The writer Maxim Biller has written a new, short novel, “The Wrong Greeting”, about a young, unstable author named Erck Dessauer, who fears that another established author named Hans Ulrich Barsilay will ruin his success.
A success that Erck thinks he deserves, he wants to go where Barsilay is already, restaurants, women, feature pages.
There is much to suggest that Dessauer imagines this competition between him and the star Barsilay.
Also because Dessauer really knows only one feeling - to be misunderstood.
And only this one desperately sweet feeling gives him support and size.
Dessauer howls a lot about it.
Tobias Rüther
Editor in the features section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.
Follow I follow
Barsilay, on the other hand, is a dazzling, raving Jewish silverback from Berlin-Mitte. He has written an autobiographical bestseller, "My People," which amounts to a cathartic nervous breakdown during a visit to Auschwitz. But Barsilay apparently invented it, he was never in Poland. What Dessauer finds out. And makes it public to disavow Barsilay and prevent him from stealing the show.
Because Dessauer himself is writing his breakthrough book: a historical portrait of Naftali Frenkel, inventor of the Gulag system. In the book, he tries to provide the ultimate proof that the Communists produced the murderous methods on which the National Socialists subsequently built: the stumbling block that started the historians' dispute 35 years ago. And Erck Dessauer is cheered for.
So the one character in Maxim Biller's new novel is a Jewish intellectual, Biller makes him a descendant of Heine. The other is an apologist Ernst Noltes - and the son of a Leipzig professor from the GDR functional elite who took his own life after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Both figures are looking for success in discourse. And the way Biller stages this duel, which ultimately only takes place in Dessauer's head, and provides a lot of allusions, you hardly have any problems recognizing a reflection of our present in it. A present of historical-political debates about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, kitschter memorial literature like “Stella”, BDS and “Israel criticism” and the fascination for the totalitarian as an intellectual sport practiced by left and right alike.
But compressing the content of this short novel in this way already means reducing it to a formula that can then be applied again to real discourses about guilt and memory, the sovereignty of interpretation and the right to speak and freedom of expression, to which the book alludes permanently. As if Biller had made a comment with this novel. But it is literature and follows its own laws of costuming, veiling, twisting, sharpening. That's why it's not that easy, even if it might read that way.