvaux, 1953
Do you consider yourself a Surrealist as well?
No, I’m not a Surrealist, nor a postmodernist, as people sometimes call me. I’m myself. I don’t like labels. When I start a book, I don’t think, ‘I’ll write a Surrealist text.’ But I’m a very curious person. I read all the time. I want to know everything about the world we were all born into without knowing why, I want to read every book, to be in each and every world. I’m attracted to strange things because when you call a thing strange, it means there’s a fissure in the prison wall — a gap through which you can escape. Strangeness isn’t just an appealing image; it’s a gap. The Surrealists were also interested in this: uncanny coincidences that show our world isn’t what it seems.
I’m also interested in conspiracy theories — not because I believe them, but because I love to go down rabbit holes. When I write, I follow my heart and go down my own strange and complex rabbit holes. Perhaps, if I live long enough, I’ll finally write a true book about myself. Until now, I’ve only circled around the real Cărtărescu.
Do you ever find it frightening that your fans are so passionate? When they approach you, do you feel you have to play a character?
No. I’m a very reclusive person. I have almost no social life — two or three friends, my family, and that’s all. I don’t enjoy being surrounded by honors, appreciated by ‘the people’, or stopped in supermarkets for autographs. I don’t like this side of the ‘profession.’ I’m not a character; on the contrary, I’m an anti-character, like the narrator in Solenoid. Many times, I even feel ashamed of being a writer. I often think that I’ve been too [hesitates] conformist. I said yes too many times when I had to say no.
I’ve always agreed with people who consider the act of publishing itself a compromise. Anyway, I feel that it’s a compromise. I have always had this idea that a real writer should write only for himself or herself. This is why I don’t like to call myself a writer. I prefer to substitute the word writer with the word author, which is not so specific.
I don’t want fans. I don’t know what to do and what to say when I meet them. But it’s okay. I go on with my life in this terrible world. I should say that I’m very shocked and very scared by what happens in our world now.
What specifically?
Everything we all know. The political situation has worsened a lot in the last five years — especially in the last year. It’s almost an unbreathable atmosphere for me. I can only hope that the world won’t end too soon, and that my children, my grandson, and all young people will have the chance to live long, beautiful lives, without tyranny or surveillance.
During the Romanian presidential election in May you were outspoken about your pro-European views. Has political engagement always been part of you, or has it only recently started to feel like a necessity?
I think I’m just a common person. I hate extremist views of any kind. Politically, I’m a centrist, a liberal in the broad sense. I consider democracy as the least bad among bad systems. I have always stood for human rights, dignity, equality, and empathy for the ‘disinherited’, those who lacked opportunities to develop fully as human beings.
Your novel Theodoros deals with tyranny and violence. Do you think readers today will interpret it more politically than you intended?
Periander, Tyrant of Corinth, probably by William Faithorne
The axis of my book is ambition — the will to power. People don’t become tyrants because they want a better life, or more money, more cars, more homes; they want to rise above everyone else. Some succeed and become monstrous creatures who enslave others. Unfortunately, we see more and more such figures today.
Theodoros is the archetype of the tyrant. Plato wrote in The Republic that the king is the happiest person, whereas the tyrant is the most miserable — because he becomes the slave of his own slaves. Theodoros is like that. If God doesn’t condemn him, I condemn him. I do it with all my powers. He climbed over mounds of dead bodies to fulfill his mad ambition. If he became God and sat in God’s chair, he would still look for a higher one.
Do you consider yourself ambitious?
There is white ambition and black ambition. Through ambition you can become a monster, but you can also fulfill your dreams. Without ambition — or perseverance, or seriousness — it’s hard to arrive where you want to arrive. I’ve always been a very serious person and I did my duties. I tried to be a good father, a good husband, a good citizen — because I think it’s good to be like that. I also wanted to be a good writer. Here, ambition is not enough, unfortunately [laughs]. But it is useful. I’m not competing with Haruki Murakami or Anne Carson or Thomas Pynchon. I’m only competing with myself — my younger self at 30, 40, 50. He’s my great competitor, and I think I’m no match for him.
Some say an artist must be ruthless, sacrificing family and friends for art. You don’t buy that?
Not at all. Maybe you won’t believe me, but I pay more attention to the people I love than I do to my writings. When my child — I have a 22-year-old son — was very small, I couldn’t write a word for two or three years because I had to take care of him. And even if I was sometimes very annoyed about that situation, I never regretted it.
When I taught at university, as a young assistant, I worked six hours, sometimes eight hours a day. It was very hard. But when I woke up in the morning, I preferred to prepare my courses, not to write my literature. Your duties in the world should come before your duties towards yourself. I think this is the correct order — if you want to be a humane person. If not, you can be a genius who destroys everything: you destroy the life of your wife, the life of your children, your own life — because you have the right to do it, because you are a genius. I totally disagree with it. I hate this kind of writer. I know some writers who are doing this without any remorse.
Don’t you think those writers might respond: ‘I have to produce this literature for the sake of everyone in the world — for the sake of art, for my readers. It’s my way of trying to be as helpful to other people as possible.’
Mihail Chemiakin, Illustration for Crime and Punishment
Yes, that’s the way of thinking of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, who thought: ‘I’ll kill an old woman — a mean old woman who’s worth nothing — and I’ll rob her, and with that money I can do a lot of good things.’ It’s absolutely evil. It’s an immature way of thinking. Another shocking example is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a great pedagogue who nevertheless sent all five of his children to an orphanage. When you find this out, how can you still read his pedagogical works?
If you have to write, you will find the time and the means to do it. After all, nobody demands a certain number of books from you. Some writers died at twenty-five, like John Keats, who wrote only a handful of poems. But you don’t wish he had written more; you only wish he had lived more. We have a tragic example in our literature, the very talented poet Nicolae Labiș. He died at twenty-one yet left two volumes of beautiful poetry. That was his fate. Others lived longer, lived better, and had different conditions for writing. Such is the fate and luck of every writer.
Has your international success made you feel like an ambassador of Romanian culture?
I don’t believe too much in national cultures. I don’t think there is something so specific that gives us the right to think of ‘Romanian literature’ as something very special. I think that individual writers matter, not where they were born or what language they write in. I think of my bookcase at home: I don’t arrange writers by country or by language.
I have only two compartments: good writers and bad writers. The writers I love can be Inuit, Arab, Dutch, Romanian, anything. I don’t care. I have to confess that for twenty years I did not know that Mario Vargas Llosa was from Peru. But I don’t care. If he was from Colombia, what’s the difference? Is the writer a man or a woman? I don’t care. Is the writer queer or straight? I don’t care. I look at their first page, and I say, ‘This is a good writer.’
The interviewers:
Emiel Roothooft is a Belgian philosopher, critic and interviewer. Earlier this year, he published an essay on Cărtărescu in the Belgian magazine De Witte Raaf.
Remo Verdickt is a postdoctoral researcher in English Literature at the University of Leuven, Belgium.
The reception of the English translation of Schattenfroh (tr. Max Lawton, ed. Matthias Friedrich) proved to be considerably more enthusiastic than I had expected. It is really heart-warming to see so many readers seriously engage with this extraordinary book. To make the experience of tackling Michael Lentz’s novel a bit easier I have decided to share this Reader’s Guide. It is an adaptation of certain parts of my guide made specifically for the reading group I managed several years ago. That guide was meant for the original, so I had to tweak some things for the English speaking audience. The main purpose of this rather amateurish compilation is to save the reader the trouble of looking up things, so you will find lots of explanations regarding allusions, quotations, names, facts, and obscure words found in the book. This is in no way an exhaustive or definitive guide to Schattenfroh, and inevitably there will be some things that I have missed or failed to explicate. Don’t judge me too harshly! I have incorporated my visual guide into this one, so now you have everything in one place. As a supplement I have added my 35-page summary of Schattenfroh, which may be convenient for some readers that may feel lost while working through the novel. Please bear in mind that this is a summary of the German original, not the translation, although I did manage to change a couple of things, like page numbers. May A Reader’s Guide to Schattenfroh be a faithful companion on your journey through the shadowy, labyrinthine world of Michael Lentz’s magnum opus.
p. 20
Your name is not Johannes and not Emmeram, your name is Nobody. Thus spake Schattenfroh. You must be and become a most proper nan mann, he said. Your mission should read: “Nobody recognizes himself.” […] Nemo, a bad omen.
Elck (Everyman) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Nobody (niemant, nemo, nul) – a fool called “Nobody” (Niemat) depicted in Bruegel’s engraving Elck (Everyman). Below the portrait of Nemo looking at himself in a mirror there is an inscription with a double meaning: “Nobody knows himself.”
Omen – “Nemo” backwards.
p. 21
Tachygraph – a person skilled in tachygraphy (shorthand, esp. as used in ancient Rome or Greece).
pp. 22-23
On a 1910 poster stamp for the Leonhard Taichmann Confectionery, you see a feeblemindedly grinning school-age child with a brown cowlick and, by means of a funnel, something, you don’t know exactly what, it’s hardly cakes or chocolate candies, is being poured directly into his head. The flat logo is crowned by the sentence: “Are you lacking wisdom in a particular thing / From Nuremberg, let us the funnel to you bring.”
Nuremberg Funnel (a jocular description of a mechanical way of learning and teaching)
Georg Philipp Harsdörffer – Baroque-period German poet and translator.
the fleeting-improvised-men, as is written in the Book of Daniel – Illusory, temporary human-like figures described by Daniel Paul Schreber in his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), believed to be divinely created from “nerves” to provide companionship during his schizophrenic delusions of a depopulated world. These entities, central to his psychosis, were thought to mimic real people but dissolve when no longer needed.
pp. 24-25
yetzer hara (יֵצֶר הַרַע) – the inclination or impulse to evil considered as an essential part of human nature in Jewish traditional belief.
Camera silens – sound-proof isolation chamber known to induce hallucinations, fear, and anxiety in those who are isolated in it.
underneath the throne, currents of flaming fire are to come forth, but the throne doesn’t burn, the wheels don’t light up, no currents of flaming fire can be seen – cf. Daniel 7:9: “I watched till thrones were put in place, And the Ancient of Days was seated; His garment was white as snow, And the hair of His head was like pure wool. His throne was a fiery flame, Its wheels a burning fire;”
He buzzes around me, he rattles, a hooded little monster, thus do I imagine him, made up of fly, grasshopper, gecko, and human head, with his wings far too large, and this rattling grounds his falsetto in such a way that I, completely absorbed by the noise, only ever perceive him in fragments.
Detail of St. John on Patmos by Hieronymus Bosch
The Frightbearing Society – allusion to the Fruitbearing Society (Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft). It was a literary society founded in 1617 in Weimar by German scholars and nobility. Its aim was to standardise vernacular German and promote it as both a scholarly and literary language.
p. 26
Geniculate nucleus – each of two protuberances on the inferior surface of the thalamus which relay auditory and visual impulses respectively to the cerebral cortex.
p. 31
when springtime comes, it shows itself ‘pon the mountains […] – the altered text of German folk song Wenn der Frühling kommt.
p. 32
‘Tis thus to conclude that on the 28 of August, 2014 […] – the altered text of the 1617 foundation report of the Fruitbearing Society.
p. 33
Thus is this society to be dubbed the Frightbearing Society, its sigil to be declared ‘The End of the Jurisdiction of the Fools,’ and to the word everything must have been put to good use.
The End of the Jurisdiction of the Fools by Werner Tübke
Mary Stuart – a verse play by Friedrich Schiller that depicts the last days of Mary, Queen of Scots.
“My daughter, haste, / And leave this house of horrors […]” – this quotation, however, is not from Mary Stuart, but from Schiller’s other play, The Bride of Messina. It is a tragedy that explores themes of fate, familial conflict, and forbidden love, set in medieval Sicily, where two brothers, unaware of their shared lineage, fall in love with the same woman, their sister Isabella.
p. 35
Eduard Mörike – 19th c. German Lutheran pastor who was also a Romantic poet and writer of novellas and novels.
Ponder it, o soul! (Denk’ es, o Seele!) – E. Mörike’s poem, consisting of two stanzas of irregular unrhymed verse whose main theme is the precariousness of life.
for what we possess black on white / we can take home and keep for good – The student’s words in Goethe’s Faust (Part I, Faust’s Study 2).
p. 39
Wunderblock – children’s toy, known in English as a magic slate; children write on the surface, then “erase” their marks by lifting the cover. Sigmund Freud wrote the essay “Notes on the Wunderblock,” in which he compared the operation of memory and the nature of the unconsciousto the layered construction of the toy.
Iki-piirto writing pad, a Finnish variety of Printator, known in the German language as Wunderblock
p. 43
The Eifel – a low mountain range in western Germany and eastern Belgium.
Prüm – a town located in the western region of Germany’s Eifel mountains. It used to be a district capital.
Hürtgenwald – municipality in the district of Düren in the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
p. 44
Psychopomp – a creature whose responsibility is to escort newly deceased souls to the afterlife.
p. 45
Corpus – a statue which reproduces Jesus Christ on the cross.
p. 47
And I leapt out of my murderers’ row of observation-repetition – reference to Kafka’s journal entry on January 27, 1922; cf. “The strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps saving comfort that there is in writing: it is a leap out of murderers’ row; deed-observation.”
p. 48
The Ore Mountains – mountain range that lies along the Czech–German border, separating the historical regions of Bohemia in the Czech Republic and Saxony in Germany.
p. 50
Pseudo-Longinus – also called Longinus or Dionysius Longinus (flourished 1st century AD). The name sometimes assigned to the author of On the Sublime, one of the great seminal works of literary criticism.
p. 55
On the left: in 2014, you’re going to drive to the Elephant Toilet in Gießen.
Elefantenklo (Elephant Toilet) – nickname of a pedestrian overpass in Giessen. Image Source
p. 56
It originates from the fifteenth century and shows the holy Saint Louis of Toulouse, who was held hostage from 1288 to 1295 as a prisoner of war for his father Charles the Lame after the latter lost a naval battle near Naples.
Saint Louis of Toulouse by Luca Signorelli
Saint Louis of Toulouse – Neapolitan prince of the Capetian House of Anjou and a Catholic bishop.
Charles the Lame – Charles II of Naples. He was King of Naples and ruler of numerous other territories, who concluded the war to regain Sicily started by his father, Charles I.
p. 59
“Concrete and secure insights about the enemy and the deep feelings of hate, abhorrence, aversion, and implacability toward the enemy” – quotation from Das Wörterbuch der Staatssicherheit (The Dictionary ofState Security). The Ministry for State Security of the GDR (Stasi) released this dictionary in 1968.
“Deformation of the personal lifestyle and of the societal attachment of the corresponding persons […]” – altered quotation from Das Wörterbuch der Staatssicherheit.
p. 60
“Hatred always aims for active confrontation with the hated adversary […]” – from Das Wörterbuch der Staatssicherheit.
p. 65
“Let us not begin at the beginning, nor even at the archive. But rather at the word ‘archive’ and with the archive of so familiar a word.” – from Jacques Derrida’s book Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.
Decisionist – pertaining to decisionism, a political, ethical and jurisprudential doctrine which states that moral or legal precepts are the product of decisions made by political or legal bodies. According to decisionism, it is not the content of the decision, but rather the fact that it is a decision made by the proper authority, or by using a correct method, which determines its validity.
p. 67
Oriel – a large polygonal recess in a building, such as a bay window, forming a protrusion on the outer wall.
p. 69
Outside of the building—up the nineteen steps of the outer staircase, above a tub-fountain—the angel-visaged flame sculpture of an artist with God-given talent, but about whose past one had briefly forgotten to ask, has been a guest for fifty years already.
Der Flammenengel (The Angel of Flames) by Adolf Wamper. Image Source
its memento brings to mind a single day, November 16, 1944 – On this day, Düren was completely destroyed by Allied air bombings as part of Operation Queen. Approximately 3,000 of Düren’s 22,000 residents died.
Düren after the Allied bombing in 1944. Image Source
Lancaster – The Avro Lancaster was a British Second World War heavy bomber.
Mosquito – British multi-role combat aircraft that served during the Second World War.
Duria – the name of the town of Düren in the Roman times.
a heavy book by a certain Speer – Erinnerungen, the memoirs of Albert Speer, who was the German minister of armaments from 1942 to 1945. The English title is Inside the Third Reich.
p. 71
“My son, be careful in your work, for your work is the work of Heaven.” – Rabbi Yishmael’s anecdotal response to Rabbi Yehuda after the former learnt that the latter was a Torah copyist.
Tzimtzum (contraction) – in the Lurianic Kabbalah is the act by which the Creator removed His Limitlessness from the world so that Creation could occur.
p. 148
ouchi su ei ho Christos sôson seauton kai hêmas – (Luke 23:39 in Greek) If You are the Christ, save Yourself and us.
“In full accordance with the norms of international law, the Curia declared in this letter […]” – quotation from Hubert Lentz’s (who is the author’s father) study Die Konkurrenz des französischen und preussischen Staatskirchenrechts 1815-1850 (The Competition between French and Prussian State Church Law, 1815–1850).
Concordat – agreement between a pope and a sovereign or government for the regulation of ecclesiastical matters.
p. 152
The Four Powers – the four countries that occupied the defeated Germany and Austria after the end of the Second World War – France, the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union.
p. 153
Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei) – the official secret police of Nazi Germany.
p. 154
Cabasa – hand percussion instrument with a thin wooden handle and a cylindrical body covered in loops of steel ball chain.
“The first name Jesus is not permitted in Germany.” – altered excerpt from Entscheidungen in Kirchensachen (Decisions in Church Matters) vol. 23, 1985. It is a legal reference work that compiles court decisions from German state courts.
p. 160
I cannot set my right foot upon the sea, […] – here and further on: Revelation 10.
p. 162
Lorica musculata – muscle cuirass (designed to mimic an idealized male human physique).
Cingulum – piece of ancient Roman military equipment in the form of a belt decorated with metal fittings, which was worn as a badge of military status by soldiers and officials.
Sagum – a square or rectangular cloak made of coarse wool, fastened usually on the right shoulder, and worn especially by Gauls, early Germans, and soldiers of ancient Rome.
Pteryges – strip-like defences for the upper parts of limbs attached to armour in the Greco-Roman world.
p. 164
applicatio ad posteriora vestimentis remotis – administering the flogging to the bare buttocks.
p. 166
Greengage – a plum cultivar with greenish-yellow flesh and skin.
Father must have grown down into the ground. – possibly, an allusion to Rumpelstiltskin from The Grimms’ Fairy Tales: “[…] cried the little man, and in his anger he stamped with his right foot so hard that it went into the ground above his knee […].”
p. 167
That’s not how the story goes at all, Mateo says, the administrative building was renovated more than fifty years later and a search was made for a manufacturer who could replace the large number of missing black and yellow stones that’d been used to decorate the building’s façade, for the city coat of arms that could be seen from afar, for example, but nobody was found anywhere in the world except for a company in Italy that claimed to recognize the mosaic stones as an original Italian product, Milanese glass, to be precise, they insisted that there was no one else left who comprehended the craft necessary to make them.
Incluse – a recluse who encloses himself or herself in an inclusorium.
Inclusorium – a cell in which an incluse is locked up or even immured.
p. 173
Sukla Hemsch – anagram of “Klaus Schmeh”, a German computer scientist. (Derrik’s find)
p. 174
Diverticula – small bulges or pockets that can develop in the lining of the intestine.
p. 175
Then there’s another circle […] – the circle made up of Hebrew letters is from Abraham Abulafia’s work Haye ha-‘olam ha-ba (Life in the World to Come). The circles in this treatise contain Abulafia’s instructions for mystical meditation.
Abulafia’s circles
p. 178
Mihi dabas multas portas – (Latin) Thou gavest me many doors. Inscription on the last page of the Voynich Manuscript.
p. 179
And here is the plan according to which the vast troop of servants must move – Düren’s coat of arms.
Alba – alb, a white vestment reaching to the feet, worn by clergy and servers in some Christian Churches.
Cincture – a rope belt or a sash.
Stole – a priest’s silk vestment worn over the shoulders and hanging down to the knee or below.
Maniple – a long narrow strip of silk formerly worn at mass over the left arm by clerics.
p. 180
Merear, Domine, portare manipulum […] – May I deserve, O Lord, to bear the maniple of weeping and sorrow in order that I may joyfully reap the reward of my labours.
p. 181
Etiam volumus quod nostro Botellerio […] – excerpt from Acta Sanctorum (Acts of the Saints), a 17th C. encyclopaedic text in 68 folio volumes of documents examining the lives of Christian saints.
p. 191
Through a toad-studded archway strides an unsightly figure, more beast than man, with red-hot eyes and a barred blast furnace with glowing coals for a belly, which, with its zippered black robe, makes it appear to be the triangular eye of God.
Detail of right panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s tryptic The Last Judgement
Right panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s tryptic The Last Judgement
p. 193
Philobiblon – (Latin) the love of books. This was the title of mediaeval bibliophile Richard de Bury’s 14th-century treatise in praise of books.
Guy Montag – the protagonist of Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451. He works as a “fireman” whose job is to burn books and the buildings they are found in.
p. 194
a fire brigade that Benjamin Franklin personally founded in 1790 – In 1736, not in 1790, Franklin helped to found the Union Fire Company of Philadelphia, one of the first volunteer fire departments in America. He was an original signee of their founding articles and was an active participant for decades.
p. 195
Quod non est in actis non est in mundo – what is not in the documents is not in the world (Latin proverb).
Jürgen Fuchs – East German writer and dissident.
p. 196
Jülich – a town in the district of Düren, in the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.
the mystery of this page – the black page is from Tristram Shandy. In Sterne’s novel it commemorates the death of Parson Yorick. In the first edition, published in York and overseen by Sterne, the “blackness” is printed on both sides of the leaf with what appears to be a solid woodblock.
p. 198
Cetera – (Latin) the other things, the rest.
p. 201
In that spacious hall, a coalition of the gown, from all the bars of it, […] – slightly altered excerpt from Tristram Shandy.
p. 202
Fourfold Sense of Scripture – four senses of Scripture (quatuor sensus scripturae) is a four-level method of interpreting the Bible. The four types of interpretation deal with past events (literal), the relationship of the Old Testament to the New Testament (typological), present events (moral), and the future (anagogical).
p. 203
Diaskeuasis – the process of editing or revising a text.
p. 205
Gonfalon – of heraldic flag or banner, often pointed, swallow-tailed, or with several streamers, and suspended from a crossbar.
p. 206
Shawm – a medieval and Renaissance wind instrument, forerunner of the oboe, with a double reed enclosed in a wooden mouthpiece, and having a penetrating tone.
Drone pipe – a pipe of the bagpipe that is tuned to produce a single continuous tone.
p. 207
Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi – a Persian polymath from Khwarazm, who produced vastly influential works in mathematics, astronomy, and geography. Around 820 CE, he was appointed as the astronomer and head of the library of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.
p. 208
Knecht Ruprecht – in German folklore, Saint Nicholas’ dark companion who metes out punishment to naughty children.
The book was called Gehenna, which made me think of red hair – Gehenna brings to mind “henna”, the hair dye.
p. 209
Exactor mortis – the centurion in charge of crucifixion.
Quaternio – four soldiers who carry out crucifixion.
p. 210
the martyred Santa Claus of December 23, 1951 – on this day an effigy of Santa Claus was hanged and then publicly burned outside of the Cathedral of Dijon in France as a protest against the paganisation of Christmas.
Dijon, December 23, 1951. At 3 p.m., 250 children set fire to a white-bearded effigy on the forecourt of Saint-Bénigne Cathedral. Image Source
Thomas Müntzer – a German preacher and theologian of the early Reformation whose opposition to both Martin Luther and the Roman Catholic Church led to his open defiance of late-feudal authority in central Germany. He became a leader of the German peasant and plebeian uprising of 1525 commonly known as the German Peasants’ War.
Portrait of Thomas Münzer by Christoffel van Sichem
p. 213
Is there a pain that one could name, […] – from Angelus Silesius’ poem Sie betrachtet den gekreuzigten Jesum (She Contemplates the Crucified Christ). Born Johann Scheffler, Angelus Silesius, was a 17th C. German Catholic priest and physician, known as a mystic and religious poet.
Carnival committee – the Elferrat (council of eleven) that plans and organizes the festivities for a Karneval (Carnival) celebration in Germany.
Look now, he hangs on high so bare […] – from Angelus Silesius’ poem Sie betrachtet den gekreuzigten Jesum.
p. 214
Do we want to let Him in? – This question is addressed to the audience at a carnival session when announcing the next performer or speaker.
Cardinal von Espe – perhaps the “aspen wood” refers to Jesus’ cross.
p. 215
His head of finest gold […] – Daniel Casper von Lohenstein’s poemGedanken über Das LIII Capitel des Propheten Esaias, VI (Thoughts on Chapter LIII of the Prophet Isaiah, VI).
Daniel Casper von Lohenstein in the year of his death, 1683
p. 218
“En face / le pire, / jusqu’à-ce qu’il fasse /rire.” – “Face up to the worst until it makes us laugh.” From Samuel Beckett’s Mirlitonnades.
B, C, J – Brutus, Cassius and Judas, whom Satan is chewing in his three mouths in Dante’s Inferno.
“he dares to weep / in the midst of us […]” – from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem Schlußstück (Final Piece)
p. 219
His breath is weaken’d howls […] – from Lohenstein’s poem Gedanken über Das LIII Capitel des Propheten Esaias, VI.
p. 220
“nullity of a unique type” – “the image figment is a nullity of a unique type”: Edmund Husserl, Zur Lehre vom Bildbewusstsein u. Fiktumsbewusstsein (On the Theory of Image Consciousness and Figment Consciousness).
“If someone wanted to impart his physical pain […]” – from Holocaust survivor Jean Améry’s essay Die Tortur (Torture) in the book Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (in English: At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities).
Noble simplicity [and quiet grandeur] – from Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s formula for Greek art.
Unhappy Middle-Thing [of Angels and Animals!] – Characterisation of humans in Gedanken über Vernunft, Aberglauben und Unglauben (Thoughts on Reason, Superstition, and Unbelief), a poem by Albrecht von Haller, an 18th C. Swiss anatomist, physiologist, naturalist and poet.
p. 222
Honda Wortrodeo – anagram of “Theodor W. Adorno”.
p. 223
“The lust for torment heightens the jubilation of salvation and the prospect of salvation gives license to orgies of cruelty.” – from Jan-Dirk Müller’s essay Das Gedächtnis des gemarterten Körpers im spätmittelalterlichen Passionsspiel in Körper, Gedächtnis, Schrift (The Memory of the Martyred Body in the Late Medieval Passion Play in Body, Memory, Writing).
