The first-person narrator of “Kotmörtel”, the “novel of a squadronor”, which Thomas Kapielski published last year in the edition suhrkamp, gives an outline of his life in the second chapter in the coordinates of space and time: “Solar system, earth, now 21. Century, Holocene, Interglacial;
Willy Brandt;
later permanent Kohl, then Merkel government. "
While the latter epoch of political history stretches almost endlessly and today, while you are reading this (to address you freely in the manner of a squadronor), it has not yet passed completely, behind which the new Willy Brandt Olaf Scholz is waiting - meanwhile Kapielski's other self has come to an eternal standstill, because the novel on page 410 had to come to an end (in capital letters). In the Holocene, the person with the unbelievable name Frowalt Heimwée Irrgang Hiffenmarkt appeared on September 16, 1950, exactly one year to the day before his creator. How do you do that?
The narrator has far too much in common with the author, such as the series of “Proofs of God”, which, in contrast to its author who is both local and biblical, who is stuck in the novel by criminal law arrest, “for their part wanders around the world (as a pocket booklet) ". The material for it falls from the sky: as the filth of the flies that buzz around it in the cell. Did such a disgusting insect settle down on paper and turn the 1 into a 0 to artificially age Kapielski's doppelganger, thereby rejuvenating the original at the same time? Kapielski's entire literary work is a series of experiments on the reproduction of printer's ink, imitation of the press, the immortal simulacrum of rustling leaves that fix, as it says in Kapielski's pocket booklet "Time Containers",what was "certainly of importance at the time", but became "irrelevant to all in the process". “Yesterday's newspaper is already today!” Today's not, because today Thomas Kapielski is celebrating his seventieth birthday.