Imperium

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

With pleasure, John, with pleasure! In general, Kracht's style in this 
fourth novel is playful and complex at the same time. For the first time 
he does not tell the story from a first-person-perspective but by a - 
more or less reliable - auctorial narrator. While the debut "Faserland"  
(the title is a reference to the alternate history novel "Fatherland" by 
Robert Harris) has a Salingeresque coming-of-age sound, "1979" and "Ich 
werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten" are very dark in 
language which contributes to their quasi-hypnotic quality. In 
"Imperium" the sound has apparently lightened up, but on second and 
third read you realize that the maritime South Sea scenario is no less 
creepy than that of the Iranian revolution Kracht is writing about in 
"1979."  There is, like in the earlier works too, sampling of motives 
and rhetorics from authors like Joseph Conrad or Thomas Mann (who, like 
Kafka and others, also has a cameo in the book). In German this 
sometimes sounds ironic, or willfully old-fashioned, or mocking. But 
it's never harmless, as the quoted sentence from the final chapter makes 
clear. Oh yes, there are "super-Pynchonian" shifts of syntax, which 
sometimes sound very strange. And isn't the sentence's ending simply 
wrong? No, it's willfully 'wrong,' as I will explain later. What's 
described in the sentence is an initiation ritual, traumatic and 
uplifting at the same time. Evoked in a language which - despite or 
better because of its fidelity! - sounds a little epileptoid.  Take "(es 
lächeln die Piloten, winkend, aus den im Sonnenlicht strahlenden 
Glaskanzeln)": This is not really wrong, but if the pilots are smiling 
and signaling in a distance, wouldn't one emphasize the signals and not 
the smiles? It sounds as if the sunlight is simply too bright ... Light 
& darkness are important here. Keep in mind that the fictional August 
Engelhardt of this  book spends decades in the cave - a motive that 
alludes to a chapter from Thomas Mann's "Der Erwählte" (The Holy Sinner) 
- before US soldiers find him. Teeth and hair get challenged by the 
standards of civilization, the color of the T-shirt they give him is 
white. They even give him a watch as a present. This is very interesting 
because in general things went the other way round: US soldiers took 
away the watches of German people. As the sociologist Niklas Luhmann 
reported: "Das erste jedoch, was ich in der amerikanischen 
Gefangenschaft erlebte, war, dass man mir meine Uhr vom Arm nahm und 
dass ich geprügelt wurde" (Archimedes und wir, p. 129: The first thing, 
however, I experienced in American captivity was that they took my watch 
and beat me up). Thousands of German experienced it just that way. A 
watch gives orientation, and the construction of time is for societies 
crucial (- the French revolutionists wanted to introduce a week with ten 
days). So what Kracht seems to be saying here is that to give someone a 
new watch as a present might be even more problematic than stealing an 
old one, pushing that person into a new order of things. The theme here 
is the threat of total assimilation, as becomes obvious when the 
American lieutenant appears on the scene. Lieutenant Kinnboot ("Kinn" is 
German for "chin" and "Boot" is German for "boat", but it's likely the 
English meaning of "boot" which is relevant here) has German roots, but 
already his parents were not anymore able to speak the language of their 
ancestors. Their Deutsch got "in E Pluribus Unum assimilated." Do note 
the order of words again, putting the world "assimilated" at the end 
makes the phrase more negative than it would have been in case it ended 
with the word "Unum." What happened to Kinnboot's family - and till 
today Germans tend to dissolve completely in the US melting pot, while 
other migrants are able to keep up an identity as Americans with a 
heritage of their own - is a metaphor for what happened to West Germany 
during the Cold War. Yet this is not uttered in the insulted language of 
cultural criticism. In contrary, the initiation through the Eucharist, 
an act of Political Theology, is presented in satirical form. The 
descriptions of how Engelhardt is fed coca-cola ("man gibt ihm aus einer 
hübschen, sich in der Mitte leicht verjüngenden Glasflasche eine 
dunkelbraune, zuckrige, überaus wohlschmeckende Flüssigkeit zu trinken") 
and a hot dog ("man serviert ihm ein mit quietschbunten Soßen 
bestrichenes Würstchen, welches in einem daunenkissenweichen, länglichen 
Brotbett liegt") are so funny because they picture these 
every-day-experiences in a quasi-phenomenological way. Like for the very 