The brain’s dampness dried […] excerpt from Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg’s Betrachtungen (Contemplations). Catharina von Greiffenberg was an Austrian poet of the Baroque era.
p. 224
“Surely he hath borne our griefs, […]” – Isaiah 53.
p. 226
Prosopopoeia – a figure of speech that represents an imaginary, absent, or dead person speaking or acting.
“He bound her eyes—and the beautiful soul flew away to heaven.” – from Zerbin oder Die neuere Philosophie (Zerbin, or the Newer Philosophy), a philosophical novel by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, who was a Baltic German writer of the Sturm und Drang movement.
“As I am writing this article […]” – from Jean Améry’s essay Die Tortur.
p. 227
“that a revolt of public conscience is no longer to be feared. [.…]” – from Jean Améry’s essay Die Tortur.
p. 229
“hopeless carousel of metaphorical speech” – from Jean Améry’s essay Die Tortur.
p. 230
Jean Maery – altered “Jean Améry”.
“One can devote an entire life […]” – from Jean Améry’s essay Die Tortur.
“Come thou, thou last one, whom I recognize […]” – from the poem Death by Rilke.
p. 231
Adonic – related to a five-syllable metrical foot consisting of a dactyl followed by a trochee.
p. 232
Bush hammer – a masonry tool used to texturise stone and concrete.
“When shall grammar return.” – the author of this sentence is Novalis.
“My gentle and mild being through thy ruthless fury […]” – from Rilke’s poem Death.
p. 240
Marc Herrisch – anagram of “irre Schmach” (mad disgrace).
alpha and omega… – 17th C. German mystical poet Daniel Czepko’s epigram from Sexcenta Monodisticha Sapientum.
p. 241
Nachzehrer – in German folklore, a type of revenant or vampire who consumes their own burial shroud and body after death, and then drains the life force from their living family members, often causing illness or death in the community.
p. 242
“Bridle your mouth from speaking / and your heart from thinking.” – from Sefer Yetzirah, the earliest extant book on Jewish mysticism.
Mandrake – the humanoid-shaped mandrake root or Mandragora officinarum was widely believed to be produced by the semen of hanged men under the gallows.
There remain, at most, 759 more pages. – Indeed: 242+759=1001, which is the number of the last page of Schattenfroh.
p. 244
“This nursing of the pain forego thee […]” – Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, I.
p. 246.
It is the Cologne Cathedral clock. One must beware of this clock, it is a golden deception built by an illiterate man who knew only enough script to write his own name.[…] Traveler! when to the Cologne Cathedral thou comest and lookest at the nave clock in the southern side aisle, declare that thou hast seen the white roses fall from the same metal as the law hath ordained.
Cologne Cathedral Clock in the west corner of the southern nave.
built by an illiterate man – the clock was built by German clockmaker and inventor Johann Mannhardt, who worked initially as a goatherd. Incidentally, Mannhardt designed the first German steel guillotine.
Jean Fidel Storno, etc. – anagrams of Josef Anton Riedl, German composer.
p. 247
Neckar – river in Germany, mainly flowing through the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg.
Guenther Markte – anagram of Hartmut Geerken, German musician, composer, writer, journalist, playwright, and filmmaker.
p. 250
“And still we fear the ill which happens never, and what we lose not are bewailing ever.”– from Michael Lentz’s book of prose Muttersterben (Motherdying).
p. 251
Elí, Elí, lemá sabachtháni – (Aramaic) “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me” (in Matthew 27:46).
p. 252
“To them, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images. […]” – some of the sentences come from Plato’s Republic.
precisely like the depths of your brother’s wardrobe on page 485 – the brother’s wardrobe is indeed mentioned on page 485.
p. 253
Enoch – a biblical figure and patriarch prior to Noah’s flood and the son of Jared and father of Methuselah. According to the Book of Genesis, Enoch lived 365 years before he was taken by God.
p. 254
O Lord, I am not worthy […] – pronounced at Catholic Church Communion.
p. 255
Kartouwe – a siege gun used in European warfare during the 16th and 17th centuries. The name is a corruption of Latin quartana (quarter cannon).
I see a figure both man and beast […] – the strange creature is depicted next to St. John in Hieronymus Bosch’s painting Saint John the Evangelist on Patmos.
ho on kai än kai ho er cho me nos– (Greek) who is and who was and who is to come (Revelation 1:8).
p. 256
mio sono, aachen kao […] – seems to be gibberish.
I sit on a stone in a flowing pink robe that drapes its folds into seven neat tiers. […] And there appears in the heavens a woman with child, her vestment the sun and the moon beneath her feet and, upon her head, a crown with twelve stars of gold.
St. John on Patmos by Hieronymus Bosch
p. 257
Shofar – an ancient musical horn typically made of a ram’s horn, used for Jewish religious purposes.
JHWH ha-qatan – Yahweh Ha-Qatan (Yahweh the smaller) is the appellation of Metatron (an archangel in Judaism) in Sefer Hekhalot, a Biblical apocryphal book in Hebrew also known as The Third Book of Enoch.
Bat Qol – In rabbinic Judaism, a heavenly or divine voice which proclaims God’s will or judgment.
‘WZHYH, ZGNG’L – the names of angels of revelation in the Hekhalot literature (a genre of Jewish esoteric and revelatory texts produced some time between late antiquity to the Early Middle Ages).
Prince of the Face – a title of Metatron.
p. 258
Shekhinah – the presence of God in the world in Jewish theology.
p. 259
pathſ a’d wayſ art deniede hem, betrayal lī˘se in ambush, peacæ a’d justicæ art mortallī woundede (paths and ways are denied him, betrayal lies in ambush, peace and justice are mortally wounded) – the source is Ich saz uf eime steine (I sat on a stone), a song by the famous Minnesänger Walther von der Vogelweide.
Ferula – the pastoral staff used in the Catholic Church by the pope. It is a rod with a knob on top surmounted by a cross.
p. 261
Bengel – Pressbengel, the lever used to tighten the screw of an early printing press. Bengel can also mean a young boy, rascal or a stick.
p. 262
This diagram with different shapes and corresponding cylliric letters is from Russian poet Aleksandr Tufanov’s treatise К Зауми (To Zaum). Zaum is a poetic language invented by the Russian Futurist poets, which uses nonsensical words.
ehjeh asher ehjeh – (Hebrew) ehye ’ăšer ’ehye: I am who I am. The first of three responses given to Moses when he asks for God’s name in the Book of Exodus.
p. 264
Alas! it nevermore may be […] – from Walther von der Vogelweide’s song Ich saz uf eime steine.
p. 266
If it weren’t for the hills and rocky outcroppings, the depicted scene might well be taking place in the Rhine landscape near Düsseldorf and my mother, the woman who strolls in the distance with a red cloak, has become the woman with child in the sky, I am the child, then and now, I am wearing a red cloak that has faded underneath the sun.
Rheinlandschaft (Rhine Landscape) by Theo Champion
p. 267
“This accursed valley is for those who are accursed forever. […]” from Chapter 26 of The Book of Enoch, an ancient Hebrew apocalyptic religious text.
Molk – sacrificial offering in the ancient Semitic world.
Topheth – a location in Jerusalem in the Valley of Hinnom (Gehenna), where worshipers engaged in a ritual involving “passing a child through the fire”, most likely child sacrifice. Traditionally, the sacrifices have been ascribed to a god named Moloch.
p. 268
Tallit – a fringed garment worn as a prayer shawl by religious Jews.
Großhau – village in the municipality of Hürtgenwald in the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Todtenbruch – forest in North Rhine-Westphalia.
lew mewin da’at (Hebrew, followed by translation) – Proverbs 10:8: The wise in heart will receive commands.
p. 270
For what I speak I do not comprehend […]; And there shall be a selling of their freedom […] and so on – from The Sibylline Oracles, a collection of oracular utterances written in Greek hexameters ascribed to the Sibyls, prophetesses who uttered divine revelations in a frenzied state.
p. 271
Nebo (Nabu) – major god in the Assyro-Babylonian pantheon. He was patron of the art of writing and a god of vegetation. Nabu’s symbols were the clay tablet and the stylus, the instruments held to be proper to him who inscribed the fates assigned to men by the gods.
Nebo is oben – oben is Nebo backwards. This can also be read as a multilingual pun because “nebo” is the Russian for the sky.
iluPA, iluAG – Babylonian ideograms for Nabu.
p. 272
manman – (Babylonian) someone.
p. 273
The sun became black as sackcloth of hair,[…] – from Revelation 6:12.
and you shall drink it down to its dregs – “Neige” is the German for “dregs” and also the French for “snow”, which makes for yet another multilingual pun.
Besetzungsinnervation – cathectic innervation, a Freudian term used to describe the process of remembering.
p. 274
“We must therefore understand it of a certain divine power, …” – from Leo Koepp’s study Das himmlische Buch in Antike und Christentum (The Heavenly Book in Antiquity and Christianity).
p. 275
YHW’L, YH YHW’L… – the possible source for this list in Hebrew is Übersetzung der Hekhalot-Literatur (Translation of Hekhalot Literature) by Peter Schäfer.
p. 281
Honech – anagram of Henoch (Enoch).
p. 282
Pargod – “Curtain of Heaven”. Sometimes identified as the first of the seven heavens, the curtain of heaven conceals the Throne of God from the sublunary spheres.
The Shroud of Turin, also known as the Holy Shroud – a length of linen cloth bearing the negative image of a man. Some describe the image as depicting Jesus of Nazareth and believe the fabric is the burial shroud in which he was wrapped after crucifixion.
“Before a man did think in secret, […]” – from The Third Book of Enoch.
p. 283
Don Daba – anagram of Abaddon, an angel of destruction, who is described in the Book of Revelation as the king of an army of locusts.
Mogel – anagram of “Golem”.
p. 284
Emeth – (Hebrew) truth. In one version of the golem legend, the Kabbalist Elijah Ba’al Shem of Chelm crafts in clay a man’s form, which he brings to life by writing the word “emeth” on its forehead.
The Maharal of Prague and the Golem by Mikoláš Aleš.
Meth – (Hebrew) death
Myxomatosis – a highly infectious and usually fatal viral disease of rabbits, causing swelling of the mucous membranes and inflammation and discharge around the eyes.
Kalltal – nature reserve in Monschau, North Rhine-Westphalia.
p. 285
[…] a tapestry is unfurled, it seamlessly juxtaposes panoramas of one and the same city from 748, 1543, 1644, and 1944, from its first documented mention to its complete destruction.
p. 295
I’d like to look at the tapestry in Father’s other room again. A black line that tapers from left to right forms the horizon that connects all of these centuries to one another. Their common sky is of a color somewhere between powder blue and gray. In the sky, words are written. “Dicker Turm” and “Spießenturm,” for example.
Tapestry in Düren City Hall made by Maria Ketterer after the design of Willi Rixen. Image Source
p. 285
Helmut Wilder Neffe – must be William, Duke of Jülich-Cleves-Berg.
p. 286
The States General of the Netherlands – the official name of the Dutch Parliament.
p. 287
Zellen Warhol, Zar Lohnwelle – anagrams of “Wenzel Hollar”, which is the German version of “Wenceslaus Hollar”, the name of a 17th century Bohemian graphic artist.
p. 288
Rowkost – anagram of Storkow, a town in Oder-Spree district, in Brandenburg, Germany.
Grabnurum – anagram of Naumburg, a town in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, Central Germany. The extra “r” in Grabnurum was apparently added for the sake of euphony. (Thanks are due to Derrik for deciphering both anagrams.)
p. 295
Dicker Turm and Spießenturm – these towers are remnants of Düren’s fortification.
Dr. Ichfrei II – anagram of Friedrich II (However, Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, died in 1250).
Jim Will von Heuchle, von Juleich Millweh – anagrams of Wilhelm von Jülich (William, Duke of Jülich-Cleves-Berg).
Zinsig – anagram of Sinzig, a town in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.
Kaiser Kleiderverrat – must be Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor (reign 1346 –1378).
The plan is true to scale, Warhol says, with it, I might explore the long-destroyed medieval city at a one-to-one scale. In order to draw the map from a bird’s eye view, he didn’t really hover over the city like a bird, rather, he determined the top view by way of exact geometric calculations.
View Bird’s Eye of Düren by Wenceslaus Hollar
see Fechner – Gustav Theodor Fechner was a 19th C. German physicist, philosopher, and experimental psychologist. In 1846 he published the essay Der Raum hat vier Dimensionen (Space Has Four Dimensions).
p. 297
Veduta – a detailed, largely factual painting, drawing, or etching depicting a city, town, or other place.
p. 298
“The movement of our space from three dimensions through the fourth, […]” – from Der Raum hat vier Dimensionen by Gustav Fechner.
First page of Gustav Fechner’s essay Der Raum hat vier Dimensionen
p. 299
Lewes – anagram of Wesel, a city in North Rhine-Westphalia.
p. 300
Muttergotteshäuschen – a Roman-Catholic pilgrimage chapel in Düren.
p. 301
I imagine the voice transmogrifying itself into one of the guard figures of the Leipzig Monument to the Battle of the Nations, […]
Monument to the Battle of the Nations, Leipzig, Germany (Image Source)Monument to the Battle of the Nations (Interior)
The Monument to the Battle of the Nations (Völkerschlachtdenkmal) – a monument in Leipzig, Germany, to the 1813 Battle of Leipzig, also known as the Battle of the Nations.
p. 302
Upon the closed wings—the visible side thereof—four people and a sheep can be seen before a barren landscape.
Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald (First View)
p. 303
Pentimento – a reappearance in a painting of an original drawn or painted element which was eventually painted over by the artist.
Ostentatio vulnerum – display of the wounds (in a depiction of Christ).
p. 304
Karst – an area of irregular limestone in which erosion has produced fissures, sinkholes, underground streams, and caverns.
What we see there defies all description. The world is a wicked inn. Sin dwells in the body, here, it swarms with the naked, the impaled, those given over to the game, cuckstool-demons and fire and birds flutter forth from the ass.
The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch (Right Panel)
The nun is a pig and bears me in her arms. I am entirely naked, she wants to kiss me, it costs me all my strength to ward her off, there is a bit of script on my right thigh, at last, I now desire to read it, the Lucifer I know all too well appears as a drollery with a lizard’s tail, a child’s legs, a bear’s paws, and a bird’s head in a knight’s helmet, from which the long, pointed beak peeps out and from whose thorn-spiked crista hangs a severed foot, gnawed off at the shinbone, he’s now finally gotten hold of an inkpot and a refill flask, which he diligently holds out in his open beak to the pig-nun so that she might dip her quill into the pot and write in my name that which I never shall have written.
Detail of The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch (Right Panel)
p. 308
The entire body riddled with splinters of thorns, flagellation wounds everywhere, split and torn skin, holes, tears, hematoma.
Detail of Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald (First View)
p. 310
A hand reigns once more in a room divided by two vaults with cross ribs, the room runs toward its arch-pointed windows. This time, it belongs to a winged angel […]
Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald (Second View)
Right panel of Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald (Second View)
p. 311
“Behold, a virgin shall be with child, […]” – Matthew 1-23.
a figure in episcopal regalia […] – Luca Signorelli’s painting St. Louis of Toulouse. See above.
pp. 312-313
Only Augustine on the right wing looks up from the book he holds open in his left hand—off into the distance in which he knows there to be a world freed from books.
Altarpiece in the Church of St. Augustine in Dettelbach by Michael Triegel (Sketch) Image Source
p. 314
Alypius – Alypius of Thagaste was bishop of the see of Tagaste (in what is now Algeria) in 394. He was a lifelong friend of Augustine of Hippo and joined him in his conversion.
“Not in rioting and drunkenness, […]” – Romans 13:13.
p. 315
“A servant’s got a story to tell: […]” – from Sagen, Märchen und Schwänkedes Jülicher Landes (Legends, Fairy Tales, and Schwanks of the Jülich Region). The text is apparently written in the dialect known as Jülicher Platt (According to Matthias Friedrich).
p. 317
Barbican – a tower or other fortification on the approach to a castle or town, especially one at a gate or drawbridge.
p. 318
Weiler Pfort– the name of a fortified gate (Weiler means “hamlet”).
p. 319
Frech-je-Glosse-Straße – Frech Je Glosse is an anagram of Joseph Schregel, a Düren poet, who wrote poems in the local dialect (Dürener Platt). (Derrik’s contribution)
p. 322
Plattdeutsch (Low German or Low Saxon) – a West Germanic language variety spoken mainly in Northern Germany and the northeastern part of the Netherlands.
[…] on the inside of the front door hangs a broadsheet, upon which a man is shown displaying an etching to the viewer, a woman with a veil portrayed in that latter image.
Self-Portrait by Wencesluas Hollar after an original by Jan Meyssens
p. 327
Meissen potcelain – porcelain produced at the Meissen factory, near Dresden.
p. 330
Protandrous – (of a hermaphrodite) having the male reproductive organs come to maturity before the female.
p. 332
“I, Schattenfroh, mayor of the city by the grace of God […]” – altered safe-conduct given to Jan Hus by Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund.
p. 335
Hiddensee – one of the smaller islands off Germany’s Baltic coast.
Tau – tau (taw) is the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet and is thought to be the symbol with which Ezekiel marked those chosen by God. Ezekiel 9:4: “And the Lord said unto him, Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof.” St. Francis of Assisi eventually signed his letters not with his name but with this symbol.
p. 344
Socage – a feudal tenure of land involving payment of rent or other non-military service to a superior.
p. 349
Edenging, Engeding – anagrams of Nideggen, a town in the district of Düren in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Versachleb – anagram of Leversbach, a village in Kreuzau, Düren, North Rhine-Westphalia. (Both anagrams deciphered by Derrik)
p. 351
Via ferrata – a climbing route that employs steel cables, rungs or ladders, fixed to the rock.
p. 355
Effraction – making forcible entry.
p. 356
It’s more like a stool with a backrest, the seat and backrest are made of boards, however, the difference between the seat boards and the back-support boards could not be starker: The boards of the seat are unadorned, a flat square, a depression runs all round the edge, double corners were created by the sawing-off of the initial corners, whereas the backrest is adorned openwork, in its middle, one can reach into the maw of a grimace gaping wide, somewhere between man and ape, the face is spread flat, nose, lips, eyes, ears, and bushy eyebrows with the appearance of two palm trees or feather dusters are raised in relief and, in some measure, very much like the ears and lips, curved into a c-shape.
Mascaron – a carved, ornamental face, usually human, sometimes frightening or chimeric whose alleged function was originally to frighten away evil spirits.
p. 358
A young woman is standing at the open box window on the left, its outer wing thrown open with inviting wideness, her head is slightly tilted, her face is flushed.
Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window by Johannes Vermeer
p. 359
Olimpia – in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman, Olimpia is the “daughter” of physics professor Spallanzani. She is later revealed to be an automaton.
Oh-oh! – Cf. “[…] but Olimpia only sighed repeatedly: ‘Oh! oh!’.”
p. 360
ShKBTh ZRGh – in gematria, the numerical value of this Hebrew word, meaning sperm or seed, gives 999.
p. 361
Blind-stamp – form an image, design or lettering by creating a depression in the paper or other material.
p. 363
Mirifica descriptio – the inscription of the Holy Trinity in the womb of the Virgin Mary.
Mahershalalhashbaz – the name of the second mentioned prophetic-name child in Isaiah 8, which Luther translated as Raubebald-Eilebeute (rob soon, hurry to the spoils).
p. 367
On the woman’s carpet, one sees an armchair with a red seat cushion and a red backrest, trees and flowers can be seen, as well as a nine-armed candlestick, script is everywhere, flames lick, clouds gather together, a labeled blue ball or balloon, something to be discovered on each square centimeter. The carpet is not beautiful, but it is beautiful in that I do not understand it. Below the tablets or gates with the ten lines is a flower-wreathed grave framed by glyphs and scrolls, at first glance, more than a dozen bodies seem to lie in this grave, if one looks more closely, the bodies turn out to be fir trees and the grave is no grave, but a nursery, the little firs are us.
Parochet (the cloth that covers the doors of the Ark containing the Torah scrolls in a synagogue) Image Source
p. 374
La kozo kuras […] – the text apparently is in Ido, a constructed language derived from Reformed Esperanto. The translation is courtesy of Gauthaman R. :
The thing runs, and we cannot intervene. One intervenes only to confirm that the thing runs. The principal question is how we can perceive that a thing does not run. In all, there exists only this one thing that runs. At all times it is time to ask how much time I still have. From question to question we can consider it. About what you consider, all thinking has already been thought.
p. 378
Eleazar of Worms – a Jewish rabbi, mystic, Talmudist, and codifier. Along with the Sefer Ḥasidim (1538; Book of the Pious), of which he was a coauthor, his voluminous works are the major extant documents of medieval German Hasidism.
“Alef with all and all with alef […]” – from Sefer Yetzirah
My Galmi – Knight Galmi is a character in the play Der Ritter Galmi mit der Hertzogin auß Britanien (Knight Galmi with the Duchess of Britain) written by German poet and playwright Hans Sachs.
Freies Erzja – anagram of “Sefer Jetzira” (German spelling of Sefer Yetzirah).
p. 381
ɥƃɹz ɥʇqʞɥs – the word ShKBTh ZRGh, which gives the numeric value 999. But since it is upside down, the number is 666.
p. 391
Lache mit Lenz, Macht in Zelle, etc. – anagrams of “Michael Lentz”.
p. 392
Chemnitz – a city in the German state of Saxony.
p. 394
sub specie latinitatis – probably an allusion to Spinoza’s honorific expression sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect of eternity) denoting what is considered to be universally and eternally true.
Johann Matthäus Meyfart – German Lutheran theologist, educator, academic teacher, hymn writer and minister.
Friedrich Melchior Dedekinden – 17th C. German publisher.
p. 395
Henning Brabant – German lawyer, mayor of Braunschweig and the ducal court prosecutor.
The Oberammergau Passion Play – a passion play that has been performed every 10 years from 1634 to 1674 and each decadal year since 1680 (with a few exceptions) by the inhabitants of the village of Oberammergau, Bavaria, Germany.
p. 397
Halle – a city in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt.
p. 399
Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris – (Latin) Remember, man, that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return. Cf. Genesis 3:19: “For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”
p. 402
“You are the man clothed with linen, […]” – Ezekiel 9:11: “And, behold, the man clothed with linen, which had the inkhorn by his side, reported the matter, saying, I have done as thou hast commanded me.”
“Then I beheld, and lo a likeness […]” – from Ezekiel 8:2.
p. 412
Ш – a letter of the Glagolitic and Cyrillic scripts. It commonly represents the sound /ʃ/.
p. 414
“So do I sit, spell-bound for hours, / Half in yesterday and half today.” – from 19th C. German poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s poem Die Bank (The Bench).
p. 417
Plus oultre – (French) Further beyond. The personal motto of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.
p. 418
Third War of the Guelderian Succession – the final confrontation in a series of conflicts between the Duke of Burgundy and Charles, Duke of Guelders. The Guelders Wars lasted from 1502 till 1543 and ended with a Burgundian victory. With this outcome, all of the Low Countries were under the control of Charles V. The war ended with the total destruction and death of nearly all inhabitants of the town of Düren.
[…] Titian’s Equestrian Portrait, which shows him at the height of his powers, […]
Equestrian Portrait of Charles V by Titian
p. 423
Fibels Leben – Leben Fibels (The Life of Fibel) is a novel by Jean Paul, a German Romantic writer.
p. 430
Steffi Rapid – anagram of “Fida Pfister”, the name of the widow who provided accommodation for Jan Hus in Konstanz.
p. 431
“Put every man his sword by his side.” – Exodus 32:27: “Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour.”
p. 434
“Father shall die on August 20, 2014.” – the author’s father Hubert Lentz died on this day.
p. 438
“Go and take the book from his hand, which standeth upon the sea and upon the earth! […]” altered text of Revelation 10:8-11.
p. 439
Pressbrokat – a technique used in the late Middle Ages in polychrome sculpture and painting. Tin foil, pressed in relief, is glued onto a surface and painted in an effort imitate brocade.
p. 442
“the noisy clamor of the day […]” – from Hegel’s Preface to the first edition of Science of Logic.
p. 446
Whoever strives in ceaseless toil, him may we grant redemption – The words said by an angel in Goethe’s Faust, Part II, as he carries Faust’s immortal essence.
ICE – Inter-City Express.
p. 447
Motherdying (Muttersterben) – Michael Lentz’s book. It is a collection of twenty-five prose pieces, one of which, titled Muttersterben, won the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for literature in 2001.
p. 448
Threethreethree Issusenlistee (Dreidreidrei Issoskeilerei) – rhyming mnemonic for the Battle of Issos that occurred in southern Anatolia, on November 5, 333 BC between the Hellenic League led by Alexander the Great and the Achaemenid Empire, led by Darius III.
p. 449
Teltower turnip– glazed turnip with bacon.
Nachash – The word nahash means “serpent” in Hebrew.
358 days pass in just a few seconds, then the snake counts to 358 and the Messiah counts to 358 – in Hebrew gematria, 358 equals both “serpent” and “Messiah”.
p. 451
Jefferson Tuff-Tuff – a character invented for the feature film Winnetou Part 1. Tuff-Tuff is a reporter from the Oxford Times who is desperate to take photos of Native Americans.
Worte von Kanzeln, Rotz wenn Alkoven, Walkern von Zoten, etc. – anagrams of “Wenzel von Tronka”, a wicked nobleman in Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas.
Opening of Michael Kohlhaas, first edition, 1810. Image Source
Herse – Michael Kohlhaas’s head servant.
Tronkenburg – the country estate of Junker Wenzel von Tronka.
p. 455
“It is what it is” (Et es wie et es) – The first “article” of the “Cologne Constitution” (das Kölsche Grundgesetz), which is basically a list of rules that prescribe to take it easy and relax.
p. 459
“there was not one among his neighbors who hadn’t benefited from his charity and his fair dealing […]” – from Michael Kohlhaas.
Alaska, hohle mich, etc. – anagrams of “Michael Kohlhaas”.
Haskell – a programming language.
p. 462
Frederick the Great or Frederick II – King in Prussia from 1740 until 1772, and King of Prussia from 1772 until his death in 1786.
Worte von Kanzeln, etc. – anagrams of “Wenzel von Tronka”.
Heers Seher (Army Seer) – both words are anagrams of “Herse”.
p. 463
Safran Hake – anagram of “Frank Haase”, the author of the book Kleists Nachrichtentechnik (Kleist’s Technique of Conveying Information) (Derrik’s find)
p. 471
Bechterew patient – Bechterew’s disease, also known as ankylosing spondylitis (AS), is a chronic inflammatory rheumatic disease that primarily affects the spinal column.
p. 472
Daun Maars – three volcanic lakes near the town of Daun in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate.
