Christian Kracht

Christian Kracht (; born 29 December 1966) is a Swiss author. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages.

Personal life

Kracht was born in Saanen in the Canton of Bern, Switzerland. He attended Schule Schloss Salem in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, and Lakefield College School in Ontario, Canada. He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, New York, in 1989. He has lived for long spells in Buenos Aires, Lamu, Florence, Bangkok, Kathmandu, Landour, Los Angeles and Munich. He is married to German film director Frauke Finsterwalder. They live in Zurich. Kracht´s father, Christian Kracht Sr., was chief representative for the Axel Springer publishing company in the 1960s.

Journalism and collaborative work

Before becoming a novelist, Kracht worked as a journalist for a number of magazines and newspapers in Germany, including ''Der Spiegel''. In the mid-1990s he lived and worked in New Delhi as Spiegel's Indian correspondent. Kracht then moved to Bangkok, from where he visited various other countries in South East Asia. During this period he authored travel vignettes that were serialised in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper and later collated in the book ''Der Gelbe Bleistift'' (''The Yellow Pencil'') in 2000. In November 2006 Kracht was a regular columnist for the newspaper ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung''. His fortnightly column, which originally had the title ''Letter from...'', later changed to ''Letter from the Past''. During this time, together with American businessman David Woodard, Kracht reported on Aleister Crowley's erstwhile residence in Cefalù.

Kracht has regularly collaborated with other authors and artists. In 1998 he worked with Eckhart Nickel. The book is an edited transcript of a recording made by the contributors in which they discuss globalised popular culture while staying at Berlin's Hotel Adlon. For some commentators this publication constituted the high-water mark of so-called ''Popliteratur'' – a literary marketing phenomenon for which Kracht was the supposed figurehead. The author has repeatedly distanced himself from this epithet and has, for example, refused permission for his work to be republished in an anthology of that genre. This notwithstanding, Kracht was the editor of the anthology ''Mesopotamia'' – a collection of short stories, fragments and photo montages by authors associated with the pop literature, including Rainald Goetz, Andreas Neumeister and Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre. First published with the subtitle "Ernste Geschichten am Ende des Jahrtausends" ("Serious stories at the turn of the Millennium"), this subtitle was dropped in its 2001 republication by Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag in favour of an "Avant-Pop-Reader". The relabeling notably coincided with the deflating currency of the term "pop literature" in the early years of the new century.

Between September 2004 and June 2006 Kracht published the independent literary magazine ''Der Freund'' in collaboration with Eckhart Nickel while working as the magazine's editor before leaving Nepal during a period of political unrest. The chiefly German-language magazine was ultimately completed in San Francisco with a total of eight editions as originally planned. The magazine featured regular contributions from Ira Cohen, Reinhold Messner, Ian Buruma, Stanislav Lem, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Rem Koolhaas, Momus, David Woodard and Eduardo Kac.

February 2007 saw the publication of ''Metan'' (''Methane''), the product of a climbing expedition on Kilimanjaro with Ingo Niermann. The book posits that the effects of methane gas on the earth's atmosphere are part of a vast cosmic conspiracy. Early reviews varied from the critical to the bewildered, one describing it as "großer Quatsch" ("a load of nonsense"). Another reviewer refers to the book as a parody of "alarmism" and suggested it should be taken as a joke: "But if this book is taken as a joke, it probably is not a bad one".

In 2012 Kracht published an exchange of letters with Woodard entitled ''Five Years''. Although this text is essentially a performance piece, certain episodes in their correspondence were deemed controversial, especially references to Nueva Germania. Indeed, in February 2012, Georg Diez, writing an opinion piece published in ''Der Spiegel'' alleged that ''Five Years'' exposed racist, right-wing sympathies supposedly present in Kracht's latest novel ''Imperium''. This view was widely contested and by established critics and authors alike during a sustained literary debate in German-language newspapers and magazines.