first time. Same effect for the description of the radio and the music 
that emerges from there. Do note that the adjective "quietschbunt" (so 
colored that it squeaks), referring to the hot dog's dressings, bears 
connotations of cheapness and vulgarity. "Quietschbunt" is also the 
color of the kids' toys in the sandbox, so we find the suggestion of 
innocence, too ... However -"emsige Kampfflugzeuge setzen im Minutentakt 
auf Landebahnen auf und starten wieder" - there's this eager traffic of 
bomber pilots, landing and taking off with their jet fighters all the 
time, a sound which must echo horribly in Engelhardt's ears. The hiding 
of the key message ("this is now the Imperium") in the middle of the 
sentence - instead of presenting it at the end as a punchline - 
emphasizes the Eucharist or magic aspect of the initiation. It happens, 
prepared by the encouraging slap on the back, 'unconsciously,' in 
between the drink and the snack. Now let's look at the end of the 
sentence and find out what's happening there. In terms of regular 
grammar the final two sub-sentences --- "nicht diesem gerade glücklich 
beendeten, sondern noch von jenem davor" --- are simply wrong, because 
they should, according to the rules, refer to the word "Zeit" (time), 
not to the word "Weltkrieg" (World War). So correct German would be: " 
... nicht von der vor diesem gerade glücklich beendeten, sondern noch 
von der vor dem davor." Why the violation of grammar, why this peculiar 
switch from 'time' to 'world war?' Well, there are a few paragraphs on 
WWI in the last but one chapter, and earlier on, when Engelhardt is in 
Cairns and tries to help an Aboriginal Australian who gets beat up by 
drunken Anglo Australians, he is called "/dirty hun/" (p. 101) and they 
tell him that there soon will be war. But apart from that, the World 
Wars are present only in their absence. Precisely by this very absence 
their centrality for the century becomes obvious. This exclusion of the 
big historical events --- think of the American revolution in M&D --- is 
a genuine Pynchonian technique. In these last two sub-sentences, 
however, the exclusion kinda collapses because the text can, so to 
speak, not carry the weight of history anymore. 'Time' and 'World War' 
(and the mingling of both World Wars implies that they can be considered 
to have been one big New Thirty Years War) become interchangeable. This 
epileptoid shift of syntax can be understood as a manifestation of the 
author's own existential ambivalence. When I said above that Kracht, 
with this fourth novel, changed from first-person-perspective to 
auctorial authorship, let me now add that there is one very significant 
passage, deeply connected to the sentence in question, where he uses the 
first-person-perspective. Through this he does not only connect the book 
to his former works, no, through this Kracht speaks as a historical 
human being. Speculating about how things would have looked in case 
Hitler had died in WW1, it says (p. 231, emphasis added): " ... und es 
wäre wohl gar nicht dazu gekommen, dass nur wenige Jahrzehnte später 
/meine/ Großeltern auf der Hamburger Moorweide schnellen Schrittes 
weitergehen, so als hätten sie überhaupt nicht gesehen, wie dort mit 
Koffern beladene Männer, Frauen und Kinder am Dammtorbahnhof in Züge 
verfrachtet und ostwärts verschickt wurden, hinaus an die Ränder des 
Imperiums, als seien sie jetzt schon Schatten, jetzt schon aschener 
Rauch." At about: " ... and it likely wouldn't have happened that, only 
a few decades later, /my/ grandparents, on the Hamburg Moorweide, walk 
on with fast steps as if they hadn't seen at all how men, women and 
children, all charged with trunks, were there, at the Dammtor railway 
station, put into trains and sent eastwards, out to the the margins of 
the Imperium, as if they were already shadows by now, by now already ash 
colored smoke."  I came across the place nearly every day when I was 
studying at the University of Hamburg, and most Germans of my generation 
know similar stories about their grandparents. What makes this passage 
so suggestive is the use of the present tense where it is referring to 
the grandparents' passing on. It's not over at all, it's still fresh ...

Are there P-listers who intend to see the show in LA?


On 12.07.2015 14:20, John Bailey wrote:
> Kai, given my middling grasp of German, can you speak more about the
> phrasing of the great sentence you've quoted (which I can read a fair
> bit of). How does the super long paragraph with its frequent
> semicolons and bracketed phrases sound to a native ear? It seems
> super-Pynchonian to me but I'd love to hear how it parses in Kracht's
> original.