Jowhar sword – a traditional sword forged from high-quality patterned steel valued in the Middle East and Persia for its exceptional strength, durability, and artistry.
p. 473
Bassa Teremtetem – allegedly Hungarian curse in Kleist’s Anecdote from the Last Prussian War.
p. 479
morne incuriosité – doleful incuriosity. The expression is from Charles Baudelaire’s poem Spleen. The whole line reads: “L’ennui, fruit de la morne incuriosité” (Tedium, the fruit of doleful incuriosity).
p. 480
Primary tone – according to the Schenkerian analysis of tonal music, the first note of the fundamental line (Urlinie), usually scale degree 3, 5, or 8, from which the stepwise descent to the tonic begins.
p. 481
Devils on Horseback – dish made with prunes wrapped in bacon and then cooked.
p. 483
Südkurve – the South Stand (the part of the stadium where the most vocal fans tend to like to sit).
p. 484
Angstloch – was a small hole in the floor of medieval castles and fortresses that led to a cellar or basement room below.
p. 485
from the first word, “One,” to the last word, “writing” – the first and the last words of Schattenfroh.
p. 486
Persilschein – nickname for a certificate issued after World War II that declared a person free of Nazi affiliation, thus “washed clean” like laundry with the Persil detergent brand.
p. 488
hast thou seen what the ancients of the house of Prüm […] – altered text of Ezekiel 8:12: “Then said he unto me, Son of man, hast thou seen what the ancients of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in the chambers of his imagery? for they say, the Lord seeth us not; the Lord hath forsaken the earth.”
p. 492
Something Invented Me – a science fiction short story by R. C. Phelan.
Raoul Hausmann – an Austrian artist and writer. One of the key figures in Berlin Dada, his experimental photographic collages, sound poetry, and institutional critiques had a profound influence on the European Avant-Garde in the aftermath of World War I.
p. 493
Schalkenmehrener Maar – a maar (crater filled by a lake) roughly 3 kilometres southeast of the town of Daun in the Eifel in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate.
Gemündener Maar – the northernmost of the three Daun Maars (Dauner Maare). It lies in the immediate vicinity of the village of Gemünden.
Totenmaar – the Weinfelder Maar, a maar around two kilometres southeast of the town of Daun in the Eifel Mountains.
p. 494
Splint pin – a metal fastener with two tines that are bent during installation, similar to a staple or rivet.
p. 495
Ahndemir – anagram of “Meinhard”. (Derrik’s find)
p. 496
Edmond Jabès – a French writer and poet of Egyptian origin. Jabès is best remembered for his books of poetry, often published in multi-volume cycles. They often featured references to Jewish mysticism and kabbalah.
p. 497
Gotteslob (God’s Praise) – the first combined prayerbook and hymnbook authorised by the bishops of all German-speaking Roman Catholics in Germany and Austria.
p. 498
“O Christ, our true and only light” – a Lutheran hymn by the German Baroque poet, Lutheran minister and hymn-writer Johann Heermann. The text was first published in 1630 during the Thirty Years’ War. It is a prayer for enlightenment of those who are ignorant, and of those who turned away.
p. 499
Flagrum – scourge.
p. 500
Reinheitsgebot – (literally “purity order”) is a series of regulations limiting the ingredients in beer in Germany and the states of the former Holy Roman Empire.
p. 501
Mater Dolorosa – the Virgin Mary sorrowing for the death of Christ, especially as a representation in art.
p. 503
“My chosen Blood […]” – from Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg’s poem Über meines Jesu blutigen Lieb- und Schmerzen-Schweiß (On my Jesus’s Bloody Sweat of Love and Pain).
p. 504
Azpey u arens – ?
p. 509
[…] through a tree-lined hole in a ruin, a hand that is much too large appears from above, an aqueduct perhaps, four gentlemen dressed in dark suits and white shirts with Vatermörder— stand-up collars called “patricides”—and bow ties are sitting on upholstered chairs at a table, they’ve taken off their jackets, they’re nowhere to be seen, they’re wearing vests over their shirts, a cloth upon the table catches the eye by way of a bright, jagged line and fringes that make me melancholic.
[4 Men at the Table, Big Hand Above] by Ror Wolf. Image Source
p. 512
Hyperthymestic – related to a rare condition in which an individual possesses a superior autobiographical memory and is able to recall the vast majority of personal events and experiences in life.
Jill Price – an American author from Southern California, who has been diagnosed with hyperthymesia. She was the first person to receive such a diagnosis, and it was her case that inspired research into hyperthymesia.
p. 514
Hutschenreuther – German family that established the production of porcelain in northern Bavaria, starting in 1814.
p. 518
Sütterlin – the last widely used form of Kurrent, the historical form of German handwriting. Graphic artist Ludwig Sütterlin was commissioned by the Prussian Ministry of Science, Art and Culture to create a modern handwriting script in 1911.
p. 523
“For instance, the pictures on the wall next the fire seemed to be all alive […]” – from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.
Keszel Wokalikoks – anagram of Leszek Kołakowski, a Polish philosopher and historian of ideas. He is best known for his critical analysis of Marxist thought, as in his three-volume history of Marxist philosophy Main Currents of Marxism. (Derrik’s find)
p. 525
Hengstenberg – German food manufacturer.
p. 528
Plague-pass letter (Pestbrief) – health pass for travel during times of plague.
Fortunatus – a legendary hero (popular in 15th- and 16th-century Europe) who is usually associated with a magical inexhaustible purse (zauberseckel).
p. 534
Rosh Hashanah – the Jewish New Year.
The Imperial Castle of Kyffhausen – a medieval castle ruin, situated in the Kyffhäuser hills in the German state of Thuringia.
In A, the sixteenth house, there is an oil painting by Champion, it is called Lowlands, it shows the “Rhine landscape near Düsseldorf,” Mother said, one day, it shall hang from the corridor wall where I live.
an oil painting by Champion […] called Lowlands – the painting used to belong to Michael Lentz’s father and after his death was inherited by Michael Lentz.
pp. 535-536
Rheinauen – a collective municipality in the district Rhein-Pfalz-Kreis, in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.
Franz Mon – Frankfurt writer. He was a pioneer in the field of concrete, visual and phonetic poetry.
In Sunday Strolling, the painter shifts the landscape a little further off from the viewer than in Mother’s painting; in the foreground, behind a gap of shadow that widens to the right, a massive, sunlit path bordered by two beech trees can be seen, on it, coming from the left, a young couple is strolling with their child (a girl) and their dog (a sheep dog?) running up ahead.
Sonntagsspaziergang (Sunday Strolling) by Theo Champion
p. 537
Teufelsschlucht – the Devil’s Gorge. It is located on the eastern edge of the Ferschweiler Plateau within the South Eifel Nature Park in the vicinity of Irrel.
p. 539
“Away with him, away with him, crucify him!” – from Bach’s St. John Passion, BWV 245.
“I am poured out like water […]” – from Psalm 22.
p. 542
Pierre Barbet – a French physician, and the chief surgeon at Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Paris. By performing various experiments, Barbet introduced a set of theories on the crucifixion of Jesus.
p. 543
Frederick Beizug – “Beizug” is an anagram of “Zugibe”. Frederick Zugibe was the chief medical examiner of Rockland County, New York from 1969 to 2002. He was known for his research and books on forensic medicine as well as his crucifixion and Shroud of Turin studies.
Suppedaneum – foot-support for a crucified person, projecting from the base of the cross.
p. 545
Martin Geck – German musicologist.
p. 549
René Girard – French polymath, historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science whose work belongs to the tradition of philosophical anthropology.
Kurt Flasch – German philosopher, who works mainly as a historian of medieval thought and of late antiquity.
p. 550
“I will not conceal his parts, nor his power, nor his comely proportion. […]” – from Job 41:12-34 (about Leviathan).
p. 552
Laterna magica – an early type of image projector that used pictures—paintings, prints, or photographs—on transparent plates (usually made of glass), one or more lenses, and a light source.
p. 554
“I fear I must have fallen asleep again. […]”, etc. – from Samuel Beckett’s novel Malone Dies.
p. 555
“The sense impulse requires variation, requires time to have a content; […]” – from Friedrich Schiller’s Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man).
p. 556
Diether Ort – anagram of Dieter Roth. Dieter Roth was a Swiss poet, graphic artist, and intermedia action and object artist. (Derrik’s find)
p. 558
Grubenreu – anagram of Neuerburg, a city in the district of Bitburg-Prüm, in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. (Derrik’s find)
Doctor Mabuse – a fictional character created by Luxembourgish writer Norbert Jacques. The character was made famous by three films directed in Germany by Fritz Lang: Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse and The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse. Dr. Mabuse is a master of disguise and telepathic hypnosis known to employ body transference, most often through demonic possession, but sometimes utilising object technologies such as television or phonograph machines, to build a “society of crime”.
p. 561
Hans Heinrich Meier – Swiss professor of English language and literature. In 1969 came out his translation of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
p. 563
Anamorphote – a distorting lens used to produce anamorphosis.
Dromological – related to dromology (the science of speed).
p. 564
“Neither neither nor nor but something else” – from Swedish poet Bengt Gunnar Ekelöf’s poem Absentia animi.
Droste – German poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff.
p. 565
Ezra – a Jewish scribe and priest. The Book of Ezra describes how he led a group of Judean exiles living in Babylon to their home city of Jerusalem, where he is said to have enforced observance of the Torah.
Artasasta – Artaxerxes I. An Achaemenid king of Persia who reigned from 465–425 BC.
p. 567
Diaskeuast – a person who revises, edits, or interpolates.
Pseudepigraphy – the false ascription of a piece of writing to an author.
p. 568
Herr Scheinenden – anagram of “Henner Schneider”, a German computer scientist. The block of text is his explanation of Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s automaton The Writer. (Derrik’s find)
The Writer, an Automaton by Pierre Jaquet-Droz. Image Source
p. 574
Giorgio Agamben – an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, form-of-life and homo sacer.
Ulrich H. J. Körtner – a German-Austrian evangelical theologian.
Elberfelder Bibel – German translation of the Bible that first was published in 1855 (New Testament) and in 1871 (Old Testament). A large part of the translation was carried out in Elberfeld—hence the name.
which is now— quite precisely—381 pages back from here – if we go back 381 pages, on page 193 we will find the episode with Guy Montag from Fahrenheit 451.
p. 584
I See Satan Fall like Lightning – René Girard’s work of philosophical and theological anthropology exploring the concept of mimetic desire, where human conflicts and violence stem from imitating others’ desires, leading to rivalry and scapegoating. Christ’s words from Luke 10:18 serve as the title of the book.
Dismas and Gestas – two robbers crucified alongside Jesus.
Moll – a nurse in Beckett’s novel Malone Dies.
He has Caspar David Friedrich’s Sea of Ice in mouth, […]
The Sea of Ice by Caspar David Friedrich
p. 588
Camma, Chammatha – In Codex Colbertinus (a Latin manuscript of the Bible), the two robbers who were crucified on either side of Jesus are named, in Matthew 27:38, as Zoatham (on the right) and Camma (on the left), in Mark 15:27, as Zoatham and Chammatha.
Maggatras – in Codex Rehdigeranus, the names of the robbers at Luke 23:32, are Ioathas and Maggatras.
The Devil and His Angels (Der Teufel und seine Engel) – a history of the Devil by Kurt Flasch.
p. 589
Pahmurks, Rahmspuk – anagrams of “Suhrkamp”, the name of a German publisher.
Amigo ab Göring, Ingeborg am Agio – anagrams of “Giorgio Agamben”.
In the third essay of The Genealo […] from the beginning of Agamben’s The Man Without Content, in which Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals is cited.
Here is the same passage recomposed for your convenience in Georgia Albert’s translation:
§I The Most Uncanny Thing
In the third essay of The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche subjects the Kantian definition of the beautiful as disinterested pleasure to a radical critique: Kant thought he was honoring art when among the predicates of beauty he emphasized and gave prominence to those which established the honor of knowledge: impersonality and universality. This is not the place to inquire whether this was essentially a mistake; all I wish to underline is that Kant, like all philosophers, instead of envisaging the aesthetic problem from the point of view of the artist (the creator), considered art and the beautiful purely from that of the “spectator,” and unconsciously introduced the “spectator” into the concept “beautiful.” It would not have been so bad if this “spectator” had at least been sufficiently familiar to the philosophers of beauty—namely, as a great personal fact and experience, as an abundance of vivid authentic experiences, desires, surprises, and delights in the realm of the beautiful! But I fear that the reverse has always been the case; and so they have offered us, from the beginning, definitions in which, as in Kant’s famous definition of the beautiful, a lack of any refined first-hand experience reposes in the shape of a fat worm of error. “That is beautiful,” said Kant, “which gives us pleasure without interest.” Without interest! Compare with this definition one framed by a genuine “spectator” and artist—Stendhal, who once called the beautiful une promesse de bonheur. At any rate he rejected and repudiated the one point about the aesthetic condition which Kant had stressed: le désintéressement. Who is right, Kant or Stendhal? If our aestheticians never weary of asserting in Kant’s favor that, under the spell of beauty, one can even view undraped female statues “without interest,” one may laugh a little at their expense: the experiences of artists on this ticklish point are more “interesting,” and Pygmalion was in any event not necessarily an “unaesthetic man.”
p. 592
If ruins are script from whose sentences history reads, then it is so that the blowing-up of a ruin is the yearning to erase this script so as to set another in its place, but the sentence “campus ubi Palmyra fuit” cannot be exploded; by lying atop Troy, it regains the consolation of eternity through the metascript of the explosion.
The ancient ruins of the historic Syrian city Palmyra destroyed by ISIS. Image Source
campus ubi Palmyra fuit – (Latin) the field where Palmyra was.
p. 593
Palazzo del Te – a palace in the suburbs of Mantua, Italy. It is a fine example of the mannerist style of architecture, and the acknowledged masterpiece of Giulio Romano. Palazzo del Te was constructed 1524–34 for Federico II Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua, as a palace of leisure.
p. 594
“in Rome the palaces of he Caesars were still standing on the Palatine […]” – from Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents) by Sigmund Freud.
p. 595
Antefix – a vertical block which terminates and conceals the covering tiles of a tiled roof.
p. 601
Galanthus – a small genus of European bulbous herbs comprising the snowdrops.
Galantamine – used for the treatment of cognitive decline in mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease and various other memory impairments. It is an alkaloid that has been isolated from the bulbs and flowers of Galanthus nivalis (Common snowdrop).
p. 602
Crime and Punishment – the literal meaning of the German title Schuld und Sühne is “Guilt and Expiation”.
The Sudden Walk – a short story by Franz Kafka about an act of self-liberation. Here is the complete text:
The Sudden Walk
by Franz Kafka
Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir
When it looks as if you had made up your mind finally to stay at home for the evening, when you have put on your house jacket and sat down after supper with a light on the table to the piece of work or the game that usually precedes your going to bed, when the weather outside is unpleasant so that staying indoors seems natural, and when you have already been sitting quietly at the table for so long that your departure must occasion surprise to everyone, when, besides, the stairs are in darkness and the front door locked, and in spite of all that you have started up in a sudden fit of restlessness, changed your jacket, abruptly dressed yourself for the street, explained that you must go out and with a few curt words of leave-taking actually gone out, banging the flat door more or less hastily according to the degree of displeasure you think you have left behind you, and when you find yourself once more in the street with limbs swinging extra freely in answer to the unexpected liberty you have procured for them, when as a result of this decisive action you feel concentrated within yourself all the potentialities of decisive action, when you recognize with more than usual significance that your strength is greater than your need to accomplish effortlessly the swiftest of changes and to cope with it, when in this frame of mind you go striding down the long streets – then for that evening you have completely got away from your family, which fades into insubstantiality, while you yourself, a firm, boldly drawn black figure, slapping yourself on the thigh, grow to your true stature.
All this is still heightened if at such a late hour in the evening you look up a friend to see how he is getting on.
p. 603
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. […] – Matthew 11:28.
p. 608
The Ems Dispatch – was published on 13 July 1870 and incited the Second French Empire to start the Franco-Prussian War and to declare war on the Kingdom of Prussia on 19 July 1870. The actual dispatch was an internal message from Prussian King Wilhelm I’s vacationing site to Otto von Bismarck in Berlin, reporting demands made by the French ambassador. Bismarck, the chancellor of the North German Confederation, released a statement to the press, stirring up emotions in both France and Germany.
p. 609
Wilderich von Ketteler – 19th C. German landowner and politician.
Ludwig Windthorst – was a German politician and leader of the Catholic Centre Party and the most notable opponent of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck during the Prussian-led unification of Germany and the Kulturkampf.
p. 612
Operation Bernhard – a World War II Nazi counterfeiting scheme, in which skilled prisoners from Sachsenhausen concentration camp forged high-quality British £5, £10, £20, and £50 banknotes totalling around £134 million (equivalent to billions today). The initial plan was to drop the notes over Britain to bring about a collapse of the British economy during the Second World War.
p. 613
Hadschi Halef… – a fictional character that appears in various adventure novels by Karl May. He is the constant companion of the traveller Kara Ben Nemsi (May’s alter ego) on his perilous journeys across the Ottoman Empire.
p. 616
[…] a wooden table becomes visible in the evaporating fog, above it on the left, a typewriter seems to hover. A multi-colored raiment can now be seen to the left of that, it is cleverly folded to give the impression of being alive. I can touch the raiment, it’s quite stiff. Instead of the missing head, the raiment wears a hood of the same material as the shroud, a wiry halo floats above the veil, attached to the ceiling, one can easily pluck it free and set it onto one’s own head.
Perichoresis – a term referring to the relationship of the three persons of the triune God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) to one another.
“God says to you: Behold, you have My Son. […]” – from Luther’s interpretation of the Bible. The exact source is hard to identify.
p. 621
The cow is silent from then on. The other cattlehead is also silent, which can be explained by the fact that it no longer has a tongue. I dub the two heads the wise men from the east. You astrologers, why don’t you tell me, if what we speak of is a hidden God, then isn’t God presupposed? When I examine them thoroughly once more, I realize that they’re really skinned sheep’s heads.
Deus absconditus by Michael Triegel (Detail)
p. 623
“Here is wisdom. […]” – Revelation 13:18.
p. 624
“And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast […]” – Revelation 13:15.
“And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, […]” – Revelation 13:7.
p. 625
Kuno von Falkenstein – 17th C. nobleman, who, according to the legend, placed the Black Madonna of Neuerburg (das Schwarze Bildchen) into the hollow of an oak tree.
Ida, a beautiful damsel from Neuerburg, was courted by many a knight. […] the complete text of Das Schwarze Bildchen from the collection Neuerburger Sagen und Geschichten (Neuerburg Legends and Tales) by Hans Theis.
p. 626
“Toward the end of the year 1146, […]” – the complete text of Kuno von Falkenstein in Die Volkssagen der Stadt Freiburg im Breisgau (The Folk Legends of the City of Freiburg in Breisgau) by Heinrich Schreiber.
Bernhard von Clairvaux – Bernard of Clairvaux, venerated as Saint Bernard, was an abbot, mystic, co-founder of the Knights Templars, and a major leader in the reformation of the Benedictine Order through the nascent Cistercian Order.
p. 631
Sophie von La Roche – German writer whose first and most important work, Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771; History of Lady Sophia Sternheim), was the first German novel written by a woman.
p. 632
Soon after, we came upon a place where the ledges of the mountain were somewhat wider […] – from Tagebuch einer Reise durch die Schweiz (Diary of a Journey Through Switzerland) by Sophie von La Roche.
p. 636
“He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity […]” – Revelation 13:10.
Joseph Lortz – Roman Catholic church historian. He was a highly regarded Reformation historian and ecumenist. Beginning in the 1940s, Lortz made his ecumenical views available to general readers as well as to scholars in order to promote reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants.
p. 639
Hinan Knallsum – – anagram of “Niklas Luhmann”. Luhmann was a German sociologist, philosopher of social science, and a prominent thinker in systems theory
p. 641
Sheikh Mohammad Samiul Alam Rajon – a 13-year-old boy who was lynched and killed by four men on July 8, 2015, in Sylhet, Bangladesh. The four men who killed Rajon accused him of stealing a bike shortly before lashing, torturing, and beating him to death. A 28-minute video of Rajon’s murder was posted on social media, immediately sparking outrage in the local community.
p. 648
Haus Marienhöhe – the name of the nursing home in the municipality of Dahlem. It was opened in 2012.
Lehdam – anagram of “Dahlem”.
p. 650
Ludwig Kaas – was a German Roman Catholic priest and politician of the Centre Party during the Weimar Republic. He was instrumental in brokering the Reichskonkordat between the Holy See and the German Reich.
The Enabling Act of 1933 – was a law that gave the German Cabinet – most importantly, the Chancellor – the powers to make and enforce laws without the involvement of the Reichstag or Weimar President Paul von Hindenburg; leading to the rise of Nazi Germany.
p. 651
Katzenkopf – a military fort in the municipality of Irrel.
p. 654
Tettenbusch – a forest in Rhineland-Palatinate.
Tietz – Hermann Tietz was a German-Jewish merchant, co-founder of the Tietz Department Store.
Kreisleiter – (District Leader) was a Nazi Party political rank and title which existed as a political rank between 1930 and 1945 and as a Nazi Party title from as early as 1928. The position of Kreisleiter was first formed to provide German election district coordination and, after the Nazi assumption of power, the position became one of county municipal government, effectively replacing the traditional German government establishment.
Clemens August Graf von Galen – was a German count, Bishop of Münster, and cardinal of the Catholic Church. During World War II, Galen led Catholic protests against Nazi euthanasia and denounced Gestapo lawlessness and the persecution of the Church in Nazi Germany. He was appointed a cardinal by Pope Pius XII in 1946, shortly before his death, and was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2005.
p. 655
Hauptluftschutzführer – Head air protection leader, equivalent to captain.
p. 657
Klaus Barbie – a German operative of the SS and SD who worked in Vichy France during World War II. He became known as the “Butcher of Lyon” for having personally tortured prisoners—primarily Jews and members of the French Resistance—as the head of the Gestapo in Lyon.
Golden pheasants – in the Third Reich, was a pejorative term for high-ranking party members and military officers, alluding to the medals and awards they wore.
p. 658
Ruhr pocket – a battle of encirclement that took place in April 1945, on the Western Front near the end of the second World War, in the Ruhr Area of Germany. Some 317,000 German troops were taken prisoner along with 24 generals.
p. 660
Joachim Hoell – German author.
Opferring – the Nazi organisation for collecting donations which operated as a charity.
p. 661
Gauleitung – district administration in Nazi Germany.
p. 663
SA – Sturmabteilung (literally “Storm Detachment”) was the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.
p. 667
Traunstein – the highest mountain on the east bank of Traunsee in the district of Gmunden, Austria.
p. 669
they will tread with measured gait with your dead body, […] – from the poem at the end of Eduard Mörike’s novella Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag (Mozart’s Journey to Prague).
p. 672
Schauinsland – a mountain in the Black Forest with an elevation of 1,284 m above sea level.
Pyramidenkogel – a mountain in the Totes Gebirge in Austria.
p. 675
Ménière’s disease – a disease of the inner ear that is characterized by potentially severe and incapacitating episodes of vertigo, tinnitus, hearing loss, and a feeling of fullness in the ear.
Miesweg – a hiking trail in Gmunden.
p. 676
Skiwasser – soft drink based on raspberry syrup, lemon juice and water. It has its origin in the winter sports resorts of Austrian Tyrol, as part of the beverage offer on ski huts or lodges.
p. 679
Father said, and I took a couple more steps until, in the depths, I saw three horse-drawn barrows upon which men and women were bundled up right next to one another, they were awaiting the continuation of their journey. Who are they? I asked Father. They are being taken out of history, they have been waiting for you, Father said, then shoved me into the depths. As I fell, I saw their red, white, and rose-colored robes, the heads already partially without flesh, their bare legs covered over with boils.
Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany by Werner Tübke (Detail) Image Source
p. 680
Martin Silbeweg, Stigma Wir Leben, Er lebt im Wagnis – anagrams of “Lambert Wiesing”. Wiesing is a German philosopher specialising in phenomenology, theory of perception, image theory, and aesthetics. In his book Das Mich der Wahrnehmung. Eine Autopsie, he proposes a theory of perception from a phenomenological perspective.
p. 681
“And how shall I call upon my God, […]” – from St. Augustine’s Confessions.
“to be against, / nothing else but that, and always against,”[…], etc. – from Rilke’s Duino Elegies (The Eighth Elegy).
p. 683
My father is sitting in a wooden chair, neatly sawed from the choir stalls of the Prüm Abbey, the space underneath the chair is large enough for his house slippers. He would like to have his head examined, something needs to be removed, thus did we engage a doctor in a floor-length robe on our way, he wears an inverted funnel on his head and a wide girdle with a clay jug hanging from its golden clasp: “Meester shnijt die keye ras / Myne name Is lubbert das.”
The Extraction of the Stone of Madness by Hieronymus Bosch
Meester snyt die keye ras/ Myne name Is lubbert Das – (Middle Dutch) Master, cut the stone out, fast. My name is Lubbert Das.
Lubbertus – Sibrandus Lubbertus, a Dutch Calvinist theologian.
Cerretano – In medieval times, people claiming medical skills they did not have roamed throughout Italy, selling “medicine” that was often completely without worth. Many of these pretenders reputedly came from a village called Cerreto, and as a result, cerretano (meaning “inhabitant of Cerreto”) became an epithet for a quack physician (charlatan).
p. 684
Cotte – medieval outer garment, a long-sleeved shift, or tunic, usually girded, and worn by men and women.
Surcot – loose garment without sleeves worn over a suit of armour, sometimes coloured or embroidered with the wearer’s coat of arms.
p. 685
We see Prüm off in the distance. The path thereto leads past a gallows, a wheel, and a pyre.
The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Detail)
Christman Gniperdoliga – a German serial killer and bandit of the 16th century. He reportedly murdered 964 individuals starting in his youth over a 13-year period, from 1569 until his capture in 1581.
Groperunge from Kerpen, which doth lie two miles awey from Cologne – from 16th C. pamphlet Erschröckliche newe Zeytung Von einem Mörder Christman genant, welcher ist Gericht worden zu Bergkessel den 17. Juny diß 1581 Jars (Terrible News of a Murderer Named Christman, Who Was Executed in Bergkessel on June 17, 1581).