Novels

The protagonists of Kracht's fiction embark on journeys that take them in search of an elusive moment of immersive, utopian experience or spiritual enlightenment often located in a different nation or culture. Their journey usually, but not always, results in disappointment, failure or even death. The theme of travel was introduced in Kracht's debut novel ''Faserland'' (1995), a text that is often central in the discussion of German pop literature by literary critics and scholars. While the first wave of the novel's criticism identified ''Faserland'' as a novel about the affirmation of brand names and consumer culture, a second wave of criticism suggested rather that the novels evinces the protagonist's dissatisfaction with his lifestyle and existential "ennui". Early criticism of the novel suggested the influence of Bret Easton Ellis on his work, with some commentators even accusing him of plagiarism. Since the critical re-evaluation of ''Faserland'', however, critics have observed the potential influence on his work by younger German-language writers such as Leif Randt with his 2011 novel ''Schimmernder Dunst über Coby County'' (''The glistening haze over Coby County'').

The setting of Kracht's second novel ''1979'' is Iran and begins in medias res against the backdrop of the revolution of the Ayatollah Khomeini during the titular year. This novel also deals with alienation and a chiefly Western form of consumer existence, but it depicts the fragility of an apparently decadent Western-metropolitan value system and its powerlessness before the Eastern-totalitarian models of Islamism and Maoism. After the supposed frivolousness of ''Faserland'', then, Kracht was now seen as on the way "towards genuine seriousness" in his writing – a view held by critics that was no doubt informed by the context of the September 11 attacks with which the novel's publication coincided. Kracht is sceptical about such a reading of his work and argues that he writes literary "light entertainment" and "comedies". Thus, during a television appearance on the popular Harald Schmidt Show in 2001, Kracht argued that his book was essentially kitsch.

The 2008 novel '' Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten'' (''I will be here in sunshine and in shadow'') imagines an alternative history of the twentieth century in which Lenin never returned to Russia from Switzerland, but instead founded a Swiss Soviet Republic – a Communist state engaged in the colonisation of Africa and in perpetual war with other totalitarian empires, notably with a federation of British and German fascists. Channeling Philip K. Dick's ''The Man in the High Castle'' and Ford Coppola's ''Apocalypse Now'', the plot of the novel traces a black Swiss political commissar's journey to the heart of the empire to arrest the rogue officer Brazhinsky in the '' Réduit''.

''Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten'' quickly garnered acclaim in the German-speaking literary world. Broadsheet ''Die Welt'' called it a "glorious horror story". The ''Süddeutsche Zeitung'' praised the writing as not only deeply reminiscent of Ernst Jünger, but also as the "most beautiful German prose currently on offer". But the ''Frankfurter Rundschau'' reviewer discounted ''Ich werde hier sein'' as "simply moronic" and ''Die Tageszeitung'' found the text to be too diffuse and incoherent, amounting to just a "drug-clouded scenery"

The novel ''Imperium'' and its reception

Kracht's 2012 novel ''Imperium'' follows on from ''Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten'' both in its very favourable reception by critics and in the way that it presents a reimagining of history that incorporates actual persons and historical ''reality'' while playing fast and loose with dates and details. In this sense the novel bears some similarity to ''Die Vermessung der Welt'' ('' Measuring the World'') by Daniel Kehlmann in the Bismarck Archipelago (now Papua New Guinea) at the beginning of the twentieth century. Engelhardt is an idealistic German emigrant who establishes a plantation on an island and founds a colony of cocoivores – radical vegetarians nourished exclusively on coconuts. Engelhardt's history is interspersed with cameo appearances by other figures from German cultural history, such as Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. The first of Kracht's novels not to be narrated in the first-person, the omniscient narrator informs us of the protagonist's thoughts and contextualises Engelhardt's life within the broader scope of twentieth-century history.

''Imperium'' created a stir in Germany even before its publication. Writing in ''Der Spiegel'', critic Georg Diez suggested that the novel "above all shows the author's proximity to extreme right-wing ideas". The accusation of racism levelled at Kracht was widely repudiated by other figures in the literary industry, including publisher Helge Malchow and fellow authors, such as Daniel Kehlmann