Thetis. Otherworld

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Thetis. Anderswelt is a novel by Alban Nikolai Herbst who opened the Anderswelt trilogy at Rowohlt in 1998 . In 2001 the sequel was published by Berlin Verlag: “Buenos Aires. Otherworld. Cybernetic Novel ”and finally in 2013 by Elfenbein Verlag “ Argo. Otherworld. Epic novel ”.

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Thetis. Anderswelt tells the story of a walk through Berlin on the upper playing area, which ends in a Berlin café, where the walker (Hans Deters) thinks up the actual novel. He is waiting for a woman, a chance acquaintance who, however, makes him wait. While waiting, he gets drunk and becomes increasingly caught up in the maelstrom of his own inventions. It is only towards the end that he notices how the café is filling up with the characters in the novel. Confused and panicked, he runs away from them.

In the actual novel, the story of the "Ostler" Achilles Borkenbrod is told, who wants to move from the East, which is completely impoverished after an ecological catastrophe, to the rich West. He has the dream of going even further beyond Europe to a legendary country (paradise?) That he calls "Lévkas" or "Leuke". Both Borkenbrod's first name and the name of this island point to Homer , whose Iliad is actually one of the templates that the plot of the novel follows, sometimes playfully, sometimes ironically to travesty.

At the end of the novel, Borkenbrod has arrived in the West, albeit as a member of an activist group that is mainly organized by women and is not afraid of terrorist attacks.

Basically, the whole novel transforms a clearly realistic view of the present (impoverishment, global north-south divide, threat from terrorism, Balkan war, environmental pollution, etc.) into a narrative that belongs largely to fantastic literature ( Fantastik ), partly also of science fiction . So also the genre of the novel as "Fantastic novel". The “fantastic”, however, always remains tied to an underlying realism because of the narrator who gets drunk in the café.

The plot, which can hardly be reproduced in its branching, has Herbst in the taz from 28./29. November 1998 for Kolja Mensing summarized as follows: “After an ecological flood disaster, the polar ice caps melted and Europe was largely flooded. With the exception of a small part of core Europe, between Bordeaux and the Czech Republic - this area is divided into three parts, east, center and west. The east is impoverished, the center is services, banks and commerce, and the rich live in the west. That is the basic scenario of the novel . "

Of course, this short summary does not give a clue of the wealth of stories in the 900-page novel, which is cleverly interlinked in the author's oeuvre: Herbst had already begun his own literary story with his great novel Wolpertinger or Das Blau (1993, Axel Dielmann-Verlag ) Build world.

In the literary confusion that the novel is at the same time, Herbst mixes Celtic, ancient and Judeo-Islamic-Christian mythology and plays with literary models such as Orwell , Huxley , Döblin , the Bible , with Homer and with the posthumous Achilles fragment of Goethe . A “central object” in the “Wolpertinger” novel was a certain floppy disk, which - like the figure of Hans Erich Deter - reappears in the Otherworld. And the connection is even closer: If the "Wolpertinger" ended with a hell of a spooky night on November 1st, Hans Deters is also waiting on November 1st in Silberstein / Samhain ...

Ralf Schnell writes about this in the history of German-language literature since 1945 (2nd edition, Stuttgart 2003):

“The machine as a human being, the programming language as universal communication - Herbst's novels represent the paradox of a digital aesthetic in the form of a novel, with the contradictions that lie in it objectively: the succession of the succession of pages in the book is not linear or chronological in terms of content , but hypertextually organized action structure. A narrator is not recognizable in it. No poetic or poetological authority rules this digital cosmos. Its abysses and falls are autopoietic in nature. The narrative system generates itself. (…) Alban Nikolai Herbst, on the other hand, has left all locations of observation, subjectification and perspective. His narrative authority has dissolved into the immanence of simultaneous possibilities. Self-reflexivity has become a constitutive part of the autopoietic system. And the question of the relationship between subject and object, original and copy, becomes obsolete, both anthropologically and aesthetically. This process represents the most advanced literary aesthetic in the age of digitization: a response of prose to the media upheaval under the sign of the computer, which has incorporated its signature into the organization of its own signs. "

1999 received fall for Thetis. Anderswelt the Fantastik-Preis of the city of Wetzlar .

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