Page from the pamphlet: Erschröckliche newe Zeytung Von einem Mörder Christman genant…
this Christian Gnipperdinga, Christoff Grippertenius, Christoph Gnippentennig, etc. – all these are the names of the same criminal, which can be found in different sources.
p. 686
prodesse – (Latin) be useful, benefit, profit.
p. 687
Ars Magna – Ramon Lull’s combining logical system to discover the truth, conceived as an instrument to be used in interfaith dialogue to convert infidels.
p. 688
Lawyer Radbruch – Gustav Radbruch, a German legal scholar and politician. He served as Minister of Justice of Germany during the early Weimar period. Radbruch is also regarded as one of the most influential legal philosophers of the 20th century.
[…] the martyred one is lying more upon the wheel than he is woven into it, his arms and legs are bound to the wheel’s rim, the post stands so crookedly that the condemned man might be nursing the hope of crashing down headfirst to the ground along with the wheel, which would almost certainly break his neck, but no, he just lies there on high and must be most terrified of his own thirst and the sun, which shall only succeed in consuming him some days later, […]
p. 689
I see a red-robed, donkey-eared pope, I say. He is seated upon small monster-beasts in a praying position, the thighs at right angles to the erect upper body, the lower legs slightly bent—about a dozen demons in the form of men and beasts surround him in a circle, the tiara with the cross atop it is flying off of his head at this very moment, the pope has his eyes shut. What are you looking at, my father asks, then takes the binoculars from my hands. Where is the pope, he asks. The pope is in the sky, I say.
Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany by Werner Tübke (Detail)
p. 690
ADSS – Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale (Acts and Documents of the Holy See related to the Second World War) is an eleven-volume collection of documents from the Vatican historical archives, related to the papacy of Pope Pius XII during World War II.
p. 691
As we continue on, we unexpectedly come upon a field of snow. – they enter Tübke’s panorama through the winter section.
p. 692
Herr Behrendt – Harald Behrendt, the author of the monograph Werner Tübkes Panoramabild in Bad Frankenhausen (Werner Tübke’s Panorama in Bad Frankenhausen). (Derrik’s find)
p. 693
mit deme rade brehhan – (Old High German) break on the wheel.
p. 694
There, Father says, then points to a cylindrical building that is probably about a kilometer away from us, located on a mountaintop and visible from afar, a foreign body that has only just landed here.
The Panorama Museum in Bad Frankenhausen. Image Source
Cylindrical building – the cylindrical building of the Panorama Museum in Bad Frankenhausen was built specifically to house Tübke’s painting.
p. 695
a certain Müller, first name forgotten – German architect and engineer Herbert Müller. One of his most well‑known buildings is the Panorama Museum in Bad Frankenhausen.
p. 697
Special measures were required […] – from Bauplanung-bautechnik, Volume 32, 1978. Scanned image of the page with the same text in German can be found on page 705 of Schattenfroh.
Schlachtberg – the hill in Bad Frankenhausen on which the decisive battle of the Peasants’ War was fought. It ended in a catastrophic defeat for the peasants.
Barbarossa Cave – an anhydrite cave (gypsum cave) in the Kyffhäuser Hills near Rottleben in the east German state of Thuringia.
p. 699
[…] in the central image-zone, which cannot disavow its allegorical horizon, Pilate appears in a black robe and a black hat, he dips his hands into a metal basin surrounded by fish-demons and washes them of responsibility, his face averted, meanwhile, the demons practice their biting, a jester grotesquely contorting himself in dance and staring at us unabashedly, with red shoes, yellow pants, a gray-black pleated skirt, and a red jerkin fastened with a thread, a much-too-large white collar peeks forth from it, it causes the bell-equipped jester’s hat to appear as a bishop’s miter, […]
Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany by Werner Tübke (Detail)
[…] while Christ, a few strides north, over Justitia balanced upon the globe, struggling to hold her posture, baring her right leg, the transparent stocking, or is it a shoe, between knee and ankle, the sword in her right hand, […] flies toward us backward, his head stretched back very far so that he might see us, […] this Christ as an outlawed outlaw who no longer needs a cross in order to be crucified, he himself is the cross, […]
Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany by Werner Tübke (Detail)
p. 701
Pick’s disease – a rare type of age-related dementia that affects the frontal lobes of the brain and causes speech problems like aphasia, behaviour difficulties and eventually death.
p. 702
“Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, […]” – Psalm 1:1.
p. 705
Soffit – the underside of an architectural structure such as an arch, a balcony, or overhanging eaves.
Shell roof – a roof of relatively large expanse composed of concrete panels curved cylindrically or spherically for strength.
p. 707
The entire white- to eggshell-colored front of the building is subdivided by sixteen sandstone columns, which seem to have been relieved of their task of supporting the roof and are thus statically superfluous as far as the roof is concerned, though there is no doubt they are meant to recall representational buildings with their elaborately decorated portals and the porticos before them.
the entire square or forecourt of the building is empty with the exception of two people or human-like figures […]
Piazza d’Italia (1913) by Giorgio de Chirico
p. 708
[…] a girl driving a hoop across the square with a stick […]
pp. 722-723
He sees a square that is atypical for this region and more representative of southern climate zones, it has two pointed buildings facing each other, they have arcade-passages, the one on the left shines in white, it has a red roof and is very long, as if one’s gaze were stretching it off into the distance, […] the square itself is stretched to the point of breaking, as if, once one had set out, one would never be able to reach one’s destination, but would have to be incessantly in motion, and that is precisely what the girl shows by way of her posture, which is more reminiscent of flight than of play, […]
Mystery and Melancholy of a Street by Giorgio de Chirico
p. 708
One sculpture […] is performing a bow that exists somewhere between submission and mischief, its legs are crossed, the left in front of the right, it’s standing upon the outer edges of its feet, it is wearing pants, its upper body bare the arms stretched out to the front as if they were being hurled away, the left hand turned outward, if the legs weren’t positioned thusly, one might think that the figure was practicing a head-first dive into the water;
Levity. From Lotta Blokker’s series I am here now. Image Source
the second figure, also in pants and with a bare torso, stands a few meters off with its head stretched backward, the arms are at the sides of its erect body, the hands with the palms turned outward, an exalted posture, but, simultaneously, the corporeal expression allows for this interpretation, there is something imploring in its gaze toward the heavens;
I am Here Now. From Lotta Blokker’s series I am here now. Image Source
the third figure lies upon a stone plinth with drawn-up legs;
Precipice. From Lotta Blokker’s series I am here now. Image Source
p. 710
A figure bent forward, a young man, naked, he is shouldering a naked young man—himself, apparently.
Atlas. From Lotta Blokker’s series I am here now. Image Source
p. 711
the reinforced concrete beams on the outer circle and in the inner ring, […] – from Bauplanung-bautechnik, Volume 32, 1978.
p. 724
Pilatus Railway (Pilatusbahn) – a mountain railway in Switzerland and the steepest rack railway in the world.
Budavári Sikló (the Budapest Castle Hill Funicular) – a funicular railway in the city of Budapest, in Hungary. It links the Adam Clark Square and the Széchenyi Chain Bridge at river level to Buda Castle above.
p. 726
Being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein) – Martin Heidegger’s replacement for terms such as subject, object, consciousness, and world. For him, the split of things into subject/object, as is found in the Western tradition and even in language, must be overcome.
Mindergag Heiter – anagram of “Martin Heidegger”.
p. 729
Ebert Neuwerk, Knut Werbeere, Kurt Werebene – anagrams of “Werner Tübke”.
p. 731
The middle of the space forms a great golden shell around which the nine people are standing. Twelve more people—it is not clear whether they belong—are also in the vicinity of the basin. When the nine catch sight of us, they signal to please come forward, covertly pointing toward the basin as they do, they seem uncomfortable with it or to think that they must excuse it away as a table for drinks. “It’s called the ‘Fountain of Immortality,’” says the woman standing furthest to the right, draped in a red raiment from head almost down to toe, she points toward the fountain with her left hand.
Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany by Werner Tübke (Detail) From left to right: Hans Hut, Melchior Rinck, Hans Sachs, Peter Vischer, Veit Stoss, Tilman Riemenschneider, Jörg Ratgeb, Albrecht Dürer, Martin Luther, Lucas Cranach; Sebastian Brant, Philipp Melanchthon, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Ulrich von Hutten, Nicolas Copernicus, Paracelsus, Columbus, Johannes Gutenberg, Bartholomeus Welser, and Jakob Fugger.
p. 732
Jörg Ratgeb – a German painter during the Renaissance, and a contemporary of Albrecht Dürer. After the suppression of the peasants’ rebellion, he was arrested, accused of high treason and executed in Pforzheim in 1526, by being torn apart by four horses.
p. 733
Tilman Riemenschneider – a German sculptor and woodcarver active in Würzburg from 1483. He was one of the most prolific and versatile sculptors of the transition period between late Gothic and Renaissance, a master in stone and limewood.
Veit Stoß – a 15-16 C. leading German sculptor, mostly working with wood, whose career covered the transition between the late Gothic and the Northern Renaissance.
p. 734
“rehabilitated and cleared of his deed” – from Emperor Maximilian’s letter of pardon.
Inés Pelzl – a German art historian, the author of Veit Stoss’s biography Veit Stoß: Künstler mit verlorener Ehre (Veit Stoß: An Artist with Lost Honour).
p. 735
Adam Kraft – a German stone sculptor and master builder of the late Gothic period, based in Nuremberg. His masterpiece is considered to be the 18.7-metre-tall tabernacle at St. Lorenz, Nuremberg.
Willibald Pirckheimer – a German lawyer, author, and Renaissance humanist. He was one of the most important cultural patrons of Germany. He was the closest friend of Albrecht Dürer, who made a number of portraits of him, and a close friend of the great humanist and theologian Erasmus.
p. 736
Peter Vischer – a German sculptor, the son of Hermann Vischer, and the most notable member of the Vischer Family of Nuremberg.
p. 737
“And that is just like us, for we have had a command from God, and we must wait for the end, and let God take care of us. […]” – from Thomas Müntzer’s sermon on the battlefield at Frankenhausen on May 15, 1525, known as Die Feldpredigt (The Field Sermon).
p. 738
“But what are these princes? […]” – from Die Feldpredigt.
p. 739
while a gaunt man dressed all in black and with a big triangular flag in his left hand approaches, it is to him that the voice can clearly be attributed, he is followed by three drummers and Death playing the bagpipes, Death is sitting upon a saddled tree stump with elephant legs.
Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany by Werner Tübke (Detail)
a gaunt man dressed all in black – Thomas Müntzer as depicted by Tübke in his panorama.
Peascod belly – a type of exaggeratedly padded stomach that was very popular in men’s dress in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
p. 741
“a white banner, thirty ells long and made of silk,” – from bailiff Hans Sittich von Berlepsch’s report about Thomas Müntzer.
verbum domini maneat in eternum – the word of the Lord endureth forever.
p. 742
With his head turned away, the gaunt man’s right hand points toward a group of men standing a mere few meters from him, they are falling upon one another with cutting and stabbing weapons, the object of their confrontation seems to be the flag inscribed with an archaic form of the word “FREEDOM,” which causes Father to speak of the perilous concentration of anti-feudal forces.
Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany by Werner Tübke (Detail)
Ernest II, Count of Mansfeld-Vorderort – a German nobleman from the Mansfeld-Vorderort line of the House of Mansfeld.
p. 743
Engberlin – anagram of “Ringleben”, a village in Thuringia. (Derrik’s find)
George the Bearded – Duke of Saxony from 1500 to 1539 known for his opposition to the Reformation.
Erich Mol von Klebtenzu, Rico von Klebten zu Helm – anagrams of “Melchior von Kutzleben”, bailiff at Sangerhausen. (Derrik’s find)
Gassenhauern, Grauenhassen, etc. – anagrams of “Sangerhausen”, a town in Saxony-Anhalt, central Germany. (Thanks are due to Artem for solving this puzzle.)
p. 744
Albrecht VII – a German noble of the House of Mansfeld who was notable for his support of the Reformation.
Horstesauen – anagram of “Osterhausen”, a village in Saxony-Anhalt. (Derrik’s find)
p. 745
Narrte – anagram of “Artern”, a town in Thuringia. (Derrik’s find)
p. 746
Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse, nicknamed der Großmütige – a German nobleman and champion of the Protestant Reformation, notable for being one of the most important of the early Protestant rulers in Germany.
p. 747
“But what do our princes do? […]” – from Die Feldpredigt.
p. 748
House of Hohenlohe – a German princely dynasty.
Heinrich of Brunswick – Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, Prince of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, reigned from 1514 until his death in 1568 and is considered the last Catholic prince in Lower Saxony.
“These are the princely virtues which they parade around. […]” – from Die Feldpredigt.
p. 749
Hans Hut – German Anabaptist preacher, a bookbinder and distiller from the borders of Franconia and Thuringia who deployed his eloquence in the service of a series of radical Anabaptist communities.
p. 750
“If you turn over to us, alive, the false prophet Thomas Müntzer […]” – from Luther’s pamphlet against Thomas Müntzer.
“ought only dispute heartily and be bold” – from Hans Hut’s interrogation records.
Cantate – the fourth Sunday after Easter.
p. 752
Katzbalger – a short Renaissance sword, notable for its sturdy build and a distinctive s-shaped or figure-8 shaped guard.
“And just as God praised Phineas […]” – from Die Feldpredigt.
p. 753
Misericorde – a long, narrow knife, used from the High Middle Ages to deliver the death stroke to a seriously wounded knight.
It is not to be considered a miracle that God will give victory […] – from Die Feldpredigt.
p. 754
Gideon – a military leader, judge and prophet whose calling and victory over the Midianites are recounted in Judges 6–8 of the Book of Judges in the Hebrew Bible.
“Do not let your weak flesh be terrified […]” – last paragraph of Die Feldpredigt.
p. 756
Greetings, noble, well-born Count. […] slightly altered Thomas Müntzer’s 22 September 1523 letter to Count Mansfeld.
p. 757
Open letter to brother Ernst at Heldrungen, that he might change his ways. […] – slightly altered Thomas Müntzer’s 12 May 1525 open letter to Count Mansfeld.
p. 760
“This sign shall testify that such books as bear it have gone through my hands, for there is much illegal printing and corruption of books these days.” – the statement that appeared on authorised editions of Luther’s Bible next to the Luther family coat of arms (the Luther rose).
p. 761
Obermaubach – a village in North Rhine-Westphalia.
p. 763
Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler – a German theologian and politician who served as Bishop of Mainz. His social teachings became influential during the papacy of Leo XIII.
p. 765
Aktion T4 – a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany.
Martin Bormann – a German Nazi Party official and head of the Nazi Party Chancellery. He gained immense power by using his position as Adolf Hitler’s private secretary to control the flow of information and access to Hitler.
p. 766
Durchs wilde Kurdistan (Through Wild Kurdistan) – Karl May’s novel from the Orient Cycle.
p. 767
Ruh’i Kulyan (ghost of the cave) – real identity of Marah Durimeh, a Kurdish princess in Karl May’s novels about Kara Ben Nemsi.
Ludwig Staudenmaier – a German priest, scientist and esotericist. He wrote the book Die Magie als experimentelle Naturwissenschaft (Magic as an Experimental Natural Science).
pp. 769-770
Ulna – a long bone found in the forearm that stretches from the elbow to the smallest finger.
the sun-halo forms the head of the crucifix with an angel tumbling down headfirst upon it, at one moment, it appears as Icarus, at another, as the angel Satan, the gaunt man himself is the midpoint, the heart of this truly over-dimensioned cross, the size of which alone is already blasphemy […]
Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany by Werner Tübke (Detail)
“Through long chain of hands / For by elements is hated […]” – lines from Friedrich Schiller’s Das Lied von der Glocke (Song of the Bell) In this poem, Schiller combines a knowledgeable technical description of a bellfounding with points of view and comments on human life, its possibilities and risks.
“beshitten prophet and lie-filled murderspirit” – Luther’s epithets for Müntzer.
p. 752
the flag of the princely horde is adorned by a false bird of prey, which, in truth, is likely to be a vulture and belongs not in the slightest to the flag, instead, it always hovers before it, […]
p.771
This enrages the vulture very much, for it has always claimed to be faster and sharper than any pike, it makes every effort to tear itself free from its own shadow. It doesn’t get even a single millimeter away from it.
Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany by Werner Tübke (Detail)
p. 774
“tear down all the castles and homes of nobility and leave nothing standing” – from Müntzer’s letter to the Mühlhausen Brothers.
p. 775
“all glory, fame and honor, all dignity and splendor” – From Müntzer’s letter titled Hochverursachte Schutzrede und Antwort wider das geistlose, sanftlebende Fleisch zu Wittenberg (Highly Justified Defence and Reply against the the Spiritless, Soft-Living Flesh in Wittenberg).The “spiritless, soft-living flesh” is Martin Luther.
pp. 776-777
The burning sea rages behind the procession of the muses. There is no sea. Flamelambent, constricting projectiles, not air, not earth. Spinning clouds that whirl skeletons. […] At the edge of the column, the sower with the red trousers bound below the knee. Van Gogh, above the left knee, in magma. Bismarck, right above van Gogh. […] Adam and Eve shall also disappear into the crevice, toward which the sower and the woman riding the white horse are moving, and the muses too shall tumble into the abyss of the cleft.
Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany by Werner Tübke (Detail)
p. 778
“God that is all good and almyghtye / Hath shewed his power upon me Nobody […] – from Jörg Schan’s 16th C. poem Der wohlredendt Niemant (The Well-Spoken Nobody).
What occurs yonder, where art thou? […] Hullo, I beeth a poor sick man … etc. – from Wittenberg bookseller Johann Rühel’s report to Luther about the capture of Thomas Müntzer.
p. 781
Durum – Roman name of Düren.
House of Wettin – a dynasty of German kings, prince-electors, dukes, and counts that once ruled territories in the present-day German states of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia.
my father seems to have become the not-even-twenty-five-year-old Philipp I von Durum – the father has assumed the identity of Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse.
p. 784
And it came to pass in the fourth year […] – Jeremiah 36.
p. 790
Occus Boccus – variant of Hocus Pocus, which can be found in the Italian saying “Occus boccus, chi nasce matto non guarisce mai” (Occus boccus, he who is born mad will never be cured.)
p. 791
Geldhernun, etc. – Heldrungen Castle, belonging to Ernest II, Count of Mansfeld-Vorderort.
“I do urge and exhort you, […] “Just tell us, you miserable […] You shall and will have to prove […]” etc. – from Thomas Müntzer’s 12 May 1525 open letter to Count Mansfeld.
p. 795
Grschwbtt – a soldier from Soldatenleben (Soldier’s Life), a story from Johann Michael Moscherosch’s collection of satirical narratives Wunderliche und warhafftige Gesichte Philanders von Sittewald (Wondrous and True Visions of Philander von Sittewald). Moscherosch published essays, poems and short stories in Latin and German under the pseudonym Philander von Sittewald—“Sittewald” is a play on the name of his birthplace, Willstaett. In 1645 Prince Ludwig I of Anhalt-Köthen awarded him membership in the Fruitbearing Society.
“When I get up in the morning, Grschwbtt spoke […]” – from Soldatenleben.
p. 796
Abludihn – anagram of “Hunibald”.
Findigerem, Miederfing and Einigfremd – anagrams of “Meginfried” (Meginfrid). (Both Derrik’s finds)
Hunibald and Meginfrid were purported early medieval chroniclers, cited by the German scholar and abbot Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516). Hunibald was said to write on the origins of the Franks, and Meginfrid on early monastic history, but modern scholarship regards both as likely fictitious, illustrating the medieval and Renaissance practice of inventing historical authorities.
Antipalus Maleficiorum (The Enemy of Witchcraft) – an immense bibliography of magical works compiled by Johannes Trithemius, German Benedictine abbot and a polymath who was active in the German Renaissance as a lexicographer, chronicler, cryptographer, and occultist.
Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) – treatise on witchcraft written by the German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer and first published in 1486. It has been described as the compendium of literature in demonology of the 15th century.
Jens Noah von Heidenberg – Johannes Trithemius, a German Benedictine abbot and a polymath who was active in the German Renaissance as a lexicographer, chronicler, cryptographer, and occultist.
“When copying texts by hand […]” – from Niklas Luhmann’s Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (The Society of Society), a two-part work that is the culmination of his thirty-year theoretical project to reconceptualise sociology, offering a comprehensive description of modern society.
p. 797
Quid necesse est me scribendo… – from Johannes Trithemius’ De laude scriptorum (In Praise of Scribes). The translation immediately follows.
p. 800
[…] after overcoming a kind of continental fissure or orchestra pit, our group first circumvents a fourteen-person shofar-choir, which has positioned itself in the fissure or pit and split up into two back-to-back ensembles of seven blowers, one of them is playing westward, into the past, the other is playing eastward, into the future, then our group goes down a stone staircase, which leads past the missing eastern side of a small ruined house, if it weren’t for the marble floor with lozenges of black and white, one might well think it to be a stable, the group presses along the long southern flank of the ruins, in the vicinity of which a princely table has gathered and is eating, while peasants come along hunched over and pay their tithes in the form of natural produce, […] behind the peasants, a wingèd, fire-breathing dragon has swung onto the western wall;
Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany by Werner Tübke (Detail)
fourteen-person shofar-choir – the trumpeters become shofar players in Lentz’s text.
p. 802
Pavane – a slow processional dance common in Europe during the 16th century.
p. 805
“The big fork, which was given to Lucifer, who was standing in the corner in a childlike huff […]” – the same text as on page 262. (Lucifer’s prediction has come true.)
p. 806
“Now Schattenfroh is straitly shut up before of its readers: no signifying meaning goeth out, […]” – the text of Joshua 6 (The Destruction of Jericho), with some alterations.
pp. 809-810
We meet nine people occupied with printing, all of them wearing head coverings, sometimes they’re blue, sometimes they’re palepink and pointed, both variations, especially the blue one, look like jester’s hats; […] In the printing works, with all of its crowding and the confused simultaneity of its processes, the sequence of individual steps can hardly be understood.
Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany by Werner Tübke (Detail)
p. 811
Tenacle – a constituent part of the copyholder fitted with a screw clamp so it can be attached to the edge of the type case.
p. 812
Divisorium – a wooden or metal fork that is slides over the tenakel. It holds the manuscript sheet and at the same time marks the line to be typeset.
Divisorium and tenacle
p. 813
Quoins – metal wedges which fit into the space between the type and the edge of a chase, and are tightened to fix the metal type in place.
p. 819
John Ormsby’s translation of the first page of Chapter XXIV of Don Quixote:
CHAPTER XXIV
WHEREIN ARE RELATED A THOUSAND TRIFLING MATTERS, AS TRIVIAL AS THEY ARE NECESSARY TO THE RIGHT UNDERSTANDING OF THIS GREAT HISTORY
He who translated this great history from the original written by its first author, Cide Hamete Benengeli, says that on coming to the chapter giving the adventures of the cave of Montesinos he found written on the margin of it, in Hamete’s own hand, these exact words:
“I cannot convince or persuade myself that everything that is written in the preceding chapter could have precisely happened to the valiant Don Quixote; and for this reason, that all the adventures that have occurred up to the present have been possible and probable; but as for this one of the cave, I see no way of accepting it as true, as it passes all reasonable bounds. For me to believe that Don Quixote could lie, he being the most truthful gentleman and the noblest knight of his time, is impossible; he would not have told a lie though he were shot to death with arrows. On the other hand, I reflect that he related and told the story with all the circumstances detailed, and that he could not in so short a space have fabricated such a vast complication of absurdities; if, then, this adventure seems apocryphal, it is no fault of mine; and so, without affirming its falsehood or its truth, I write it down. Decide for thyself in thy wisdom, reader; for I am not bound, nor is it in my power, to do more; though certain it is they say that at the time of his death he retracted, and said he had invented it, thinking it matched and tallied with the adventures he had read of in his histories.” And then he goes on to say:
The cousin was amazed as well at Sancho’s boldness as at the patience of his master, and concluded that the good temper the latter displayed arose from the happiness he felt at having seen his lady Dulcinea, even enchanted as she was; because otherwise the words and language Sancho had addressed to him
p. 820
Hoffman is perplexed, he cannot find the passages he read aloud from my book […] – passage from page 423 of Schattenfroh.
Stefan Horcht – anagram of “Schattenfroh”. (Derrik’s find)
Antimony – a lustrous grey metalloid that is found in nature mainly as the sulphide mineral stibnite.
p. 828
Shoulder – the curve at the beginning of a leg of a character.
Counter – the open space in a fully or partly closed area within a letter.
p. 829
“for the Imagination is as it were pitch […]” – from Paracelsus’ treatise Von der Imagination in Philippi Theophrasti Paracelsi von Hohenhaim etliche Tractetlein zur Archidoxa gehörig.
p. 830
Lead lice – imaginary creatures that supposedly hid in typecases and could be made visible by pouring water on the type. The main idea was to play a practical joke on a trainee when the more experienced typesetters pretended to see the mythical lice, which the newbie obviously couldn’t.
December Testament – the second, revised edition of Martin Luther’s German translation of the New Testament.
p. 832
“I pour type in the print shop to begin / It is made of bismuth, lead, and tin, / I arrange the type accordingly, / Putting letters in order as need be / like this:”
The Type Founder by Jost Amman
“I pour type in the print shop to begin […]” – slightly altered text of German Meistersinger Hans Sachs’s poem accompanying Jost Amman’s woodcut Der Schriftgiesser (The Typefounder)
“Once a forme has just been printed […]” – from Hieronymus Hornschuch’s poem Der Edle Greiff in his 17th C. proofreading texbook Orthotypographia.
Deleatur – deletion mark in proofreading (₰).
p. 834
Paraphe – initials; signature stamp.
Catchword – a word under the right-hand side of the last line on a book page that repeats the first word on the following page.
p. 835
Maculopapular rash – a type of rash characterised by a flat, red area on the skin that is covered with small confluent bumps.
p. 836
Hieronymus Emser – German theologian, lecturer, editor, and polemicist who is remembered chiefly for his long public controversy with Martin Luther at the onset of the Reformation. Emser wrote eight polemical tracts against Luther.
Upper German – the group of High German dialects spoken in southern Germany, Alsace, Switzerland, and Austria.