>
> On Sun, Jul 12, 2015 at 8:25 PM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
> <lorentzen at hotmail.de>  wrote:
>> Happy to hear that from you!
>>
>> Kracht's novel is indeed "very Pynchonesque," and when I said earlier that
>> "Imperium" covers the time span of "Against the Day" let me now add that it
>> also has a "Gravity's Rainbow" spin. The real August Engelhardt died in
>> 1919, but Kracht takes the story beyond WW II. Why? Because this is not only
>> about Germany but also about America and the way the century which first
>> looked as if it would become a German one then became an American one which
>> also changes the way Germans themselves look at their history. This becomes
>> obvious in the novel's last paragraph, which I'm not gonna tell about here
>> because some of you believe in 'spoilers,' but of which I can say that it
>> gives the whole narration a cyclical structure. All the things happening
>> earlier in the novel and, especially, the way they are told shine in the
>> light of Engelhardt's final transformation, too.
>>
>> When American soldiers find Engelhardt in a cave, they give him a white
>> T-shirt, an encouraging slap on the back (--- "this is now the Imperium"),
>> and kinda Eucharist initiation in US culture: He, who had not eaten the meat
>> of animals or industrial sugar for decades, gets fed a hot dog and some
>> coca-cola. Popular music --- "enigmatic, heavily rhythmic, but not at all
>> unpleasantly sounding music" --- is played by the radio. This is,
>> crystallized into an allegory, the story of the Americanization of
>> (West)Germany. The US installed a "dispositive." According to Foucault, a
>> dispositive produces knowledge in the bodyminds of those living under it.
>> Soft power under our skin. And the author of "Imperium" is aware of that,
>> aware of the fact that his meditation on Germany takes place in a world,
>> where the media epistemologies are made on the other side of the big water.
>>
>> The inspiration for the Eucharist part of the scene - in Kracht's case it's
>> definitely more about Political Theology, though -  comes, I guess, from
>> Philip K. Dick, an author Kracht knows very well. Earlier this year I reread
>> "VALIS" and recognized the idea in chapter 12. There it is described how the
>> protagonist baptizes his son and then celebrates Eucharist with him. Not the
>> traditional way but with hot chocolate and a hot dog. "First I had fixed a
>> mug of hot chocolate. Then I had fixed a hot dog on a bun with the usual
>> trimmings; Christopher, young as he was, loved hot dogs and warm chocolate./
>> Seated on the floor in Christopher's room with him, I ---or rather VALIS in
>> me, as me--- had played a game. First, I jokingly held the cup of chocolate
>> up, over my son's head; then, as if by accident, I had splashed warm
>> chocolate on his head, into his hair: Giggling, Christopher had tried to
>> wipe the liquid off; I had of course helped him. Leaning toward him, I had
>> whispered,/ 'In the name of the Son, the Father and the Holy Spirit.'/ No
>> one heard me except Christopher. Now, as I wiped the warm chocolate from his
>> hair, I inscribed the sign of the cross on his forehead. I had now baptized
>> him and now I confirmed him; I did so not by the authority of any church,
>> but by the authority of the living plasmate in me: VALIS himself. Next I
>> said to my son: 'Your secret name, your Christian name, is ---' And I told
>> him what it was. Only he and I are ever to know; he and I and VALIS./ Next I
>> took a bit of the bread from the hot dog bun and held it forth; my son ---
>> still a baby, really ---  opened his mouth like a little bird, and I placed
>> the bit of bread in it. We seemed, the two of us, to be sharing a meal; an
>> ordinary, simple, common meal./ For some reason it seemed essential ---
>> quite crucial --- that he take no bite of the hot dog meat itself [Do note
>> Kracht's significant variation here! kfl]. Pork could not be eaten under
>> these circumstances. VALIS filled me with the urgent knowledge./ As
>> Christopher started to close his mouth to chew on the bit of bread, I
>> presented him with the mug of warm chocolate. To my surprise --- being so
>> young he still drank normally from his bottle, never from a cup --- he
>> reached eagerly to take the mug; as he took it, lifted it to his lips and
>> drank from it, I said,/ 'This is my blood and this is my body.'/ My little
>> son drank, and I took the mug back. The greater sacraments had been
>> accomplished. Baptism, then confirmation, then the most holy sacrament of
>> all, the Eucharist: sacrament of the Lord's Supper." (PKD: VALIS and later
>> Novels. The Library of America, pp. 365-366). Germany opened her mouth like
>> a little bird, too ... That all epistemological matters remain unclear in
>> "VALIS" may also say something about "Imperium."
