When Bertolt Brecht urgently needed a car, he wrote a poem about a car without further ado: "We're in the curve like an adhesive strip.

/ Our motor is: / A thinking ore,” it said, among other things.

That was total nonsense, but led straight to the point, because Brecht had given the poem the title "Singende Steyr-Wägen" and was immediately provided with such a car by the Austrian automobile company Steyr, which could not sing, which Brecht, who was a devastatingly bad driver but didn't bother.

Brecht had invented what he needed right now so that it would become reality – a trade of fiction for reality, mind for matter.

That's how it is with the true masters in the "truth trade".

One thinks up what one needs, just as the writer Martin Walser came up with the word truth trade when he urgently needed it.

Since then, anyone who makes a product that contains at least a grain of truth has been able to call themselves a truth crafter in good spirits.

This applies to the social novel, the theater criticism and the award-winning report in the magazine, which brings us to the rather large grains of untruth that the journalist Claas Relotius stumbled upon when, a few years ago, he found out how good he was at inventing, what he needed for his reports for the news magazine "Der Spiegel".

How to analyze an audience

The journalist prizes that Relotius had received for his fakes were followed by disclosure and scandal, and the scandal was followed by expulsion.

Then a book was quickly published on the subject, and finally a film was made.

But now Relotius is said to have found a new job.

He proved that he knows how to analyze the needs of a target group when he gave his superiors at “Spiegel” what they asked of him.

This is probably why the advertising agency that successfully spread the untruth that stinginess is cool, recruited Relotius.

So has Relotius arrived where he belongs?

The author Walser made the bold statement: "Dreaming is enough." Relotius' new employer should have a completely different view: you have to sell the dreams of others.

As the author of advertising texts, Claas Relotius now has the opportunity to reconcile literature and advertising, the description of reality and the invention of reality.

He should only write advertising slogans for products that he has come up with himself.