Currency dispute (Münzstreit) – 16th C. dispute about a proposed devaluation of the Saxon currency.
p. 837
164 more pages – indeed: we are on page 837, and it will take 164 more pages to reach page 1001, the final one.
p. 838
I might add that the book carousel or reading wheel to be presented by Agostino Ramelli in sixty-three years […] would be the beginning of a mobilization and an acceleration of reading […]
Bookwheel, from Agostino Ramelli’s Le diverse et artificiose machine
Agostino Ramelli – an Italian engineer best known for writing and illustrating the book of engineering designs Le diverse et artificiose machine del Capitano Agostino Ramelli, which contains, among others, his design for the bookwheel.
p. 839
Robert Carlton Brown – American writer and publisher. In his 1930 essay The Readies he called for a new reading machine and new reading material for it called “The Readies”. In his own words:
“To continue reading at today’s speed I must have a machine. A simple reading machine which I can carry or move around and attach to any old electric light plug and read hundred thousand word novels in ten minutes if I want to, and I want to. A machine as handy as a portable phonograph, typewriter or radio, compact, minute operated by electricity, the printing done microscopically by the new photographic process on a transparent tough tissue roll which carries the contents of a book and is no bigger than a typewriter ribbon, a roll like a miniature serpentine that can be put in a pill box. This reading film unrolls beneath a narrow magnifying glass four or five inches long set in a reading slit, the glass brings up the otherwise unreadable type to comfortable reading size, and the reader is rid at last of the cumbersome book, the inconvenience of holding its bulk, turning its pages, keeping them clean, jiggling his weary eyes back and forth in the awkward pursuit of words from the upper left hand corner to the lower right, all over the vast confusing reading surface of a page […. ] My machine is equipped with controls so the reading record can be turned back or shot ahead, a chapter read or the happy ending anticipated. The magnifying glass is so set that it can be moved nearer to or father from the type, so the reader may browse in 6 points, 8, 10, 12, 16 or any size that suits him. Many books remain unread today owing to the unsuitable size of type in which they are printed. A number of readers cannot stand the strain of small type and other intellectual prowlers are offended by Great Primer. The reading machine allows free choice in type-point, it is not a fixed arbitrary bound object but an adaptable carrier of flexible, flowing reading matter.”
p. 841
Le mort Venez danser vng tourdion Jmprimeurs sus legierement Venez tost/ pour conclusion Mourir vous fault certainement Faictes vng sault habillement Presses / & capses vous fault laisser Reculer ny fault nullement Alouurage on congnoist louurier.
Woodcut from La grant danse macabre des hommes et des femmes by Mathias Huss. Image Source
Le mort: Venez danser vng tourdion […] – from Mathias Huss’ book Danse macabre published in Lyon in 1499. The book contains the first illustration of a printing press and printing workshop in a printed book. The image shows death visiting a printing workshop and a bookseller’s shop.
p. 843
Is the image the empty page, Gijsbrechts’s backside of a framed painting, not as the image of an image, but as empty bookpage of empty bookpage; not painted as a panel, but printed as a bookpage.
The Reverse of a Framed Painting by Cornelis Norbertus Gysbrechts
Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts – a Flemish painter who was active in the Spanish Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Sweden in the second half of the seventeenth century. He was a court painter to the Danish royal family. He specialised in trompe-l’œil still lifes.
p. 847
Knut Werbeere, Rene Tubewerk, etc. – anagrams of “Werner Tübke”.
p. 848
Frueh gross Joerg ratendem […] – all three lines are anagrams of one another.
p. 849
Circumvallate papillae – dome-shaped structures on the upper surface of the tongue.
Rursee – lake in the Eifel region.
Rur Dam – a 77.2 metre high dam located in the southwestern part of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany.
p. 850
Stalagnate – a column from the ceiling to the floor of a limestone cave, which is usually formed when a stalactite and a stalagmite meet.
p. 851
Schloss Grundlehne – Heldrungen Castle.
I am going to be mistreated according to Hundregeln […]: zur Lehrendung nach Hundregeln traktieren – anagrammatic pun in which the name of the Heldrungen Castle is used. Literally: maltreat according to dog rules to teach a dung lesson.
p. 851
[…] what I can see is a horse standing next to a printing press, a woman sits upon it in a red leather-cloth saddle, a smoking torch or candle in her left hand, […] I can decide for myself whether I don’t recognize myself in this man, gaunt, bald-headed, truculent ambition in the gaze, where does my mother’s right hand point, she points to a small soul-figure slipping out of the mouth of an old man in a crew-neck hospital gown, gray and blue diamonds strung up and linked upon the white cotton, the last bit pulled out of the mouth by an angel or demon or demonic angel hovering in the air with red-glowing wings and fire-flaming hair as a midwife has, it is a soul-birth, […]
Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany by Werner Tübke (Detail)
a woman sits upon it in a red leather-cloth saddle […] I can decide for myself whether I don’t recognize myself in this man, […] – The woman on the horse is Tübke’s third wife Brigitte Tübke-Schellenberger. The artist with a palette and a brush standing next to the horse is Tübke himself.
p. 852
[…] an aerial painting, based, however, on an original that paints a completely different image, in this one, the obstetrician is a graceful angel with curly hair and fluttering dress, the soul—a well-formed child with already aged head, its long arms stretched out toward the angel, it gazes most trustfully at the angel and the angel does not tear it forth, but receives it unto itself most calmly, […]
Woodcut from Mortilogus by Conrad Reiter. Image Source
p. 857
Ossenboch – possibly a variant of Ossenborch, an old name for Ochsenburg. (Derrik’s suggestion)
Goldene Aue – a valley in eastern Germany, in the states Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt.
p. 858
skeletal (about soil) – referring to soils that contain 35 percent or more of rock fragments, cobbles, gravel and laterite concretions or ironstones.
p. 859
Coleopterological – related to the scientific study of beetles.
Blaps lethifera – a species of beetle in the family Tenebrionidae, the darkling beetles.
p. 860
Liebsolden, Lobendlies – anagrams of “Oldisleben”, a village and in the district Kyffhäuserkreis, in Thuringia. (Derrik’s find)
p. 861
Matthias Bilderhand, Daherblind – anagrams of “Hildebrand”. Matthias Hildebrand was a monk who participated in Thomas Müntzer’s rebellion. (Derrik’s find)
p. 862
Weißer Berg –the name of the 266-metre hill on which the Battle of Frankenhausen took place. The present name is Schlachtberg.
p. 866
“On, on, onward, for the fire is hot! […]” – Müntzer’s words.
p. 867
Oast house – a building designed for kilning hops.
Vaubanian earthen bastions – Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban was a French military engineer who worked under Louis XIV. He is generally considered the greatest engineer of his time, and one of the most important in European military history. His principles for fortifications were widely used for nearly 100 years, while aspects of his offensive tactics remained in use until the mid-twentieth century.
p. 869
with my mere 36 years – the age of Thomas Müntzer at the time of his death.
p. 876
Hildegard von Bingen – a German Benedictine abbess and polymath active as a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, and as a medical writer and practitioner during the High Middle Ages.
p. 877
Baruch ben Neriah – the scribe, disciple, secretary, and devoted friend of the Biblical prophet Jeremiah. He is traditionally credited with authoring the Book of Baruch.
“I am grateful to the famous Simonides of Ceos […]” – from Cicero’s De Oratore, a detailed study of the techniques and skills required by the ideal orator.
p. 878
“Beautiful, firm standing on the image-stage, […]” – from a 1984 issue of the GDR magazine Bildende Kunst.
p. 880
Drei Chinesen mit dem Kontrabass (Three Chinamen with a Double Bass) – a popular nonsensical German children’s song. Its distinctive feature is a very simple form of word play: while the lyrics remain in effect unchanged, in each consecutive stanza all the vowels are replaced by one single vowel, with that single vowel changing in each new stanza.
Johann Kaspar Schade – 17th C. German Lutheran preacher, author and poet. The “Berlin Confession Controversy” (a dispute within Lutheranism in Berlin regarding the abolition of individual confession) is particularly associated with him.
p. 885
Eleven articles – the eleven articles of the humorous “Cologne Constitution”
The complete text of the Constitution:
1. Et es wie et es. – It is what it is.
2. Et kütt wie et kütt. – Whatever will be, will be.
3. Et hätt noch immer jot jejange. – It has always worked out.
4. Wat fott es, es fott. – Whatever is gone, is gone.
5. Nix bliev wie et wor. – Nothing remains as it was.
6. Kenne mer nit, bruche mer nit, fott domet. – What we don’t know, we don’t need, be gone.
7. Wat wellste maache? – What can you do?
8. Mach et jot ävver nit ze off. – Fare well but not too often.
9. Wat soll dä Quatsch? – What the heck is that?
10. Drinkste ene met? – Join in! Let’s have a drink!
11. Do laachste dech kapott. – You’ll split your sides laughing.
p. 886
Quia parvus error in principio magnus est in fine – Because a small mistake in the beginning is a big one in the end. From Thomas Aquinas’ On Being and Essence.
p. 888
Wolfgang Reis – “Reis” is an anagram of “Iser”. Wolfgang Iser was a German literary scholar known for his contribution to reader-response criticism. (Derrik’s find)
the master wants to set the game in motion, the evil-doers are for it – from Thomas Müntzer’s Letter to the Miners.
p. 889
modal-logical conclusion – modal logic is the study of the deductive behaviour of the expressions “it is necessary that” and “it is possible that”. However, the term “modal logic” may be used more broadly for a family of related systems. These include logics for belief, for tense and other temporal expressions, for the deontic (moral) expressions such as “it is obligatory that” and “it is permitted that”, and many others.
p. 892
“Abidaga went once more to the stable, […]” etc. – from Ivo Andrić’s novel The Bridge on the Drina.
Arshin – a measurement of extent in Turkey and Russia equal to 28 inches (71 centimetres).
p. 897
“Death is a constant quantity—only pain is variable and may be intensified infinitely.” – from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s collection of aphorisms Sudelbücher (Waste Books).
pp. 900-901
Dürer recently dreamt a better dream, Mateo says, then reads out from the book: “In 1525, during the night between Wednesday and Thursday after Whitsuntide, I had this vision in my sleep, and saw how many great waters fell from heaven. The first struck the ground about four miles away from me with such a terrible force, enormous noise and splashing that it drowned the entire countryside. […]
Dream Vision by Albrecht Dürer
p. 904
Hypogram – came into use among 20th-C. semioticians to describe the “theme word” (mot-thème) or absent text, seme, or presupposition that furnishes a nucleus from which a poem’s “given” structure takes its form.
p. 907
Apodictic – absolutely certain or necessarily true.
Pascal’s wager – a philosophical argument presented by the 17th-C. French philosopher Blaise Pascal. Pascal argues that a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas if God does exist, he stands to receive infinite gains (as represented by eternity in Heaven) and avoid infinite losses (an eternity in Hell).
p. 912
Carthusian order – a Roman Catholic religious order founded in 1084 by St. Bruno of Cologne. Carthusians live a very strict, contemplative life of silence, solitude, and prayer, combining elements of eremitic and cenobitic monasticism.
p. 916
Pluralis Majestatis – the royal “we”.
Meister Hans – executioner.
to make Luffer suther: Schindluther getrieben – wordplay. The name of Luther was inserted in the expression “Schindluder treiben” (make smb suffer).
p. 918
Eisleben – town in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. It is famous as both the hometown of Martin Luther and the place where he died; hence, its official name is Lutherstadt Eisleben.
p. 920
Wartburg – castle in the town of Eisenach, in the state of Thuringia, Germany. It was the place where Martin Luther translated the New Testament into German.
When I do heave the sword aloft, I wish unto the sinner eternal life – typical engraving on an executioner’s sword.
Blade of an executioner’s sword with the inscription: “Wan ich Das Schwerdt thu auff heben so wünsch ich dem armen Sünder das ewege Leben”.
p. 921
Brandberge, beg bernard, bender brag – anagrams of “Bardenberg”, borough of Würselen in North Rhine–Westphalia. (Derrik’s find)
Barditus – war chant used by the early Germanic peoples.
p. 927
Sopor – abnormally deep sleep.
Anima separata – separated soul is the human soul after death in Thomas Aquinas’ terms.
Anima unica forma corporis – “the soul is the only form of the body” is also Thomas Aquinas’ concept.
p. 929
Total death – refers to the conception that both body and soul are eliminated when an individual dies; as a result, resurrection can be understood only as a new creation of the whole human being.
p. 931
reticulo-endothelial – the reticuloendothelial system (RES) is a heterogeneous population of phagocytic cells in systemically fixed tissues that play an important role in the clearance of particles and soluble substances in the circulation and tissues, and forms part of the immune system. Substances that are cleared include immune complexes, bacteria, toxins, and exogenous antigens.
“If humanity disappears, […]” – from German sociologist Norbert Elias’ work Über die Einsamkeit der Sterbenden in unseren Tagen (The Loneliness of the Dying).
p. 932
Videofied – a wirefree battery operated video alarm system.
p. 933
“Rise, take up thy bed, and walk.” – John 5:8 (Derrik’s find)
p. 939
“The next morning the learned man went out to take his coffee and read the newspapers. […]” – from Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Shadow. (Derrik’s find)
p. 945
Hell im Hürtgenwald – the full title is Hölle im Hürtgenwald: Die Kämpfe vom Hohen Venn bis zur Rur September 1944 bis Februar 1945 (Hell im Hürtgenwald: The Battles from the High Fens to the Rur, September 1944 to February 1945). A military history book by Adolf Hohenstein and Wolfgang Trees.
Trappists – a Catholic religious order of cloistered monastics that branched off from the Cistercians. They follow the Rule of Saint Benedict and have communities of both monks and nuns that are known as Trappists and Trappistines, respectively.
Daliwaram – anagram of “Mariawald”, the monastery of the Trappists located above the village of Heimbach, in the district of Düren.
p. 946
Vossenack – Vossenack War Cemetery located in Düren. “Vossenack” means “fox hill”.
Hornisse (hornet) –the initial name of the Nashorn tank destroyer developed in Germany in 1942.
p. 949
Lindhorst – Archivist Lindhorst is a character in The Golden Pot: A Modern Fairy Tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Lindhorst is in reality a salamander, the Elemental Spirit of Fire, who has been banished from the legendary Land of Atlantis by Phosphorus, the Prince of Spirits, and must enter mankind’s prosaic existence on earth.
Teplitzer Fragmente – a collection of notes and aphorisms by Novalis.
et sic porro – (Latin) and so on.
p. 952
Then, at that moment, one of the men is carrying the other over a deep gorge. He could easily manage this—he seems to be strong enough, the man he carries lies comfortably over his shoulder—if the rockface he’s just stepped onto, directly opposite, had not immediately risen steeper than the man can effortlessly scale with the shouldered, seemingly unconscious other man. […] A third man is also looking on while, simultaneously, a fourth man, who is initially mistaken for a woman, hits a fifth man with a stick-blow or stabbing- weapon, laying him out onto the ground. A saber falls from the right hand of the one hit by the stick or the stabbing-weapon and, as this saber, which shall never make contact with the ground, falls out of his hand, it can be seen that the other man, who is laying him out onto the ground, is also wielding a saber. What has remained unobserved up until this point is that a sixth man has been lying face-down on the ground for a long time.
[Man Is Being Carried over the Gorge] by Ror Wolf. Image Source.
pp. 953-954
I move along its upper edge on all fours and gaze upon a bed in the valley, a bed in which a man with Bismarck’s aspect lies. It is not Bismarck, in any case not Otto von Bismarck, but rather General Friedrich Theodor Alexander Graf von Bismarck-Bohlen—one can tell by the sideburns. The man’s baldness is much like my grandfather’s. The bed stands with its foot-end in the thinly flowing brook of the valley-floor. […] An image is now projected onto the center of the outer side of the footboard, where there may once have been a flat cut carving. What is to be seen is two young lads who have stuck their heads into the crooks of their arms, which rest upon a table in such a way that only the backs of their heads can be seen.
Friedrich Alexander von Bismarck-Bohlen – served as a Prussian cavalry officer and Governor General of Alsace prior to the Great War. He was also a distant cousin to German’s first Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.
alopecia areata – also known as spot baldness, is a condition that causes one’s hair to fall out in patches.
p. 955
Kukident – a German brand for denture maintenance products such as adhesive cream for dental prostheses.
p. 961
A nun carrying a wooden box with nineteen white and eighteen black dashes on the lid around her neck tumbles off of her bicycle, hits her head on the curb of the sidewalk, then perishes.
Stills from Un chien andalou by Luis Buñuel
pp. 962-963
“in the corner of a tavern, sufficiently concealed behind a small glass of whisky […]” – From The Diaries of Franz Kafka, December 10, 1913. (Derrik’s find)
p. 966
Filcyw – anagram of “Wyclif”. John Wyclif or Wycliffe was an English scholastic philosopher, theologian, biblical translator, reformer, Catholic priest, and a seminary professor at the University of Oxford. He became an influential dissident within the Catholic priesthood during the 14th century and is considered an important predecessor to Protestantism.
Johannes von Eisenjec – “Eisenjec” is an anagram of “Jesenice”. Johannes von Jesenice (Czech: Jan z Jesenice) was a Bohemian jurist, university scholar, and early supporter of Jan Hus.
p. 968
“Thou that here open thine eyes, take heed and be assured of this […]” – inscription on the North Tyrolean execution sword exhibited in the armoury (museum) in the city of Innsbruck in Tyrol, Austria.
Exhibition in the armory (museum) in the city of Innsbruck in Tyrol, Austria. Image Source
“LOOK NOT UPON ME AND MINE, […]”; “O Lord take this poor sinner up into Thy kingdom […]”– also inscriptions on execution swords.
p. 970
Juist – an island and municipality in the district of Aurich in Lower Saxony in Germany.
Lacheralm – an alpine pasture in the Bavarian Prealps.
Sudelfeld – a mountain landscape in the Bavarian Alps in south-eastern Upper Bavaria.
Wendelstein – a 1,838-metre-high (6,030 ft) mountain in the Bavarian Alps.
Mangfall Mountains – the easternmost part of the Bavarian Prealps.
p. 973
“to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself” –Heidegger’s definition of phenomenology in Being and Time.
Epoché – in Hellenistic philosophy it is a technical term typically translated as “suspension of judgement” but also as “withholding of assent”. In the modern philosophy of Phenomenology it refers to a process of setting aside assumptions and beliefs.
Secura pericli – (Latin) safe from danger.
p. 974
everything that is the case – from the first proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus: “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.” (The world is everything that is the case.)
Noscere magnatum… – Lentz’s source is most likely a compendium of symbols and their explications titled Emblemata: Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts. Below is the relevant excerpt from the book with the German translation of the Latin text.
p. 975
Prüm (river) – the Prüm is a river in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, left tributary of the Sauer.
p. 979
“being-in-itself is the other-worldly beyond of itself” – From paragraph 231 of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit. The full sentence is “Für das unglückliche Bewußtsein ist das Ansichsein das Jenseits seiner selbst.” (For the unhappy consciousness, being-in-itself is the other-worldly beyond of itself (tr. Terry Pinkard).)
p. 981
“From this, I conclude: As the world is entirely evil […]” – from German-Jewish writer Paul Adler’s 1915 novella’s Nämlich (Namely).
Raul Pedal – anagram of “Paul Adler”.
p. 984
“Cathedral sparrow” (Domspatz) – member of the boys’ choir at the Regensburg Cathedral.
Johann Meier – was a German Roman Catholic priest and headmaster of the Elementary School of Regensburger Domspatzen.
p. 985
Fracht Sehnot […] – anagrams of “Schattenfroh”.
p. 986
Nahet! Forscht! – Approaches! Seeks!
p. 987
Biginning in ende, ende in biginning […] – 17th C. German mystical poet Daniel Czepko’s epigram from Sexcenta Monodisticha Sapientum.
p. 998
Zero-sum game – a mathematical representation in game theory which involves two sides, where the result is an advantage for one side and an equivalent loss for the other. In other words, player one’s gain is equivalent to player two’s loss, therefore the net improvement in benefit of the game is zero.
My copy of Schattenfroh with a clay figurine of Golem bought in Prague 20 years ago
Summary of Schattenfroh
The protagonist and the narrator of the novel tells us from the very outset that he writes his text in his “brainfluid”. He is forced to state that he acts of his own free will. He is kept in a dark room, in complete isolation from the rest of the world. On his head there is a contraption made up of a box and a pair of lenses. His jailor and evil master is an entity called Schattenfroh, who has imposed the name Nobody on him. This name is an allusion to the fool Niemat in Bruegel’s engraving Elck. In addition, it brings to mind Odysseus, who assumed the name Nobody to trick the cyclops.
The narrator is remotely controlled by Schattenfroh via the mask. He confesses that nothing which he thinks, imagines, and expresses truly belongs to him. He is not sure whether the movement of his hands imitating the process of writing evokes the images in his mind or, on the contrary, it is the images that trigger his hand movement. We learn that Schattenfroh lured Nobody into the trap by painting the number 6 in different parts of the city. The protagonist followed the clues until he found the combination 666, and now he is kept prisoner in the middle 6. Schattenfroh is a protean character with many faces. On one page, he is depicted as the Old Testament God, speaking the language of Luther’s Bible, on the other—he is a chimerical creature made up of a fly, grasshopper, lizard and a human head.
Thanks to the lenses in the mask, Nobody can look inside himself and see the world of the Frightbearing Society, an organisation which serves Schattenfroh. According to his captor, the protagonist is the first member of this society and his first important task is to write its foundation report. After his vision gets adapted to the lenses, Nobody can make out the objects in front of him. He is especially fascinated by the tabletop with numerous inscriptions. Following his master’s order, Nobody produces the foundational document of the Frightbearing Society, which contains some fragments from the authentic 1617 foundation report of the historical Fruitbearing Society. The members of the Frightbearing Society must make the generation and spreading of fear their perennial duty. The main symbol of the society is Werner Tübke’s painting The End of the Jurisdiction of the Fools. Among other things that the neophytes of the society undertake to accomplish is to express themselves in High German in the best possible way and to be ready to make a journey in “devilish imagination”. The completion of the document is followed by the Old Testament rhetoric from the Exodus.
Nobody sits at the table with a stylus attached to it with a long chain. The tabletop is a palimpsest of numerous inscriptions, flourishes, doodles. It reminds the protagonist of the children’s toy Wunderblock described by Freud in his essay on the operation of memory and the nature of the unconscious. After staring into this “wooden book” for some time, Nobody can see a sequence of images, which signify important landmarks on his future journeys. Some of the half-erased inscriptions on the tabletop are perceived by the narrator as phantoms one of which could be his psychopomp. The phantoms carry the idea of “soul” with them. Nobody’s father used to attach a lot of importance to the concept, which infused the boy with the rebellious impulse to destroy it. There is a glimpse of the narrator as a boy being beaten with a stick for misspelling the word Strafe (punishment).
As time passes, the narrator gets used to the cell in which he is confined as well as to the bizarre routine maintained by Schattenfroh. There is an open end of a metal tube protruding from the wall. A voice gives orders through it. Three times a day the tube spits out slips of paper with written descriptions of meals. Nobody manages to make out in the tabletop inscriptions the house of his parents, its furniture, and some utensils. The box around his head perceives reality as “inner revelation”. The narrator has become Subject-Object with the compulsion to confess. He can project with his eyes images from his mind onto the white walls of the cell. He has had this ability since childhood. What appears to be happening now is that he sees on the wall of his cell a scene from his childhood in which he, as a kid, sees another scene on the wall of his room. In that scene, he hits his father on the head with a retractable plastic sword. The father goes through his son, picks up the sword and decapitates him. Then the real father enters the son’s room. He looks at the wall on which the beheading scene has just unfolded and sees nothing.
The protagonist can see his father on the wall of his room, but he cannot follow the father as he goes about his daily business. This becomes possible in the dark when the boy starts spinning around and the “movie” starts unfolding before his eyes. We also learn in a brief reminiscence about the corporal punishment to which the boy is subjected: his father beats him with a cane.
The protagonist watches his father arrive at the town hall of Düren, where he works as the municipal director (head of the town administration). As the father goes about his everyday business, we learn more about his workplace. His secretary Frau Monduhr/Ohrmund lets into the office a young man who wants to speak to the director. The visitor is none other than the protagonist. The young man wants to talk to his father in his office because at home he won’t listen to him. The office is equipped with loud-speakers that transmit his father’s thoughts as speech. On a wall in the office there is a portrait of Saint Louis of Toulouse holding a book. According to the protagonist, it is his book (the book which we are also reading) stolen from him by the saint. The father berates his son for wearing the cloak, the mitre and the sandals, which can be seen on the portrait of Saint Louis of Toulouse. It is as if the boy has turned into Saint Louis. The father lets his son out of the office through a side door which leads to the basement. Below there is a dungeon of sorts, and the main character finds himself in one of the cells. He projects images on the walls of his prison cell and sees his father, who says that he will let him out of the dungeon when he returns the book he has stolen from the portrait of Saint Louis. The protagonist hears his father’s voice, which does not belong to his father, reciting definitions from the Stasi Dictionary. More voices join the recitation. One of them belongs to Mateo Atschel, the clerk responsible for the procuring of writing utensils. This man is the father’s closest associate. They keep exchanging secret notes on scraps of paper at the agreed meeting points in the complex network of the town hall’s passages. Besides being a stationary procurer, Mateo is also the arch-secretary of the two municipal director’s secretaries one of whom is Peter Ozianon, who is caught up in some dark business and is possibly no longer alive. It is next to impossible to meet the father personally for external visitors. He communicates via paper. He speaks directly to his secretaries and assistants: Mateo, Ozianon, Frau Ohrmund, and Frau Ganzbrod.
The father doesn’t use a computer and puts his trust only in paper. He has ordered to arrange a special room as the inventory for all the processed and unprocessed documents. His favourite book about archives is Jacques Derrida’s treatise Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. The father’s obsession with paper administration has eliminated his friendships.
We get a detailed description of the interior of the town hall building. The offices of the municipality are interconnected in such a way that each of them is at the same time somebody’s intersecting room. Outside of the building, the monument Angel of Flames commemorates the victims of the air raid carried out by the Allied forces on November 16, 1944. Mateo brings to the protagonist a typed list with the names of the victims and Albert Speer’s memoires. Two men come in carrying a desk, a chair and writing utensils: their entrance is recorded on the first page of the paper stack they have brought. The father wants Nobody to copy by hand all the names of the dead along with their ages in the alphabetical order. If he makes a single mistake, he will have to eat the paper he has filled with writing. This act is compared to the Kabbalistic Tzimtzum. Actually, there are two lists that the main character has to copy: the first one is that of the inhabitants of Düren and the second is that of the non-locals.