>> And here comes this one very long sentence from "Imperium" in original; it
>> could - mutatis mutandis - also be a part of "Gravity's Rainbow:"
>>
>> "Er sah staunend allerorten sympathische schwarze GIs, deren Zähne, im
>> Gegensatz zu seinem eigenen, ruinös verfaulten Trümmerhaufen eines Gebisses,
>> mit einer unwirklichen Leuchtkraft strahlten; alle erscheinen so
>> außergewöhnlich sauber, gescheitelt und gebügelt; man gibt ihm aus einer
>> hübschen, sich in der Mitte leicht verjüngenden Glasflasche eine
>> dunkelbraune, zuckrige, überaus wohlschmeckende Flüssigkeit zu trinken;
>> emsige Kampfflugzeuge setzen im Minutentakt auf Landebahnen auf und starten
>> wieder (es lächeln die Piloten, winkend, aus den im Sonnenlicht strahlenden
>> Glaskanzeln); ein Offizier hält sich mit verzückt lauschendem Ausdruck eine
>> kleine perforierte Metallschachtel ans Ohr, aus deren Inneren enigmatische,
>> stark rythmische, doch überhaupt nicht unangehmen Musik dringt; man kämmt
>> ihm Haare und Bart; zieht ihm ein makellos weißes, baumwollenes, kragenloses
>> Leibchen über den Kopf; schenkt ihm eine Armbanduhr; schlägt ihm aufmunternd
>> auf den Rücken; dies ist nun das Imperium; man serviert ihm ein mit
>> quietschbunten Soßen bestrichenes Würstchen, welches in einem
>> daunenkissenweichen, länglichen Brotbett liegt, infolgedessen Engelhardt zum
>> ersten Mal seit weit über einem halben Jahrhundert ein Stück tierisches
>> Fleisch zu sich nimmt; ein anderer Soldat, der deutschstämmige (schon seine
>> Eltern waren ihrer Herkunftssprache nicht mehr mächtig --- sie ist im E:
>> Pluribus Unum assimiliert worden) Leutnant Kinnboot, der sich hemdsärmelig
>> und überaus freundlich anschickt, ihm für eine Zeitung gleich Dutzende von
>> Fragen zu stellen, kommt aus dem eifrigen Staunen nicht mehr heraus, da
>> Engelhardt sich nun der über die Jahrzehnte rostig gewordenen englischen
>> Sprache entsinnt und zu erzählen beginnt, erst stockend, dann zunehmend
>> munter, von der Zeit vor dem Weltkrieg, nein, nicht diesem gerade glücklich
>> beendeten, sondern noch von jenem davor." (pp. 240-241)
>>
>> A hell of a sentence!
>>
>>
>>
>> On 11.07.2015 17:20, Bekah wrote:
>>
>> It's on my wish list. Lots of great-sounding books coming out in the next
>> couple months.
>>
>> Becky -
>> have word-mangling iPad will travel
>>
>> On Jul 11, 2015, at 9:51 AM, Mark Kohut<mark.kohut at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>> Thanks much Kai...going to get....heard of it no other way but from you.
>>
>> Sent from my iPad
>>
>> On Jul 11, 2015, at 8:05 AM, John Bailey<sundayjb at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>> Loving what I've read of this excerpt so far - very Pynchonesque:
>> http://us.macmillan.com/excerpt?isbn=9780374175245
>>
>> On Sat, Jul 11, 2015 at 9:27 PM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
>> <lorentzen at hotmail.de>  wrote:
>>> On 07.01.2015 22:44, James Kyllo wrote:
>>>
>>> English version not out until July it appears though..
>>>
>>>
>>> Out now!
>>>
>>>> After a long and remarkably fruitful translation process, Farrar, Straus
>>>> and Giroux of New York finally publishes "Imperium US Edition. A Fiction of
>>>> the South Seas" in English, available as of now. This is Christian Kracht`s
>>>> very first English language translation.<
>>> Kracht will discuss his novel in Los Angeles on Tuesday (7/14):
>>>
>>> 19:30 (PDT)
>>>
>>> Skylight Books
>>> 1818 N Vermont Ave, Los Angeles 90027
>>>
>>> Skylight Books, publishers Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the Goethe-Institut
>>> of Los Angeles and the consulate of Switzerland present Christian Kracht
>>> discussing his book "Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas".
