Where Between Worlds, the new dialogical novel by Juli Zeh and Simon Urban, comes from, there's more.

In the author's drawer lies an unfinished "e-mail novel" entitled "Wolfenstein".

Zeh has now given an excerpt from it to the literary magazine "Text + Kritik", which is dedicating its current issue to her (109 pages, 28 euros).

"Part of my writing practice is writing a lot of texts that I eventually give up, mostly novels," Zeh explains in a brief note.

“The longer it has been since the last working day on a certain text, the less likely it is that I will continue to develop it.

This is the 'survival of the fittest' in my creative process.”

Tobias Ruether

Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

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Zeh began the twenty-page “Wolfenstein” in 2009, the year when her health dictatorship dystopia “Corpus delicti” appeared, which Zeh’s colleague Daniel Kehlmann later described as a “prophetic book” of supposedly encroaching corona measures.

The student Lilo, that's what it's all about, is writing a master's thesis on "greats of the modern theater world" and sends the husband of the actress Franziska a few questions by e-mail to be forwarded.

Franziska sends her answers to Lilo but to Roland.

"Darling, you accidentally pressed the reply button again," he replies, "the mail went to me, the 'forwarder'.

I'll send them to this Lilo, okay?

Kiss you, R."

Juli Zeh - as the "Text + Kritik" issue conveys in almost all articles - is a socio-politically committed author who writes about the present and its phenomena, who has gained a literary acumen of multi-perspectivity and objectivity from her law studies.

The Germanist Stephen Brockmann certifies Zeh "foresight" and a "remarkable consistency of her vision".

The Germanist Agnes Mueller, a cousin of the author, congratulates Zeh on designing “a social topography that places high demands on authenticity” in her novels.

Zeh himself says in an interview conducted by the editor Heinz-Peter Preusser for this issue: "My wish is to tell the reader a story that is as gripping and credible as possible, lively and lively, almost 'like the real thing'."

The means to an end is thus the ambiguous perspective of the narrative, organized as an e-mail novel.

Or Whatsapp exchange.

With changing main characters.

There is no one truth.

Or, as Zeh himself once said: "The question of whether something is a crime or not always depends on how the story is told." That Agnes Mueller wrote her cousin a letter in order to verbally refuse, Revealing details from the life of “dear Juli” corresponds with this.

Unusually for an author who has dedicated herself to defending polyphony, there is great agreement in this literary debate with Juli Zeh that she shines in these narrative changes of perspective.

"No hermeneutic complexity"

Only Matteo Galli dares to deviate from the consensus.

He devotes himself to Zeh's village novel "Über Menschen" from 2021, in which a dropout and a Nazi become friends (as a vision of a society that is not blinded by slogans).

Galli notes that there is no multi-perspectivity at work here, but only the one narrator, who keeps looking at different characters: “This narrative technique in no way creates hermeneutic complexity, but rather a gradual, slow, mechanical parallelism , horizontal progression of the action.”

And the short excerpt from the unfinished "Wolfenstein" also shows how commented on Juli Zeh's multi-perspectivity is.

She intervenes, always visible, as the organizer of perspectives.

What man would write to his wife in a private message that he was only the forwarder of an email - and then put the term in quotation marks?

Similar narrative awkwardness can also be found in the new bestseller “Between Worlds”, when the two characters repeatedly have to explain exactly what they are talking about so that you can follow along while reading.

Behind these awkwardnesses is a writer who leaves nothing to chance as she pretends to let free people speak freely in the free exercise of their freedom.

"With the new book, we stand up for differentiation, for perspective diversity, for pluralism, for the ambivalence and complexity of literature," Zeh said in an interview with the "NZZ".

Nothing is ambivalent here.

It is directed literature that declares everything negotiable except the authority of its author.