The two men bring into Nobody’s cell a trunk with books, nails, hammer and six timber beams. On second thoughts, they carry the latter out of the cell and leave the prisoner alone. In one of the books there is a text describing how the two men renovate and refurbish the cell to make it look like a room in an apartment. We also learn that the arrangement of the offices is similar to that of the prison cells as well as that there is an observation tower in the middle (a kind of panopticon) which allows the person inside to see what’s going on in all the offices. It is assumed that some Belgian general might be sitting inside the tower.
There is a recollection of Panzerstrasse and the military training area behind it from which it is possible to hear weapons firing. After that, there is additional description of the interior of the town hall building, especially the conference hall. The committee members who gather in the hall are known to bang their heads against the walls in rage, which has earned them the nickname “Bump Parliament”.
Nobody is still in the dungeon because he refuses to return the unwritten book that he has allegedly stolen from the painting. Mateo tells him about his father’s speeches that still can be heard in different parts of the building long after being uttered. We also learn that the father is reluctant to delegate tasks to his subordinates. One day he invites his twelve secretaries to a restaurant where he makes them eat pieces of paper with the verses from Chapter 10 of the Book of Revelation. He never meets his councillors, however. He doesn’t even know their names. They work on a different floor and some of them lie about running into their boss to tease their colleagues. They have no idea what the director looks like and therefore come up with mythological descriptions of him. In the building, there is a gallery with the portraits of all the town managers. People call this gallery “Everyman and Nobody”. “Everyman” refers to the portraits of the father’s dead predecessors, and “Nobody” is the father’s “portrait”, which is an empty picture frame. The protagonist tells Mateo that he recognises his father in the empty frame. He recollects that his father was “present” for him mostly during the beatings. There is a flashback to the occasion when the father broke his cane and had to use a coat hanger to flog his son. It turns out that the mother was complicit in the beatings by inciting her husband each time the protagonist misbehaved. When the boy grew older, the father stopped flogging him and slapped him in the face instead. With time, it appeared as though his father was turning into a little malicious man incapable of causing him serious pain.
Mateo tells the protagonist a strange story about the janitor who for many years collected the yellow and black stones falling from the façade of the town hall building. Later these stones came in handy for the renovation of the mosaic representing Düren’s coat of arms. The main topic of his narration, however, is Nobody’s father. His engagement in the matters of religion is remarkable. He has had a little chapel built in the annex to his house and is planning to bring there incluses. The wooden cross in the chapel has been reserved for his son. The father has also helped the Discalced Carmelites to get access to the sufficient supply of firewood. He has secured the financing for the restoration of a dilapidated church known among the locals as the owl cathedral. The father is meticulous and always pays attention to small details because they tend to accumulate into big and important things. He also loves nature and often spends time outdoors sitting in a folding chair and working with his papers.
Mateo reveals to the young man that he has made up a lot of facts and events to keep up with the heavy workload the father expects his employees to deal with. Moreover, as a response to the father’s barely readable instructions, Mateo came up with an indecipherable nonsense script in which he wrote his boss a message. The father responded with a message composed in his own script. Nobody points out that his father uses this script to exchange love letters with his wife. After that, Mateo shows the protagonist the loopy plotlines from Tristram Shandy, which, according to the young man, is the plan for escape from the alphabet. One more sheet of paper produced by Mateo has a mystical circle made up of Hebrew letters, which Nobody calls “God”.
The next topic discussed by Mateo is the hierarchised and ritualistic character of the official dinners presided by the father. The description makes one think of sumptuous royal feasts with a host of attendants, each responsible for a certain task such as pouring wine, pre-tasting food, carving meat, etc. The participants of this complex performance have to keep a certain distance and to move in a designated way. The “plan” for their movements is Düren’s coat of arms with the number 666 depicted on the central tower of the castle at the top. One feast almost ends in a mass knife-fight because the guests, having learnt that the sharpness of the knives reflects the hierarchy at the court, start comparing their utensils: many get frustrated with the bluntness of their knives and the sharpness of those distributed to the other guests. What they don’t realise is that the blunter the knife is, the higher is the status of its owner.
Mateo invites the protagonist to take a sit at his father’s dinner table. As soon as he does that, he finds himself in the right panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s tryptic The Last Judgement. All the central figures of the painting are described in detail. The scene is presented as a trial against Nobody whose guilt is proved by the very fact of the trial taking place. The father is present too, and he addresses his son formally, which bodes no good. Guy Montag from Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 takes the floor. He points out that the young man not only reads books but also is writing one, whereas all books should be burnt. When he raises his flamethrower, the father makes him disappear. The father, while talking to Mateo, starts calling him Antonio as well as Peter Ozianon. Mateo tells the father that his son has weird fantasies, which he writes down in his book. Moreover, according to Mateo, the young man writes so densely on certain pages that they seem to be totally black. Mateo opens the book on such a page and the father gets slowly sucked inside. They look intently into the page and eventually make out the father stumbling about confusedly in some “tangled matter” (Wirrlagenstoff), looking for his glasses.
As long as the main character cannot decide between the two new names of Mateo, he decides to call him Antonio Atome. Nobody closes the book, and then opens it again on the page with a passage from Tristram Shandy satirising courts and litigation. Mateo suggests that Nobody say the word “Rat”, which will replay the opening of the trial; otherwise, he will be executed. When the protagonist says “rat”, the scene from Bosch’s painting is repeated but with a difference: instead of the dark demonic figure, a rat emerges from the toad-infested archway. It is Lucifer in the shape of a rat. When the defendant finds out that this creature is versed in Scripture exegesis, he realises that it is his father. His father is Lucifer. Mateo becomes the recording clerk with a red pot on the head. As for the protagonist, he is transformed into the naked figures tortured by the demons. The chimera in a red cloak sitting among the trio of the infernal musicians is likened to St. Nicolas’ dark companion Knecht Ruprecht. This conceit makes Nobody remember one St. Nicholas’ Eve, when Knecht Ruprecht opened his sack and let him see the fiery Gehenna and the melting sinners inside. The next vision inside the sack was that of a youth nailed to a cross. The execution was carried out by a Roman crucifixion team. In a matter of minutes, the youth turned into a tall man, who disappeared in the fiery pulp. The crucifixion in the sack was the punishment for the youth’s bad behaviour throughout the year. There is an unequivocal suggestion that the crucified youth is the protagonist himself.
The protagonist holds a conversation with Ruprecht in the shape of the red-cloaked chimera from the right panel of Bosch’s tryptic The Last Judgement. The subject of their conversation is the suffering of a crucified person yearning for a quick end, the care taken by the executioners to prolong that suffering, and the morbid aestheticisation of Christ’s crucified body as reflected in Baroque Passion poetry. Ruprecht acquaints Nobody with this genre by making him read Angelus Silesius’ Sie betrachtet den gekreuzigten Jesum, and having him transcribe Lohenstein’s Gedanken über Das LIII Capitel des Propheten Esaias, VI. It seems that the goal of the chimera is to make the young man question his humanism and empathy by exposing him to the religious art that appears to savour physical suffering. Nobody meditates on the graphic nature of Passion poetry, maintaining that its objective is to arouse compassion and to make the reader vicariously experience Jesus’ torments. Lucifer, apparently, has adapted the Passion mythos for hell with the crucial difference that death in his realm does not bring salvation but serves to perpetuate suffering.
Nobody’s protracted meditation on the nature of art representing pain (the most radical examples of such art could be called pain porn) starts irritating Ruprecht, who accuses the protagonist of regurgitating the same concepts. When asked by the chimera about the way he would describe Christ’s passion, the young man offers a concise, two-sentence account devoid of any ornamentation. The issue of torture and its modern representation also form part of the main character’s reflection. There seems to be a trend in the press to publish photographs of torture without a critical commentary, which can be perceived as the admission of the fact that society has got used to this practice and is unlikely to condemn the “sincerity” of the atrocity depiction. The media colludes with the executioner. Nobody wonders if a representation of the crucified Christ can also be seen as an example of torture turned spectacle.
Ruprecht falls asleep, and Nobody uses this opportunity to leaf through the book lying before the chimera. This book is depicted in Bosch’s painting, but it is also the book which the main character is writing, and consequently, the one we are reading. On one of the pages there is Rilke’s poem Komm du, du letzter… It might be useful to include Scott Horton’s English translation:
You, the last I recognize; return,
pain beyond help that sears the body’s cells:
as I burnt in the spirit, see, I burn
in you; the wood, that for so long rebels
against the flame you kindle, comes of age;
behold, I nourish you and burn in you.
My earthly mildness changes in your rage
into a rage of hell I never knew.
Quite pure, quite planless, of all future free,
I climbed the stake of suffering, resolute
not to acquire what is still to be
to clad this heart whose stores had become mute.
Is it still I that burns there all alone?
Unrecognizable? memories denied?
O life, o life: being outside.
And I in flames—no one is left—unknown.
What follows is a detailed analysis of this poem with a special attention paid to the meaning of certain words. The narrator is captivated by the depiction of pain as an overbearing power to which the poet willingly submits himself. This hermeneutic endeavour leads to the recollection of the main character’s mother, who died of cancer, and of the medical procedures he himself had to undergo.
Meanwhile, the chimera’s tail winds around Nobody, who identifies Ruprecht with his dead father, who has come back as a Nachzehrer. The tail transforms into a mandragora. The offshoots of the mandragora-tail start producing yellow-green berries. There are hundreds of them now. Nobody is supposed to eat a berry every hour. He is expected to follow a certain order when picking the fruit without being informed what that order is. The following developments are presented as a text read by the protagonist in the chimera’s book. Nobody starts eating berries, and when he violates the prescribed order, he is compelled to eat a berry each 20 minutes. There are 666 berries in total. When he realises that he doesn’t have a clock, the Cologne Cathedral clock, built by Johann Mannhardt, appears in his head. The minute hand of the clock helps him to mark the time between the berries. He also recollects some friends, whose names have been anagrammatically altered. The next berry he eats contains an ivory figurine that used to belong to his mother. He has made a mistake again and now has to eat a berry each 10 minutes. Instead of the ivory figurine, Nobody is holding a milk tooth carved into the likeness of Jesus. On the back of the milk-tooth statuette there is an inscription. It is a quote from Muttersterben, Michael Lentz’s book about his mother dying from cancer.
The milk-tooth carved into the likeness of Jesus, which used to be the ivory figurine of the mother, proves to be Satan’s tick. It bites into the protagonist’s thigh and bloats with his blood. Nobody calls it Lucifer’s Jesus-cyst, and later, Jesus-tick. Having sucked enough blood, the creature leaves the protagonist, who is too late in grabbing the next berry, and is now supposed to eat the fruit every 5 minutes. Ruprecht the mandrake gets inside the main character. When the monster’s tail tightens around the book, it becomes unreadable, but the young man can still read it in his mind. He also sees the Jesus-cyst preaching from the pulpit in the Cologne Cathedral, using excerpts from Plato’s Republic in its speech. The protagonist fails to eat the fruit in time again. The Jesus-tick predicts Nobody’s heavenly journey modelled after that of Enoch.
Ruprecht’s voice commands the protagonist to eat all the fruit at once, which he does and then a voice tells him to write down in his book everything he sees. He encounters the already familiar hybrid of a cockroach, a gecko and a hooded man. It is the Devil from Hieronymus Bosch’s painting Saint John the Evangelist on Patmos. They are inside this painting now, and the protagonist assumes the role of St. John sitting on the stone with his book of revelation. In the sky, there is the Virgin Mary with her child. Her words are transmitted to the protagonist by the angel on the hill. The Devil’s ultimate goal is to sabotage God’s Plan of Salvation, and he intends to use Nobody’s book to achieve it. Once the text is written, he is going to change it surreptitiously to fit his purpose. Another important project for Lucifer is the transformation of letters: he wants them to become rough so God will get grazed when he comes down to earth. In order to bring God down, Lucifer needs a new alphabet whose consonants would grind everything that gets between them. The draft of this alphabet was made a hundred years ago by a certain Doris Erben. When God, instead of “I am who I am”, becomes “I was who I was”, the sound of the shofar will announce the arrival of the Devil. The background in the painting changes to give way to the scenery from Theo Champion’s Rheinlandschaft. At some point, the protagonist realises that it is not the mother who is speaking but her baby; moreover, he recognises in the babbling infant himself. In his book, Nobody reads about Tophet, Gehenna, and the children sacrificed to Moloch.
As the effect of the berries wears off, Nobody finds himself again in Bosch’s Last Judgement, in which all the naked figures represent different stations of his way of the Cross. When the protagonist tries to tear the black page (with his father inside) out of the book, a new black page immediately appears. The task of bringing the book to the father while the father is inside the book seems a tough proposition. (We shouldn’t forget that at one of the narrative levels, Nobody is confined to the dungeon in the town hall cellar for stealing the book from the painting of Saint Louis of Toulouse). The protagonist mutters the 70 names of God that appear in the book. These names come from the angel Metatron, whose name contains “Atome” (anagram of Mateo Atschel’s first name). However, the letters “trn” in “Metatron” are not part of the anagram of “Atome”, which is the sign that this “angel” is a traitor. To put it simply, Metatron is none other than Mateo. The latter gives the protagonist guidance for his journey through seven anterooms, each guarded by a Lady, to contemplate the chariot throne of his father behind the celestial curtain Pargod. The protagonist undertakes what in Merkabah mystical literature is described as the ascent of the visionary’s soul to heaven through the seven spheres or heavenly dwellings. The black page serves as the Pargod concealing the Merkabah (God’s throne). Nobody travels through the antechambers. Each Lady falls down on her face when he passes through. The protagonist believes that all of them are the same woman: his mother. He finds his father sitting in a blue armchair, which talks to him in a reverent tone. That is his throne. The father leafs through his son like through a book. He writes and subsequently deletes on his forehead the following words: “Don Daba” (Abaddon), “Mogel” (Golem), “Emeth”. When the last word is changed to “meth”, the protagonist falls on the ground and dies. Then his father commands him to go back, and he finds himself in his parents’ garden. A series of brief recollections follow. When he approaches the deathbed of his father, a voice tells him that it is not yet time for him to be there. He returns to his cell in the town hall dungeon.
The two men enter the cell and refurbish it. They put on a wall a large tapestry depicting the panoramas of Düren from the years 748, 1543, 1644, and 1944. The narrative changes to a dry summary of the major historical events related to the town in the 16th and 17th centuries. Of note is the mention of the engraver Zellen Warhol (Wenceslaus Hollar), who is responsible for the first map of the town. When the two men leave the cell, the protagonist listens to his father talking on the phone in the adjacent room. He says, among other things, that it is not allowed to name one’s child Jesus. His ashtray is described, and we learn that it is adorned by the figures of the Babylonian scribe god Nebo and Lucifer. The former is giving his writing utensils to the latter.
The protagonist enters his father’s room. On the desk there is a recording device playing back the father’s message. The father says that Peter Ozianon is a traitor conspiring against him. Nevertheless, the father confesses that he followed Ozianon’s advice and acquired the supposed Holy Shroud, which was brought into the library and deposited into a hollow space beneath the floor, under a protective glass plate. Nobody switches off the device and goes into the room with the tapestry showing the panorama of Düren at different time periods. He dives into the tapestry and immediately meets the first cartographer of Düren Zellen Warhol (Wenceslaus Hollar). The protagonist takes the artist’s sketchbook and reads the text about Düren written by the latter. Zellen Warhol also gives Nobody his 1634 map of the town, which is known to us as Wenceslaus Hollar’s etching Bird’s Eye View of Düren. During their encounter, the engraver acquaints the traveller with Gustav Fechner’s ideas related to the fourth dimension. Equipped with the map, the protagonist walks towards the 17th-century Düren.
The protagonist lies to the first gatekeeper that he wants to visit the pilgrimage chapel Muttergotteshäuschen (literally: the Little House of the Mother of God). In order to check the authenticity of the newcomer’s statement, the gatekeeper challenges him to describe the winged altarpiece in the chapel, which he does. This fictional altarpiece consists of elements from different paintings. The central panel in the closed position is from Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, with the significant difference that the crucified Christ is absent. The Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, John the Apostle, and John the Baptist are standing next to an empty space. The inner left wing of the altar bears Hieronymus Bosch’s depiction of hell from The Garden of Earthly Delights. The protagonist becomes the naked man next to the pig dressed as a nun and Lucifer in the guise the helmet-wearing creature. Nobody hesitates to sign the document lying on his thigh because of its paradoxical nature: it says that he attests to not buying any indulgences. But by signing this document, which is an indulgence, he will prove the opposite. If he doesn’t sign it, he will admit his guilt. The upper part of Bosch’s panel is believed to depict the burning of Düren in the aftermath of the air raid. The protagonist sees the house of his parents, which is intact. His mother is in the kitchen. Instead of the book, which was lying on the table a moment before, she notices a kerosene slide projector. With the help of this device, she projects onto a white sheet the image of the Crucified Christ that has disappeared from the central panel of the altarpiece in the chapel (which is the Isenheim Altarpiece’s central panel). The scene changes, and the protagonist sees the interior of his house as it was 53 years before – the time of his conception. (Michael Lentz was born in 1964, and Schattenfroh was published in 2018). This scene is depicted on the left panel of the chapel altarpiece with the outer wings opened. What he contemplates is the Annunciation scene of the Isenheim Altarpiece. The angel tells the Virgin Mary, who stands for the protagonist’s mother, that she is going to give birth to a son called Michael. On the panel next to the Annunciation, there is a portrait of St. Louis of Tolouse by Luca Signorelli. Nobody believes that the man in the painting is his father. The right panel of the altarpiece has the painting of St. Augustine from Michael Triegel’s triptych at the Church of St. Augustine in Dettelbach.
The protagonist tells the gatekeeper the story of the wife who wanted her husband to leave the church. When the man doesn’t show any sign of being impressed, Nobody tells him a similar story in a dialect. The gatekeeper is totally unresponsive. The protagonist goes into the interior of the Annunciation scene, takes his mother’s book off the trunk, and goes through the window into the night. He loses the book while roaming around, but he does find the way to the town again thanks to the map. He reaches the gate leading to the town itself, but the gatekeeper does not allow him to pass when he shows him the town map instead of an identification document. Nobody keeps walking around the town wall, looking for the next gate. When he comes to the tower gate, the guards allow him to pay the toll but will not let him through. In a building called The Valve of Eden (Edens Ventil) he comes across an old man with a book, who is writing in it the exact text of the narrative that precedes Nobody’s question about what he is writing in the book. The protagonist writes his name in the book as “Jesus of Nazareth”. After that, the building disappears, and Nobody finds himself in an open field with the regained book of his mother and the old man’s book. He arrives at the gate castle. In a little house, he meets another guard, who speaks Lower German. While the guard is dressing, Nobody notices a “wanted” poster depicting Zellen Warhol. He is wanted because of his town map, which is believed to pose a risk to the town’s defensive capability. After finding out that the newcomer has no money to pay the toll, the guard suggests that he earn his entrance by repairing a section of the town wall. The guard leads him through the gateway. While walking, the protagonist remembers the photographs of his parents and grandparents, which inevitably brings the memories of his parents’ house and of his mother.
As the protagonist keeps following the guard, he notices a shadow on the wall in which he recognises the black page that has sucked his father in. The father manages to stick his upper body out of the darkness but does not manage to get out completely. Nobody finds on the back of the town map a safe-conduct written for him by his father. This official letter is heavily based on the safe-conduct Emperor Sigismund gave to Jan Hus. The guard, who is holding a bull pizzle, is associated with the father. When they meet the second guard, the main character discovers that he has the letter “tau” branded on his forehead; the symbol that the guards call “hammer” means that he has been condemned to the wall repair work. He learns from both guards that wall repair is the only type of hard labour in the town. If all the spots at the wall are occupied then convicts have to wait in prison until there is a vacancy. The protagonist is accused of sabotage on account of the town map that the first guard has taken away from him. If enemies got hold of this detailed plan, it would be easy for them to break through the town’s defences. Until the main character’s fate is decided by the townsfolk, he is to remain at the wall, doing the repairs.
The guards leave the protagonist to figure out how to use the tools necessary for his job. After some time, Nobody is approached by the town master builder Erich Amjage, who has been inspired in his work by Vitruvius’ treatise De architectura libri decem. Amjage has been translating this book into German with intentional errors to mislead his competitors. The master builder initiates his interlocutor into the matter of wall-building and repair, describing in some detail all the materials and tools used for these tasks. Having finished his lecture, Anjage disappears right into the wall. Next, the protagonist notices a group of people discussing Zellen Warhol’s map and his own role in the alleged sabotage against the town. He recognises Mateo as one of the speakers. Soon he finds out that he can actually rewind the conversation and watch it again. When he raises his head, he can also watch a court hearing in slow motion. Mateo is delivering a speech. He believes that the town wall combines two forces: beauty and ugliness. Moreover, he considers the convicts working at the wall to be prisoners of beauty. He introduces the initiative of “monument protection”, which would oblige all the labourers to integrate into the wall their own life-size statues.
The protagonist abandons his post. His goal is to reach the town hall, but he is weary of walking along the wall, so he proceeds across the green area. In the grass, near a group of houses, he finds a wooden doll with its left arm damaged by fire. He picks it up. In a garden, he comes across a baroque face chair (Fratzenstuhl), which he also takes along. He approaches a house with the light burning inside. Nobody sits in the chair and watches a young woman inside reading a Bible. The interior of the house and the woman are from Vermeer’s painting Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window. After the woman leaves the room, the protagonist climbs inside using the face chair as a foothold. He inspects the interior and finds out that instead of the washing instructions the label on the pillow bears the number 999. When he stands at the head of the bed and reads the number upside down, he has a disturbing vision of the doll licking blood off a forehead injured by a crown of thorns. Nobody can still see the reflection of the young woman’s face in the window glass. He finds out that the Bible is the book Schattenfroh in disguise. There is a letter inside. This letter fills the narrator with jealousy and he is overwhelmed by the wish to kill the young woman and commit suicide. When he looks at the letter, he discovers that its pages are blank. He concludes that the room itself is the letter. The message is the annunciation of sorts. The woman’s pregnancy is the cause of his sudden bout of jealousy. In a corner of the room, he notices another grimacing chair, so he gets his Fratzenstuhl inside to keep it company. In place of the curtain, which he used to lower his chair into the room, he hangs the carpet taken from the woman’s bed. The carpet becomes a parochet, the curtain that covers the Torah ark containing the Torah scrolls in a synagogue. In its patterns he sees the tablets with the ten commandments. A female voice reads them to him. Among different objects embroidered on the carpet, the protagonist singles out an enclosure with a fire inside. The fire grows and spreads to the surrounding area, burning down the forest and the king’s throne. Nobody realises that the destruction of the throne is a deception because it stands inside a house made up of flames. The throne of thrones withstands the fire just like the king of kings sitting on it. Nevertheless, this throne is fake. Everything that is depicted on the carpet may turn to dust except the tablets with the ten commandments.
A female voice commands the protagonist to lie in the bed, which he does. His body begins to change. His legs extend and the hands detach themselves from the arms and begin frolicking around. His eyeballs behave like spiders: they shoot white threads that cling to the objects around, so he can see them. He falls asleep, and wakes up the next morning.
The letters ShKBTh ZRGh, corresponding to the number 999, have been transformed into predatory plants, which wind around the narrator’s legs, drag him out of the house and carry to the town hall. The already familiar wooden doll emerges from the building. The doll says that it was created and destroyed by the face chairs as well as that it now serves as a wooden male member. Nobody reads the story of the doll in his own book. From this story we learn about a neighbour who makes the face chair out of a dead apple tree and carves the doll out of the apple-shaped chunk of wood that has been cut out to make the Fratzenstuhl’s mouth. The man watches the chair pick up the doll and slide it through its mouth, back and forth. He intends to use the chair’s talent to his own benefit, but the chair never stirs again, so he sells it together with the doll to an elderly couple. After discovering that sitting in the chair causes pain in the back, the couple consider making a crucifix out of it. Later, they dismiss the idea and place the chair and the doll in the garden. They never touch both again while they are alive, but upon dying, they return to the garden, sit in the chair and no longer feel the pain. The chair tries to instil life into the doll with the help of Eleazar of Worms’ Kabbalist formula but makes an error in the combination of letters. The doll gets damaged as a result of the chair’s incorrect manipulations. The Fratzenstuhl lays the blame on the doll itself and carves “Emeth” on its forehead as a punishment. The doll comes alive and starts serving the chair by crawling into and out of its mouth. With time, its head becomes too big and heavy, and the chair kills it by erasing the letter “e” from the inscription. Before dying, the doll hits the chair and knocks it over. The overturned chair cannot get up and has to wait until the protagonist picks it up from the garden. After he brings the chair and the doll to the house of the young woman, the young woman’s chair recognises the doll, reanimates it in accordance with the precepts of Eleazar of Worms, and calls it Schattenfroh. As a reward for the excellent service, the young woman’s chair carves “Emeth” on the doll’s forehead.
The protagonist finds himself again in the young woman’s bed. The letters ShKBTh ZRGh on the blanket are upside down with respect to him, signifying 666. The letter-plants wind around him again and transport him to the meat market where he is tied to a pole like a carcass and is carried by the two guards who earlier accompanied him to the wall repair site. They bring him to the portico of the town hall, where Mateo meets the procession. Time slows down. A voice tells the protagonist that it has taken him 3 months and 25 days to cover the thirty-metre distance to the desk at which he is now sitting. What follows next is Nobody’s recollection of spending the same time period confined to a wooden crate in a prison cell. On the third night of his imprisonment, he starts hearing voices that, as it turns out, belong to different aspects of his personality that have become autonomous. Their names are anagrams of “Michael Lentz”: Lache mit Lenz, Macht in Zelle, Alle Chemnitz, Mein Elchlatz, Am Elch Litzen, Zelle am Nicht, Tanz mich Elle, and Allich Zement. We learn a bit about each of them. These entities are involved in a continuous political struggle. They have to elect the president despite the fact that each of them wants to become one. The prisoner imagines that the voices cut out his flesh and compose a text out of it. He has to contemplate the text until it is infested with maggots that transform it into the earlier passage in which the protagonist discovers the letter tau on his forehead. Then the left and right eardrums of the protagonist begin talking to each other and he writes down their text, which is a recollection of an incident at a flower shop. Someone (probably the protagonist) accidentally hit the shop assistant when practising a stretching exercise.
For a brief period of time, one of the entities called Macht in Zelle takes complete control over Nobody’s speech. It speaks to the protagonist in his own voice and orders him to stand to attention as though he were before the judge, which the prisoner can’t accomplish because of the limited space in the crate. The voice threatens to start a trial against him and pass a most harsh sentence, but then it gets quiet, and the next day Nodody is capable of speaking independently again. He begins humming to make sure that Macht in Zelle doesn’t control his voice anymore. Even worse fears creep in: those of being left without food and water.