>>>
>>> https://www.facebook.com/mr.christiankracht?fref=nf
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 11:18 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
>>> <lorentzen at hotmail.de>  wrote:
>>>> Check this shit out! I've read it four times so far.
>>>> Definitely the straight dope --
>>>>
>>>> Kracht is influenced by Pynchon. In "Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein
>>>> und im Schatten", his third novel from 2008 which is alternate history and
>>>> imagines Lenin wasn't allowed to return to Russia and thus made the
>>>> revolution in Switzerland which then became the globally acting Swiss Soviet
>>>> Republic,
>>>> the protagonist is an high rank soldier with African roots who in the end
>>>> leads his people back to the African countryside. The inspiration by Enzian
>>>> from "Gravity's Rainbow" is here obvious. "Imperium" now not only covers the
>>>> time span of "Against the Day" but also samples genres the way Pynchon did
>>>> there, as the Kracht scholar Johannes Birgfeld (Südseephantasien. Christian
>>>> Krachts "Imperium" und sein Beitrag zur Poetik des deutschsprachigen Romans
>>>> der Gegenwart, in: Wirkendes Wort 62, 2012, Heft 3, pp. 457-477) pointed
>>>> out. Presenting a personal observation, I can add that Kracht learned from
>>>> Pynchon how to write good slapstick scenes.
>>>>
>>>> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>>>>
>>>> Imperium
>>>>
>>>> A Fiction of the South Seas
>>>>
>>>> Christian Kracht; Translated from the German by Daniel Bowles
>>>>
>>>> Farrar, Straus and Giroux
>>>>
>>>> <mime-attachment.jpg>
>>>>
>>>> An outrageous, fantastical, uncategorizable novel of obsession,
>>>> adventure, and coconuts
>>>>
>>>> In 1902, a radical vegetarian and nudist from Nuremberg named August
>>>> Engelhardt set sail for what was then called the Bismarck Archipelago. His
>>>> destination: the island Kabakon. His goal: to found a colony based on
>>>> worship of the sun and coconuts. His malnourished body was found on the
>>>> beach on Kabakon in 1919; he was forty-three years old.
>>>>       Christian Kracht’s Imperium uses the outlandish details of
>>>> Engelhardt’s life to craft a fable about the allure of extremism and its
>>>> fundamental foolishness. Engelhardt is at once a sympathetic
>>>> outsider—mocked, misunderstood, physically assaulted—and a rigid ideologue,
>>>> and his misguided notions of purity and his spiral into madness presage the
>>>> horrors of the mid-twentieth century.
>>>>       Playing with the tropes of classic adventure tales like Treasure
>>>> Island and Robinson Crusoe, Kracht’s novel, an international bestseller, is
>>>> funny, bizarre, shocking, and poignant—sometimes all on the same page. His
>>>> allusions are misleading, his historical time lines are twisted, his
>>>> narrator is unreliable—and the result is a novel that is also a mirror
>>>> cabinet and a maze pitted with trapdoors. Both a provocative satire and a
>>>> serious meditation on the fragility and audacity of human activity, Imperium
>>>> is impossible to categorize, and utterly unlike anything you’ve read before.
>>>>
>>>> http://us.macmillan.com/imperium/christiankracht
>>>>
>>>> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>>>> "Unter den langen weißen Wolken, unter der prächtigen Sonne, unter dem
>>>> hellen Firnament, da war erst ein langgedehntes Tuten zu hören, dann rief
>>>> die Schiffsglocke eindringlich zum Mittag, und ein malayischer Boy schritt
>>>> sanftfüßig und leise das Oberdeck ab, um jene Passagiere mit behutsamem
>>>> Schulterdruck aufzuwecken, die gleich nach dem üppigen Frühstück wieder
>>>> eingeschlafen waren. Der norddeutsche Lloyd, Gott verfluche ihn, sorgte
>>>> jeden Morgen, reiste man denn in der ersten Klasse ..."
>>>>
>>> --
>>> http://www.last.fm/user/Auto_Da_Fe
>>> http://www.pop.nu/en/show_collection.asp?user=2412
>>> http://www.librarything.com/profile/Auto_Da_Fe
>>> http://www.thedetails.co.uk/
>>> http://big-game.tumblr.com/
>>>
>>>

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