A new prison guard arrives in the cell. The protagonist’s alter ego, which is represented by the italicised “he” calls the guard Hoffmann, although the man maintains that his name is Ш (the Cyrillic letter denoting the “sh” sound). We learn that he has been present in Nobody’s life since childhood. The boy invented this character as a scapegoat: each time he went through an unpleasant experience, he imagined that it was him who suffered, not him. The guard can see into the future, and tells the prisoner that the tapestry through which he has travelled will be smeared with ashes that will have to get beaten out. Ш is illiterate and he wants Nobody to teach him to write and read so he can report the court proceedings during the trial against him. The guard also tells the protagonist about his strange employer, an old man with eyesight and hearing problems, who always sits in the last row at any meeting or public hearing and relies on Ш’s phenomenal memory to get all the details about the given event. The task of the guard is to memorise what is being said and report it to the old man. Many people believe that this mysterious character is none other than the resurrected Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. We find out that Ш uses the memory palace technique to memorise words. He transforms the words he wants to remember into images and then places those images at certain places along an imaginary street. With time, he has developed a kind of image-stenography allowing him to retain huge amounts of information.
The trial begins. On the first day, the hearing takes place without the defendant. Nobody learns from Ш that he has been accused of four offences, each of which condemns him to the stake: unauthorised entry into the town with the help of a map that renders it vulnerable to an enemy attack; fleeing from the wall repair works; penetration into someone else’s house with the purpose of using a carpet to simulate the town’s destruction in fire; the writing of a heretical book that purports to look into the future (which only God can do), belittles the present before the future, and vilifies the town and the father. On the second day, he is brought into the courtroom but is not allowed to speak. On the third day of the trial, the protagonist is expected to express his repentance although that is unlikely to save his life. He notices Mateo next to Hoffmann/Ш and the old man/Emperor. Mateo tells Nobody that everything that is going to be said today is already part of his book. When asked if he has written the passage which is a distorted version of the text at the beginning of his book, the protagonist gives a negative answer. Mateo also points out that Hoffmann’s real name is Michael von Deutschbrod and that he is the principal witness for the prosecution because he remembers all their conversations. Another witness against the protagonist is the wooden doll, which claims that he has written some passages in the book using it as a writing tool. Mateo, who acts as the prosecutor, asserts that there are messages to the enemy encoded in Nobody’s town map. He also accuses the defendant of killing the widow Steffi Rapid in the house with the carpet and the bowl of fruit (from Vermeer’s painting).
Mateo announces that the defendant has been condemned to death. The sentence is carried out immediately. The execution proves to be a re-enactment of Jan Hus’ burning at the stake in 1415. (The Bohemian church reformer was executed for heresy against the doctrines of the Catholic Church.) The treacherous Ш kindles the firewood stacked around Nodody. However, it is not the protagonist but he, his alter ego, that gets burnt. The unscathed young man picks up his book and leaves the town, which gradually disappears. He returns to his father’s office as a pile of ashes that gets reassembled into a human being again. According to the father, the portrait of Saint Louis of Toulouse is completely different from the one we saw earlier. They start perusing Zellen Warholl’s map on the father’s desk. By using the magnifying glass, they can actually see what is going on in that miniature world. They can even make out the wooden doll and try to smash it with a letter knife, but the creature crawls out of the resultant crater intact. They also see Mateo and the father reminds his son about that man’s treacherous schemes.
The father opens a secret trapdoor under his desk. It leads to his library, which contains the old, modern and even future chronicles of the town, all the editions of Luther’s Bible, and about a hundred finished versions of his son’s book Schattenfroh. Although they are only on page 445, the father has managed to get those books by commissioning a bunch of second-rate scribblers to finish Nobody’s work, borrowing his simple (!) methods of composition. The father suggests that he take one of the versions and start reading on page 445, which will allow him to come closer to reality. He also tells his son that if he ever gets stuck with writing his book, he can take any of the finished copies and use their text to continue his own.
The pages of all the Schattenfroh copies in the father’s library are empty. However, the father can read them easily, and, as soon as he reads a sentence, it appears in the original Schattenfroh. He promises his son that in a couple of days he will also learn to read the white print and leaves him alone in the underground library. The protagonist gets hungry and starts eating books. He begins with a glowing copy of Michael Lentz’s book Muttersterben, and then switches to the works of Franza Kafka and Thomas Mann. When Nobody has to defecate, he uses the pages of Schattenfroh as toilet paper. This procedure makes the white print visible to him. He starts reading from the finished copies and comes across the passage whose beginning his father read to him earlier. In this passage the protagonist meets his mother on a train from Berlin to Cologne, 16 years after her death. He decides to copy this passage into his unfinished book.
A book from the section “Contemporary Literature” shouts that all the town chronicles stink, and this precipitates the great battle of the books. The warring tomes form different factions and alliances, but the main confrontation seems to be between contemporary books and the old, musty chronicles of Düren. Most of the books end up ruined. Eventually, the surviving books surround the main character and attack him. A mountain of books pushes the narrator up, towards the trapdoor. He picks up a copy of Michael Kohlhaas, which he believes will help him to escape. In this novella, there is a piece of paper with a secret message that a fortune-teller gives to Kohlhaas and whose contents we never learn. Nobody is certain that this message is addressed to him and that it will allow him to leave the library safe and sound. He rereads the novella from start to finish, meditating on its main themes and events. In the end, he finds the piece of paper in the book. It proves to be empty. He eats it following the command of an old woman, and manages to climb out of the underground library. The trapdoor, however, does not lead to his father’s office but to the carriage of the ICE train with his mother on board.
He is sitting some 12 metres away from his mother (who has been dead for 16 years) and looks at her, thinking about the time when she was stricken with cancer. He reads some newspapers and then remembers a short story by Ror Wolf which explains to the reader the concept “suddenly”. The narrator retells this story, in which a man begins thinking about nothing and finds himself in an empty room with white walls. There is a man sitting next to the protagonist’s mother. He calls him her husband, but he is not his father.
Nobody confesses that he is watching an ISIS execution video on his smartphone. Before getting to the description of the gruesome content he tells us about his interest in the history of executioner’s swords. He gives a roundup of the beheading procedure in Saudi Arabia, which he learnt from a businessman who had travelled there to present some mysterious material that facilitated the growth of an artificial liver as well as the development of an invisible armour that could neutralise the adversary by emitting deafening sound. While escaping from police officers, the businessman was helped out by the courier in the employment of his local business partner and then they both stumbled on an execution scene. This story is immediately followed by the description of the ISIS beheading video on the smartphone.
A fat man comes into the carriage and takes his place. He takes out of his bag an enormous number of snacks and desserts, stacks them on the table and starts eating. The spectacle disgusts the protagonist. After the feast, the fat man falls asleep. A trickle of saliva runs from the corner of his mouth. It reminds the protagonist of the sulphur thread with which Herse wanted to set Wenzel von Tronka’s house on fire. The saliva accumulates on the sheet of paper with Michael Kohlhaas’s complaint against Tronka and appeal for justice. Soon there is enough liquid to form a small lake. The protagonist and his father are traversing this lake in a boat. They see a red balloon with a long, algae-covered rope attached to it. The father catches the end of the rope, and, when they come ashore, his son begins walking along the rope towards the red balloon. After 8 years, he reaches it to realise that it is the head of his mother, whereas the rope is her body. The mother tells him about a hole in the wardrobe that leads to the dungeon underneath. The father noticed through the hole a piece of paper with some writing and dictated the text to the mother, who wrote it down in a notepad. It turns out that this text, which the mother calls “protocol”, is the text of the novel Schattenfroh. The protagonist’s brother wrote this text in the dungeon under the wardrobe, and their grandfather tried to commit it to memory in a Gestapo prison, where he had been thrown on the charge of high treason. The grandfather came up with the formula ש (Hebrew letter “shin”) which could be unfolded like a map and “bring everything back again” (whatever that means). He gave the formula to Satan in exchange for the promise to free him from prison. Nobody releases the rope (das Tau) to wave to his mother and the letter Tau is branded on his forehead. Schattenfroh takes him by the hair, lifts him above the earth and warns against worshipping graven images. In this vision, years pass in the blink of an eye, and the protagonist encounters his father as an eighty-year-old decrepit man confined to a wheel-chair. The father cannot write anymore, which inaugurates his “farewell to the language”.
The father is now a resident of a nursery home. He is losing his ability to speak and is nothing like the despotic municipal director he used to be. After the visit during which he learns from his dad a bit of family history, the protagonist meets a little girl sitting on the bench outside the facility. She shows him where to go, but his walks into the opposite direction. The girl follows him, maintaining that he has written his father into the wheelchair. Before disappearing, she recommends that he read Edmond Jabès.
The main character’s suitcase opens and its contents fall into the snow. Among the things strewn around there is a book without a title. Nobody picks up the book and reads it. The text says that his suitcase opens and that among the things that fall out there is a book without a title which he picks up and reads in it about nail scissors, a prayer book, and his mother’s photograph. The objects evoke the memories of his mother, who is metaphorically referred to as the unhealing wound on his forehead. The little girl appears for a moment and tells him to cut out that wound with the scissors, which the protagonist does. When he opens the book without the title again, he can hear the voice of his mother in the vicinity of a gallows from which a man is hanging. The noose is not around his neck, however, but is tightened around the tuft of hair on his head. The man, whose name is Hansel, says that the reason of his current situation is to be found in the fourth Canto of a certain L, who committed to writing painful and embarrassing things and sent to the gallows the idea that provoked them. The man hung by his hair is the embodiment of that idea. His mother and her daughter-in-law tarred and flogged him. He was punished for refusing to have sex with his own mother.
What follows is the story that is supposed to lead up to the hanging of Hansel. While the young man is drinking in the nearby pub, his mother lies naked into his bed. He comes home, finds his mother in his bed and climbs the windowsill with the intention of committing suicide. The mother persuades him to step down back into the room. She notices the golden crucifix on the chain on his neck and promises to set Christ free so he can direct her son. The chain slips from his neck, and they begin looking for it behind the bed. When he regains the crucifix, something is burnt into his chest: it is a sequence of 23 upturned and inverted letters. Out of those, the son can feel only 11. The daughter-in-law enters the room. She declares that if the son does not want to return into the womb of his mother, he should hold himself by his own hair above the earth and liberate his mother’s spirit. Thanks to the black fire, all 23 letters now become visible on the son’s chest. The mother and the daughter begin hitting the son into the chest with the palms of their hands. As a result, the letters rise up like little houses, and in one of these houses we find the protagonist. His goal is to visit all the 23 houses with the help of the map that is represented by the said sequence of the upturned and inverted letters.
The protagonist begins his journey through the houses. Each of them is a certain part of his parents’ home at different periods of time. With each visit, we get a detailed description of the place and the objects inside. Before entering the house of his parents, Nobody has a strange vision: four identical sons are sitting at the table and playing draughts, while a giant hand of their father hovers above their heads. Of some note is the seventh house (N) also known as the House of the Empty Middle. It is a version of his parents’ house in which most of the rooms are empty in the middle. A voice tells him that he has to kill someone. There is a small picture on the wall that he notices only now. A man is lying in a bed that is placed over a stream. There are mountains in the background. In the eighth house the voice of the headmaster accuses the protagonist of cheating for his German class. The proof is the short excerpt from Through the Looking Glass in which there a mention of a clock with the face of a little old man. The protagonist confirms writing this passage, adding that the little old man is none other than Schattenfroh. In the tenth house, we learn more about Nobody’s younger brother, whom he cynically exploits together with his other siblings. In the eleventh house, there is a scene in which the protagonist and his younger brother exchange imaginary mutilations. In the thirteenth house, we find out about the nightstand into which the little brother hides all kinds of things. A health pass from the times of plague is the jewel of his collection. We learn that the father beats him too; he tells the protagonist that he wants to shoot the despotic parent. The protagonist is especially interested in the wardrobe, in which his brother hoards food cans. It is the mysterious place of all 320 houses.
The protagonist wants to get rid of his red, moth-eaten pullover because for him it represents Satan. He hangs the pullover on a makeshift cross in the back of the garden, burns it down, and then buries it amid the trees. Afterwards, he begins seeing nightmares. In one of those, he is compelled to reduce all numerals to the sums of number 1. In another nightmare, he incessantly steals his parents’ pieces of jewellery that keep reappearing in the same spots he has taken them from. He drops the stolen rings, chains, and bracelets into a deep hole in the garden in which they are melted into an idol. He has been stealing the jewellery for Satan.
In the sixteenth house, he finds Theo Champion’s painting Ebene. The narrator’s mother used to tell him that the artist had depicted in that painting the Rhein landscape near Düsseldorf. The protagonist’s contemplation of the picture inevitably brings forth the memories of his deceased mother.
The seventeenth house is a dark chamber. The protagonist uses a pair of binoculars to observe through the tabletop the place where the house of his grandparents used to stand. A century has passed and the location has completely changed. There are no dwellings, nor animals, nor vegetation: just a barren landscape cut through by the Devil’s Gorge (Teufelsschlucht). If we are to believe the narrator, the gorge was formed when his heart had burnt through the ground. In the same chamber, the protagonist places the glowing crucifix on the shoe box and puts on a record with Bach’s St. John Passion. While listening, he contemplates on the technical aspects of dying on the cross. He imagines the public flogging of Christ taking place in the Munich Philharmonic Hall before the performance of Bach’s composition. This hall becomes the eighteenth house.
In the nineteenth house, which is his childhood room, he meets a fallen angel who walks backwards and keeps shuttling between the nineteenth and the twentieth houses. The angels tells Nobody that in the next house he is to dedicate himself entirely to reading books, recommending to begin with two biographies of Satan. Nobody believes that this angel is none other than Schattenfroh. The angel promises that the protagonist will become the book Schattenfroh and proclaims that reading is not mere pastime but is time itself.
The twentieth house turns out to be a huge, empty room without any books. By thinking about Consciousness and Perception, Nobody acquires the ability to read the texts of numerous books in his mind without any need to access their physical form. As soon as he asks to see the list of the required reading for the Frightbearing Society, it begins to snow, and he starts walking towards what he imagines to be a golden bookshelf. He is accompanied on his journey by a messenger boy with a changing face: he recognises his father, his grandfather, his daughter and himself. The messenger must be Dr. Mabuse, the protean villain from the Fritz Lang films. The whole body of the boy begins to change, and he turns into a snake-like creature. They reach a place which reflects different meanings of the word “armarium”. Thus, it is a library room, a cupboard, a weapons locker, a bookcase, and a funeral vault. The snake proves to be a flexible, writhing pencil whose graphite leaves behind scrawls that correspond to Nobody’s brainfluid script. There is a huge rose some thirty or forty metres away. The protagonist feels insuperable attraction and moves towards it. He gets stretched out during this passage and becomes some kind of human anamorphote lens.
The protagonist approaches the desk at which Ezra the Scribe is writing in his own book (i. e. Schattenfroh). He believes that Ezra is just an externally-controlled automaton that is putting on paper what is being transmitted to him. Ezra’s activity falls somewhere in between that of a diaskeuast and a copyist: he does not create anything new but just edits and interpolates what has already been written. The “literature” he creates is nothing but pseudepigraphy.
The protagonist discovers that Ezra has a phantasmal nature as he can easily walk through him and sit on the stool occupied by him. Nobody considers himself Ezra’s doppelgänger, pointing out that this ghostly writing automaton is some kind of virus that is programming him.
The bookcase standing next to Ezra’s desk harbours a very special book: it is the Complete Index of Schattenfroh. On the first page of the Index there is an instruction to lay it on Schattenfroh and open the book on page 575. On that page Michael Lentz’s list of sources for Schattenfroh begins and runs for seven more pages. Among the books in the bibliography there is Schattenfroh written by Schattenfroh. The protagonist speculates that Schattenfroh fears that a book might appear that could expose as bogus his claim to have created a unique book whose originality and closeness to God are unsurpassed.
A trolley with books appears, and Nobody realises that he can absorb their contents without even opening them. One of those tomes is René Girard’s I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. What follows is a bizarre meditation on the crucifixion, Golgotha and the two robbers on either side of Christ. This reflection is apparently based on Girard’s study. There seems to be contamination with some characters and motifs from Beckett’s Malone Dies. The three crosses on Golgotha are identified with the three remaining teeth in the mouth of Moll, a character from Beckett’s novel. There is also the recurring image of the narrator nailed to the cross on top of a hill being observed by himself from a distance. The mother asks him which of the three crucified men he is. When he says that he is in the middle, she observes that he looks like the one on the right. Her son explains that the impostor, who is supposed to hang on the right cross, has taken his place. The mother calls her son by different names of the two robbers (Gestas, Dêmas, Camma, Chammatha, Maggatras).
Nobody decides to destroy some books so that the number of the ones he has to learn by heart would be smaller. This doesn’t work. As soon as he starts tearing the first page of Agamben’s book The Man Without Content, a new copy appears on the shelf. We read the torn page on which Agamben quotes from Nietzsche’s TheGenealogy of Morals. The narrator concludes that the pinnacle of beauty is its destruction. This leads to his meditation on ruins and the implications of their purposeful destruction (which was the case with Palmyra). Schattenfroh is called a liber ruinarium. He believes now that the goal of the Frightbearing Society is not to arise from the ruins but to make sure that our society remains in a ruinous state because therein lies eternal peace, and the role of Ezra is to ensure that the ruins will not become the theatre stage of the unconscious.
The protagonist finally reaches the final, 23rd house. It is his hobby room. When he closes its door, the 23 letters disappear from the chest of the embodied idea. He puts his father’s belongings into his coffer and returns to the bench in the park. There he opens the book without a title that he found among his father’s things and starts reading from page 601, which is the page of Schattenfroh that we are reading right now. He starts remembering his childhood again, the time when he would stare at his reflection in a mirror. Then we learn that the protagonist finds the key to the forbidden room in the attic of the house. He imagines that a certain Mr Schattenfroh lives there. He does not enter that room but descends into the boiler room and builds with wooden blocks a defensive wall around himself. The mother finds him there, slaps him in the face and leaves without supper as a punishment. Later he does open the door of the forbidden room and finds there a large linen sheet. He remembers the recurring situation in which he found a mysterious box on his shelf but as soon as he opened it to look what was inside his mother came in and slapped him in the face, saying “don’t you dare”. It turned out that the box aroused the boy sexually.
According to his mother, the forbidden chamber, in which the protagonist watches the Last Judgement take place, is imaginary. It is a workshop in which he can exercise his imagination. When the participants of the trial leave the room, Nobody begins carefully examining its interior, which corresponds to Michael Triegel’s painting Deus absconditus. In the empty richly embroidered garment to the left of the crucified figure hidden behind the linen sheet, he recognises his Mother Mary. He calls the kneeling figure on the right “little hooded man”, the same way he called the Devil, whom he met in Bosch’s painting of St. John. Overcome with a sudden wish to cause it harm, the narrator picks up the hooded figure and hits it against the typewriter on the table. Then the hooded figure and the wooden statue of Jesus play Easter egg tapping of sorts by smashing against each other. The protagonist puts the Holy Ghost in its coffin below the table and sends it with a kick to the wall. He tries to pull off the sheet from the crucified body but does not succeed: they have become one. The main character also recognises the diagram consisting of three triangles as his father’s work and recollects how the latter used his pen as a burin, engraving his desk with a palimpsest of inscriptions. That was apparently the desk at which Nobody was sitting at the beginning of the novel. Suddenly, one of the skinned cow heads below the table begins speaking. This speech is an excerpt from Luther’s text interpreting the Bible. The protagonist puts a sheet of paper into the typewriter and types the first sentence: “The key is the whole house.” At that point, he closes the book, in which he has read everything above.
Next follows the story of the father’s hearing aid that the protagonist cannot find now among his father’s things. Once at an informal gathering, the father meets a strange man who calls himself Sechsenmann (the man of sixes). That man says that he is going to draw the number 666 over the whole of Berlin. He also mentions an underground passage in which there is a black book attached to a chain. That book has the instructions how to create 666 out of the world. The father switches off his hearing aid and goes to his hotel room. There, he switches it on again and hears the voice of Sechsenmann, who tells him four different versions of the legend of Kuno von Falkenstein. The key event of the story (albeit not in all the versions) is Kuno’s pact with the Devil, who sends him a lion to carry him back to his homeland from Palestine. The condition is that he shouldn’t fall asleep during the ride. If he does, the lion is going to bring him to hell. Kuno is saved by a falcon, which keeps slightly pecking him in the head during the whole journey. Upon his return, Kuno reunites with his wife, besieged by suitors, and the couple is blessed with children. Another important detail of the legend is the Black Madonna, the figure of the Virgin Mary that Kuno placed in the hollow of the oak in gratitude for saving him from his persecutors when he was hiding in the same hollow. When the father returns to the gathering, Sechsenmann is gone. When he switches the device on again, he hears the fairground barker’s voice recite verses from the Book of Revelation.
At the same gathering, there arises a discussion on the role of mobile phones, which enable their possessors to become reporters and share recorded evidence with millions of people via the Internet. This possibility raises ethical issues when instead of interfering with an evil act, the person with the phone records it, so that the video can be used later as morbid entertainment. We learn the story of a 13-year-old boy from Bangladesh, whose torture and murder were filmed on a mobile phone, as well as that of a woman who was gang-raped and beheaded by a group of “family men”, who also recorded their crime on a phone.
The father begins confusing the voice coming from the hearing aid and his own thoughts. He tells his son that there is a wooden box inside his head that receives the signals which are then amplified by the hearing aid. The son believes that the wooden box stands for the onset of dementia. When the protagonist plugs his father’s hearing aid into his ear (apparently, he has found it somewhere), he hears the voice of his father, who tells him he knows about his joining the Frightbearing Society. Now he is supposed to wear the hearing aid all the time so that the father can get in touch with him. The father’s voice resounds in the protagonist like in a tunnel. He goes through that tunnel and finds himself back at the park bench near the nursing home. On the bench, his father is waiting for him. He has the eyes of the little girl, whom the protagonist met here earlier. The father tells him that they should set out on a journey, on foot, to attend a class reunion. The class was taught by the protagonist’s grandfather.
As they walk, the father recounts to the protagonist the story of the granddad, which his son dutifully records. The granddad was a devout catholic, who was accused of high treason and arrested by Gestapo. In the Gestapo prison, he was beaten up and humiliated. His torturers made a point of ridiculing his faith. Once they made him crawl on all fours around the interrogation table, calling that “cross procession”.
After two months of confinement, the grandfather is released from the Gestapo prison without any explanation. He returns to the school where he used to teach but is almost immediately dismissed by Kreisleiter Dr. Müller. He is serving in an anti-aircraft detachment when he gets a warning about his second forthcoming arrest. He leaves the place of deployment to join his family, which flees from Prüm in the face of the inevitable invasion of the U.S. troops. The father’s main source for these events is his brother Ahndemir’s letter of appreciation dedicated to their grandfather. During the occupation, the grandfather becomes a denazification commissioner. He comes into the possession of a card catalogue with the names of the citizens that had dealings with the Nazi organisation Opferring. The protagonist’s father and Ahndemir use this information to visit the businesses that belong to some of those people to shame them. As for the grandfather, he refuses to punish most of the former Nazis from his town, considering them just brutalised petits bourgeois, who will become harmless under the right circumstances. The grandfather does not even retaliate against Dr. Müller after finding his order to shoot him. After the war, the grandfather returns again to the school, where he soon becomes the headmaster. He also actively engages in politics, and from 1947 to 1958 serves as the district chairman of the Christian Democratic Union.
The protagonist tells his father that they are going in the wrong direction, but the latter doesn’t react and keeps going. He will never accept his mistake. Nobody makes a halt. As he watches his father walk away, he recollects another time when his father lost bearings. He was 14 years old at the time, and his father took him to the Alps for a hiking trip whose goal was to climb the summit of Traunstein. Instead of following a relatively safe route, the father, by mistake, chooses another one, which requires special preparation and is fraught with danger. At one point, the boy gets left behind on the narrow path. He walks on alone until he finds his father’s note telling him to get to the alpine lodge Gmunder Hütte. New text emerges on the piece of paper with the father’s message. When there’s no space left, it bleeds over into the air. For the most part, those are words urging him to keep walking to the destination. The word “davon” from the phrase “Das kommt davon” (It’s your fault) unravels like a yarn. The thread winds around the protagonist and leads him to Gmunder Hütte. It turns out that the person responsible for his rescue is the lodgekeeper, who introduced himself to his father, when he came alone to the lodge, as Schattenfroh. When they come together into the lodge, the keeper berates the father for his negligence. Later, the father maintains that his son suffered from altitude sickness and did not remember well their walk to the mountain lodge. The lodgekeeper suggest that they kneel together before the crucifix to thank God for sparing the lives of the father and the son, but the father refuses to do that because the crucifix in the lodge doesn’t have a corpus. The lodgekeeper urges the father to stare at the cross until the corpus appears. The father tries, but nothing happens. When the keeper says that Germans are the dumbest hikers, the father attempts to beat him with the crucifix; the lodgekeeper counters his blows with a butcher’s knife. When later recounting the story of their hike, the father comes up with different, mutually contradictory versions of what happened.
There is another, much stranger recollection. The father leads the protagonist from the alpine lodge to the Traunstein Summit Cross. He comes with his son to the edge of the cliff and, mimicking Satan tempting Christ, says that everything he sees can belong to him if he takes a step further. Below, there are three carts filled with half-decomposed, plague-infested corpses. The father pushes the protagonist over the edge.
We return to the current journey. The protagonist sees his father eating their rations on a hill and reunites with him. The father reveals to his son that the body is just a secondary effect of perception, a piece of knowledge he has drawn from the book Das Mich der Wahrnehmung. Eine Autopsie. Next, they enter Bosch’s painting The Extraction of the Stone of Madness, in which the father performs the role of the patient. The woman with the book on her head becomes his mother. After the surgery, they continue their journey. Their route leads past execution sites. First, they come across a man (from Tübke’s painting) strapped to a wheel atop a pole. He hasn’t been broken and asks the newcomers to save him before the crows start pecking at him. The father refuses to help him. The father tells his son that he sees him hanging on a cross, but for the son the cross is empty. When he looks through binoculars, he sees the hovering donkey-eared Pope from Tübke’s panorama. Nearby, someone is impaled. The father believes that the Pope is none other than Pius XII. The crows peck out the eyes of the man on the wheel. The protagonist and his father walk into a snow-covered terrain. They have entered Tübke’s painting Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany. They marvel at how the winter landscape abruptly transitions into the one in which eternal summer reigns. The father reminds his son that in reality he is still confined to the cell, in which he is producing the text of Schattenfroh.
The father shows the protagonist the cylinder-shaped building of the Panorama Museum and tells him that it is the concrete frame for the world they see around (the world of the painting). The newly-made world is 123 metres long and weighs 1.1 tonnes. It has taken 12 years to create it.
The father recites the technical description of the museum’s construction process from a certain Müller’s article for the magazine Bauplanung-Bautechnik. Before they reach the museum, the protagonist imagines the painting of the panorama as a punishment imposed on him by Mateo and contemplates several scenes from Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany: Pontius Pilate washing his hands and the Jester playing a lute; Justitia (Goddess of Justice) balancing on a terrestrial globe; Jesus Christ suspended horizontally in the air and flying towards the viewer.
On the father’s forehead the words “Morbus pick” appear. He makes his son do push-ups. When the son complies, he puts a Bible on his back, saying that it will help him to do the task better. The book presses him down to the ground, and he is unable to do push-ups properly. The father urges him to continue and then starts beating him: first with his hands and then with a bull pizzle.
They approach the building and admire the bronze sculptures in the forecourt. Those are pieces from Lotta Blokker’s series I am here now: Levity, I am here now, Precipice, Atlas. There is also the girl with a hoop from de Chirico’s Mystery and Melancholy and the two conversing men from Piazza by the same artist. The admission clerk introduces himself as Herbert Müller aka Shell. He will not let them enter the building before listening to the history of its construction, which he tells in excruciating detail. To check how well the protagonist has been following his lecture, Müller asks him 4 specific questions. Nobody answers 3 correctly. When the father and son realise that Müller will never stop talking, they come up with a cunning plan: they minimise the font of his speech and, as a result, the admission clerk dwindles down to the size of an ant.
Before entering the building, the father and son contemplate the forecourt, which is a representation of the square from de Chirico’s Mystery and Melancholy. The shadowy silhouette of the girl and the mysterious circus wagon get the most attention. The distribution of the shadows seems unnatural to the father. He also believes that the huge shadow towards which the girl is running is cast by Bismarck.
After they enter the Museum, the protagonist, for a brief period, imagines himself to be the Devil from Hieronymus Bosch’s Last Judgement. As he steps through the toad-infested archway, he finds himself in the lobby, where he sees his father talking to Mr Müller, who has returned to his normal size. The father is telling the admission clerk about his son’s delusions. Then, the father introduces Müller as Ebert Neuwerk, which is an anagram of “Werner Tübke”, the name of the artist who has created the panorama painting. They enter a room without beginning and end, which must be the circular hall in which Tübke’s painting is displayed. The father now addresses Ebert Neuwerk as Mateo. It turns out that the father’s former twelve classmates who have arrived for the class reunion are none other than the twelve historical figures standing around the well of immortality (or Luther’s well) in one of the scenes in the painting. The gender of some of these personages has been changed. Thus, Erasmus, Dürer, and Veil Stossare referred to as women. We learn a bit about several of the distinguished persons gathered at the well. Besides the three mentioned above, those are Sebastian Brant, Jörg Ratgeb, and Tilman Riemenschneider. Columbus is not recognised and is referred to as a soldier in a purple jacket.
When the father greets his former classmates, who look like the historical figures, in order to officially start the reunion, a shrill voice interferes. The voice belongs to Thomas Müntzer, who delivers his famous Field Sermon, the one he gave before the Battle of Frankenhausen. On the other side of the hedge surrounding the well, the father discovers a haggard man with a triangular white flag: it is Müntzer as he is depicted by Tübke in the panorama. All of a sudden, the father is dressed as a 16th century nobleman. Karl May’s character Jefferson Tuff-Tuff has arrived to report on the uprising of the peasants in a baroque style, characterised of the use of long sentences. We get a summary of the main events.
The father slaps Müntzer in the face. The haggard man falls on the ground but continues his sermon. “It is a revolt!” complains the father to Hans Hut, who corrects him by replying: “No sir, it is a revolution.” We follow the description of the course of the battle, which is also an ekphrasis of the battle scene in the panorama. The protagonist assumes the role of Thomas Müntzer. The father proceeds screaming abuse at him and then slaps his son-as-Müntzer again, sending him to the ground for a second time. The protagonist keeps delivering the sermon. He promises that he is going to catch cannonballs with his sleeves. The father gets his son’s sleeves cut off, and out of them two letters fall out: those are Thomas Müntzer’s derogatory messages to his enemy Count Mansfeld. The father puts the letters into his leather bag and orders two Landsknechts to sew back the sleeves.
When they return to the well, everyone is dressed in modern clothes. On the outer wall of the well, the word “Schattenfroh” appears. The writing continues around the well and the protagonist follows it, running around the well 10 times. The writing evokes the early scene of Schattenfroh in which the main character is sitting at the table covered in inscriptions. He starts reading and what he reads about is the reunion of his father with his former classmates. Lucas Cranach turns out to be Mr Fietkau; Sebastian Brant – Werner Beutek (Tübke?); Riemenschneider – Mechtild Goergen. There is also Paul Schug, Gisela Stromm, and Anni Gansen. An argument about the grandfather’s anti-Nazi position ensues. Some of the guests do not think that it was so obvious. The discussion quickly turns to the subject of Clemens August Graf von Galen’s pastoral letters. There is a flashback to the time when the mother of the protagonist got worried that the book he was reading (Karl May’s novel Through Wild Kurdistan) might have violent content. The father confronts his son about the book, in which the main character receives an amulet from the mystical character Marah Durimeh. The father does not approve of his son’s interest in esoteric and superstitious subjects.
As the company of the former classmates raise their glasses in honour of the grandfather, the battle rages on. The protagonist sees the crucifixion pattern formed by the characters and objects in the battle scene of Tübke’s painting. It is hard for him to tell whether the falling white creature in the halo is an angel or Satan. He also thinks that the predatory bird hovering above the banner of the princely army is a vulture whose purpose is to get shot down. The father asserts that society should return to the medieval class system whose members were rendered equal by the Dance of Death. He gives the order to arrest his son, but thanks to the streams of blood running down the hill, the protagonist manages to escape. He enters a house with an attic room similar to the one that he used to inhabit as a grown-up in the house of his parents. He lies in bed, and, having difficulty to fall asleep begins meditating on the failure of the popular uprising whose goal is to build a just society according to the will and word of God.
The protagonist lying in bed re-enacts the fate of Thomas Müntzer, whose identity he has assumed. He is discovered in his hideout by the winners of the battle: Landgrave Philip I (whose role is performed by his father) and George, Duke of Saxony. The Landgrave points out that the peasants’ uprising is an act against God’s will, for God prohibits any rebellion and revenge against the powers that be, which can be clearly seen in the New Testament (Romans 13). The protagonist opposes his father by falling back on the authority of the Old Testament (Jeremiah 36), which recognises the right to rebel against the tyranny of evil. The father dismisses his son’s arguments, noting that his God is Schattenfroh and that he has distorted the text of the Bible to serve his blasphemous goals.
Four servants grab the protagonist and lead him out of the building, followed by Philip and George. They return into the landscape of Tübke’s painting. George tells the protagonist that his heretical writings should be destroyed and that is why it is important to find the evil place which harbours all the letters he has used, that is the printing workshop in which his book was made. George summarises some of the arguments that Johannes Trithemius (Jens Noah) advanced against printing. For example, the multiplication of a text with errors and misprints, which are inevitable, may lead to the establishment of the perverted meaning as the true one. Johannes Trithemius also gave preference to copying holy books rather than writing one’s own because the scribe was less likely to develop vanity and fall prey to mischievous thoughts.
They arrive at a rocky area traversed by a fissure which serves as the orchestra pit for a choir of shofar sounders. Nearby there are the ruins of a building amid which commoners are dancing, a group of nobles feasting at a table, a fire-breathing winged dragon perched on a wall and a printing workshop. This is a slightly modified scene from Tübke’s panorama. The captors of the main character collect from the meadow stray sheets of paper with text. On one of them there is already familiar prediction that Lucifer made to Nobody on pages 261-262. Here is a reminder: “In order to bring God down, Lucifer needs a new alphabet whose consonants would grind everything that gets between them. The draft of this alphabet was made a hundred years ago by a certain Doris Erben. When God, instead of “I am who I am”, becomes “I was who I was”, the sound of the shofar will announce the arrival of the Devil.” Another sheet of paper turns out to be a leaflet with a text about the assault on and the capture of the print shop of Schattenfroh. That turns out to be the biblical text about the Destruction of Jericho (Joshua 6) with some alterations. In the version read out loud by the duke of Saxony Jericho is the print shop of Schattenfroh; the seven priests are the seven hermeneuts; the Ark of Covenant is the book Schattenfroh; the Lord is the Father; Joshua is George; Rahab the harlot is Mateo. In the text of the leaflet George pronounces condemnation of anyone who will try to analyse and interpret the book Schattenfroh, to which the protagonist responds that the book has not been finished yet as they are currently on page 810. They enter the print shop (as depicted by Tübke) in which nine people are working. George asks one of the printers to explain to the captive the work of the printing press. The printer obliges and delivers a highly technical, complicated lecture whose tediousness and obscurity can only be rivaled by the gobbledygook of the Panorama Museum admission clerk.
According to the master printer, the workers at the shop have been toiling for years over the production of Schattenfroh and there is no end in sight. The text of each page appears first on a sheet of paper fixed in the copyholder, and as soon as the compositors see it, they proceed to typesetting. The erratic orthography of the text and the abundance of all kinds of errors are a real pain in the neck for the proof-readers, not to mention the serpentine sentences running on for whole pages. The protagonist notes that there are freshly printed pages, which he didn’t write and which shouldn’t be part of his book, like a page from Cervantes’ Don Quixote with a reference to the story of the cave that may have been the only fabrication on the part of the valiant knight who otherwise had always told the truth.
Philip I tells the protagonist that not only his body is going to be destroyed but also his soul, which lies in the text of Schattenfroh. The princes are going to execute the book by deprinting it. An old typefounder called Mario, who is none other than Mateo, has cast numerous copies of the deletion mark (₰) which will render all the black print in the book invisible when the process of deprinting is carried out. The protagonist performs the role of the bar, i. e. the wooden lever which is used to tighten the screw of the printing press. The printers grab his stiffened body, attach it to the press, and get down to work. They suspend the deprinting of the book on page 837, which is also the page on which we read about it in Schattenfroh. The exhausted workers take a break. They nail a crossbeam to the back of the protagonist and hang the resultant cross on a wrought-iron mounting. Philip is dismayed by the fact that the workers can still read the book pages which have turned blank after the deprinting. The black print has been replaced by the white print, which proves to be perfectly legible for some readers. Upon Philip’s order, Mateo reads from one of the blank pages a Danse Macabre poem set in a printing office. This is the poem that accompanies the respective woodcut in Mathias Huss’ 1499 book. Duke George is frustrated because he can see neither the poem nor the woodcut. He wonders if the blank page is an analogue of Norbertus Gijsbrechts’ trompe-l’œil The Reverse of a Framed Painting: an empty page representing an empty page. Mateo objects that the page is not empty and that there is a concrete image that he can see. This sends George on an association-generating spree. Using Gijsbrechts’ painting as a springboard, he describes several images that he can “see” in the white page, the most notable of those being the image of the crucified Christ.
As a live illustration of the debate about the meaning of the blank page, the protagonist, who is still hanging on the mounting, gets whitewashed from head to toe. He feels that there are some letters in his mouth, and he keeps rearranging them until they make up a row of meaningful words: George Philip Jesus Christ Schattenfroh Father Nobody. For some time, he follows the movements of these characters inside his mouth. Then, the main character gives his own interpretation of the Danse Macabre woodcut: Death will come for and lead away anyone who has decided to murder the book. George proclaims this statement an offence against the sovereign and tells the protagonist that he will be taken to Heldrungen Castle, where torture and death await him. The protagonist looks at the scene unfolding to the right of the printing shop. He sees in Tübke’s wife astride a horse his mother and in the old dying man whose soul is snatched by a demon—his father. Tübke’s self-portrait is reinterpreted as the image of the protagonist holding the book Schattenfroh in his hands.
The protagonist with the wooden beam still attached to his back is tied to the saddle of the woman’s horse. He considers the woman his mother. The woman with the protagonist tied behind, the princes, their servants, and a detachment of landsknechts set off for the castle of Count Ernest II, the notorious place of Thomas Müntzer’s incarceration and torture. During the ride, the main character discovers the ability of switching between two different selves: the Writing One and the Mama’s Boy. After some time, he realises that his “mother” is in reality a wooden doll. There is a detailed description of the landscape traversed by the cavalcade. The plant species of the region are described with the precision one would expect to find in a botany textbook.
During a halt, Nobody’s attention is caught by a swarm of beetles pullulating on the ground. He begins observing their movements and soon discovers that the beetles very accurately recreate the Battle of Frankenhausen. In the end of this performance, the insects swarm up the horse trying to overwhelm the narrator. When they fall back to the ground, they form with their little bodies the word “Schattenfroh”. On the back of each beetle there is the number 666. The protagonist manages to free himself from his ties and to sit upright in the saddle. His “mother” has turned to a chunk of deadwood.
They finally arrive at the castle grounds. George tells the protagonist about some of especially sadistic guards of the castle. For example, the gatehouse watchman is notorious for luring undesirable visitors to the spot with a trapdoor and sending them to the vat with toxic chemicals below. All the victims are then preserved and turned into medical exhibits. As George assures his captive, the guard of the keep is even more cruel and inventive. In the course of his stint, he has come up with unspeakable and inimitable tortures for those who have tried to pass him without a permit. In this guard, whose name is Antonio Atome, we recognise our old friend Mateo.
Antonio Atome convoys the protagonist to his cell in the tower in the eastern part of the castle complex. There is a bed, a table, and two chairs inside. The furniture and the walls are covered with the same synthetic material. There are two guards present in his cell most of the time. One of them is Antonio Atome. Soon the prisoner has no idea whether it is day or night at a given moment and begins having hallucinations: for example, he sees some familiar faces in the faecal contents of the clogged toilet bowl. At one point, Atome makes the protagonist sit at the table, which turns out to be either identical or similar to the one from the very beginning of the novel. It is likewise covered in inscriptions and has a stylus attached to it with a chain. Only this time, the stylus writes and scribbles on its own, without any external interference. Upon Atome’s orders, Nobody tries to commit to memory the ground plan of the cell, which makes him think of the passage about Simonides in Cicero’s book De Oratore.
One day, when the totally confused protagonist is alone in his cell, it is announced that his interrogator, who is the Devil himself, is about to arrive. It is Mateo who enters the cell. (He is not Antonio Atome anymore). Mateo orders the prisoner to say his new creed which is the repeated phrase “Interrogator/ you are my Interrogator” in which words are shifted to different positions in each new iteration. The model for these permutations is children’s song Drei Chinesen mit dem Kontrabass. Before going away, Mateo leaves some writing paper in the cell but strictly forbids the prisoner to write. The latter circumvents this ban by releasing the writing birds out of his head. These strange creatures prone to cannibalism do the writing in his stead. Then Mateo appears sitting in the already familiar blue sofa and says that he can read the bird scribbles. Nobody tells the interrogator his nightmare: While writing, he is holding in his hand a snake instead of a pencil. Afraid that the snake is going to bite him, he takes off his writing hand and puts it into a box. Then it turns out that this is a female hand and not his.
Mateo reveals to the protagonist that the cell arrangement has 11 articles, which happen to be the same as those of the Cologne Constitution. The prisoner has to repeat them after the interrogator. His next task is to decipher the jumbled Latin phrase Quia parvus error in principio magnus est in fine from Aquinas’ text On Being and Essence. At some point, Mateo reminds his prisoner the paradoxical nature of the Frightbearing Society, which is not a part of society at large but a society that contains society at large within.
A third guard enters the prison cell and stands with his face to the wall. Mateo tells the protagonist that the newcomer is going to take over his responsibilities. When the man turns toward them, he proves to be a spitting image of the main character, his double. It turns out that there is no third guard, that the double and the second guard are the same person. Mateo calls him Alter, while the protagonist is dubbed Ego. Alter sits at the desk, and Mateo begins dictating to him the impalement episode from Ivo Andrić’s novel The Bridge on the Drina. He keeps interrupting his dictation to elicit from the protagonist his ideas regarding the content of the excerpt. Nobody makes several wrong guesses before it becomes clear what kind of execution is described. Mateo wonders if the writer attended a real impalement to describe the scene with such verisimilitude and attention to detail. Mateo demands from the protagonist and Alter to choose who is going to be impaled. If they choose each other, they both are going to be executed. The same fate awaits them if each of them chooses himself. The only chance to survive for one of them is to choose the other, who is going to chooses himself. The protagonist points at Alter, who does nothing.
The main character lies in bed and has a dream about a spiritual experience in a tent on the bank of the river Ganges. He has a 40°C fever, while the air outside is 42°C. He drinks two litres of warm beer and then God tells him to get out of the tent and go swimming. When the protagonist emerges from the tent, he sees in the river a two-headed beast with the likeness of a leopard, paws of a bear and the mouth of a lion. The beast accuses him of drinking Bavarian beer instead of Cologne beer and threatens to devour him unless he recites 666 Cologne beer brands in alphabetical order.
Mateo returns to the cell and reads to the protagonist Albrecht Dürer’s apocalyptic dream. Then Mateo has the prisoner swallow printing letters from a box so that he can produce a text with his thoughts on Luther. The protagonist can’t do anything. Mateo inserts a golden character into his tooth gap. Nobody puts black type into his mouth to colour the golden character black. The mouth of the main character becomes a printing press, and he quickly prints this single character on each of the 907 blank pages. As it becomes clear, these pages contain the deprinted text of the book Schattenfroh and the symbol in the mouth of the protagonist makes the text visible again. Moreover, the protagonists’ thoughts on Luther have already been written down by Alter and now are part of the text of the book. Those thoughts have the form of a theological essay on such topics as the initial Word, the prohibition of images, and the Ten Commandments (specifically the fifth one: “thou shall not kill”). The bulk of the essay is dedicated to the fifth commandment and the way it is interpreted by Luther. The most controversial point expressed by Luther is that the authorities stand above the fifth commandment and therefore possess a license to kill granted by God. The essay concludes with the idea that Luther saw in Thomas Müntzer the anti-Luther that he wanted to suppress in himself.
Mateo decides against impalement and beheads Alter with a sword on whose blade the name “Schattenfroh” is engraved. The head is displayed on a stake near the old printing shop. The curious passers-by keep disturbing the head, so it is decided to remove it together with the stake and let the path leading to the spot grow over with grass, for a well-trodden path may be perceived as the way leading to a martyr or a saint.
The protagonist remembers his father’s last days in hospital. There is a detailed description of the dying patient connected to an artificial respiration apparatus. The main character meditates on the difficulty of finding the right words when talking with someone who is about to die. He remembers Frederick the Great, who could not talk to his dying sister face-to-face and sent her a letter instead. Then the thoughts of the protagonist drift to the concepts of the immortality of the human soul and the resurrection of the dead. In particular he wonders whether the soul dies together with the body, and if it does, is the resurrected person a newly created double of the one who died?
The protagonist meditates on the death of his father and wonders if he has become a Nachzehrer, a kind of vampire from the German folklore. He recollects a little wooden box that used to stand on the chest of drawers in his parents’ bedroom. The smells that the box gave off made him think of a hybrid animal, half a lion and half a bird of prey. When one day the protagonist told his mother that he was inside the box, she stopped opening it. There is also a brief recollection of the father’s second wife, who was slowly dying of leukaemia. Thinking about her, the protagonist comes to the conclusion that euthanasia should be taught at elementary school. Further on, he develops an outlandish conceit of a special government body that requires the inhabitants of each city to take an exam in road construction guidelines. Those who fail the exam are not allowed to use sidewalks.
The protagonist remembers a visit to a loud and smoke-filled bar. He is there with his brother. Apparently, this happens after the death of their father. The attention of the main character is drawn to a woman called Erna, who is addicted to slot machine gambling. He also thinks about the Military Cemetery in Vossenack and entertains the idea of being crucified there. When they leave the bar, the brother of the main character takes a taxi, whereas the latter prefers to walk on foot. While walking towards the train station, the protagonist encounters a group of drunk homeless people. Their strange conversation rings a bell for him because it alludes to an earlier episode, in which he identified the three crosses on Golgotha with the three remaining teeth in the mouth of Moll, a character from Beckett’s novel Malone Dies. One vagrant asks another to open his mouth, so he can show him Jesus and the robbers, hanging on crosses inside. Then the landscape changes. A deep gorge opens in the ground, and they find themselves in a mountainous region. The homeless alcoholics turn into sabre-wielding soldiers.
The protagonist crawls to the edge of the gorge and looks down. What he sees below is a scene which is inspired by the collages of German writer, poet, and artist Ror Wolf. At the bottom of the gorge there is a shallow creek above which a bed stands. There is a man lying in the bed; he looks like Friedrich Alexander von Bismarck-Bohlen, a Prussian cavalry general and a distant relative of Otto von Bismarck. On the outer surface of the bed’s footboard, there is a projected image of two boys: the narrator and his brother. The bed is approached by a man wearing a tail-coat and a top hat. When the boys notice the man in the top hat, they crawl out of the bed and run away. The protagonist sees a stone falling into the gorge and then realises that he is that stone. He approaches the figure lying in the bed. It is his father. The main character has assumed the role of the man in the top hat. The two boys in the footboard detect his presence, crawl out of the bed and run away. They have left a sheet of paper, which the protagonist is able to pull out of the footboard. On the sheet of paper, there is a drawing. It is the modified geometric figure from Michael Triegel’s painting Deus absonditus with the words Pater, Filius, Spiritus. Next to the bed, there is a mysterious cone-shaped optical device with two square eyepieces. The lid on one side of the device is open. He discovers hundreds of spiders inside. Then someone lights a torch and sets the spiders on fire. They melt into an amorphous mass that flows away like a rivulet. He looks into the device and sees the bottom of the gorge with the creek and the man lying in bed. Next to the bed there is the optical device. He observes himself interacting with his father. The protagonist who is observed by himself via the apparatus, ruminates on the state of his teeth and imagines that the Munich Olympic Stadium is being built inside his mouth. In his throat there is a mountainous landscape in which several scenes unfold. First, there is a nun falling off a bicycle. Then, we see the mother of the protagonist with a book of reproductions of Vermeer’s paintings. After that, the father of the protagonist comes alive after the mother puts in his bed the clothes of the nun. The father puts on the nun’s attire and sits at his desk to work with papers.
The father writes a “decree” about his son’s disaffiliation from Catholicism. He points out that although the protagonist can formally leave the church, he will always remain a baptised catholic. Among other things, the father accuses Nobody of his mother’s death and warns him that the host he has swallowed will turn one day into a monster that will be sitting in his mouth and giving him orders on his father’s behalf. He also maintains that the gorge in which he is seen lying in bed does not exist. Before the father can write down his son’s verdict, he disappears leaving the nun’s habit in the empty bed.
The protagonist, who is lying on a table that stands on a ledge on the rock wall, sees his mother skiing down the slope of a mountain. The origin of this vision is his mother’s photograph taken at a ski resort. There is a mysterious symbol on the surface of the tabletop. He has a brief hallucination in which he lies in the ICU bed instead of his father and gets decapitated with a medieval execution sword bearing an inscription. Back on the tabletop, the main character looks at the photos of his mother which are kept in a little wooden chest. In one of them, his mother is captured as a five-year old girl astride a black horse. Her pet name is “little sparling” (Stintelein).
Nobody manages to transfer the symbol from the tabletop to the lid of the little chest. This symbol shows nothing else except itself and thus corresponds to Martin Heidegger’s definition of phenomenology in Being and Time. The symbol itself is the picture of the little chest with the text borrowed from the explication of the medieval symbol of discretion. The main message is not to reveal the secret of the great ones under any circumstances. Meanwhile the scene below has changed. The bed with the man lying in it now stands in the middle of the river Prüm. Next to the bed, there is the same optical device. On the surface of the footboard a huge mask is formed. The protagonist cuts his foot on a root and the smell of the blood attracts little bloodsucking beasts. He wants to jump down to avoid these animals but notices below a child with his features. The protagonist begins to descend and the child to climb up, and, at some point, the child takes his former place on the tabletop. The main character now has a feeling that the child can control him, and that he has become his marionette. With the help of the child, he succeeds safely reaching the bottom of the gorge.
The protagonist looks into the optical device next to the bed. He dubs the device “Hegel” because it lets him observe his own consciousness. He sees himself cutting his foot on the root and the child with his features pointing at the same device. The earlier scene follows, ending with him descending to the bottom of the gorge. But then things get different. The creek turns bloody red. Next to the optical device there is a desk whose top is filled with inscriptions. This is the desk from the beginning of the novel. A person who looks like the protagonist sits at the desk. Mateo is there too. He strokes the head of the scribe. The protagonist who observes this scene through the Hegel device, realises that this double is a golem and that he himself is this golem’s golem or a mogel. There is a little box on the golem’s head similar to the Jewish tefillah. The Golem has an old, crumbling book in which he writes a story about a paranoid man in the GDR, who thinks that the officers from the Stasi building across the street can read his thoughts and therefore gives himself up before they can arrest him. However, he is neither interrogated nor arrested for he should not forestall with his self-hatred the well-deserved hatred of the security service.
Mateo is holding a folder with printed pages. The protagonist can reach the box on the head of the golem through the device. With his finger, he draws the Hebrew letter Shin (ש) on the box and immediately the name “Schattenfroh” appears and goes through multiple anagrammatic permutations. The main character realises that the golem is Schattenfroh, and that each time he will touch the box on the golem’s head, Schattenfroh will get weaker, whereas he will get stronger by absorbing the released power. The text in Mateo’s folder is the same text as at the beginning of the novel Schattenfroh, but it goes backwards as Mateo turns the pages in the opposite direction. As the narrator repeatedly shakes the box, the anagrams of Schattenfroh lose a letter each time: first S, then C, then H etc. The golem begins writing in Mateo’s folder, which is also a book, the text from the beginning of Schattenfroh which still goes backwards. As the letters in “Schattenfroh” keep disappearing, the enfeebled golem keeps writing until he reaches the very beginning of the book. The picture that the protagonist sees in the device gets distorted, a crack runs through text, the words become bearably distinguishable. When the name “Schattenfroh” totally disappears, all that is left is the first sentence of the novel, clear and undamaged: “One calls this writing.”
The Untranslated 
