An event from the series “Literatur zur Zeit”. Moderation: Britta Tekotte.
Germany in the fall of 2001, between Big Brother and Harald Schmidt Show . Andreas Martin von Hohenstein, a hip pop writer of the 1990s, misses the September 11 attacks – plagued by breakup pain and writer’s block.
He gives up coke, moves from Berlin to the countryside into the house of his deceased parents and embarks on a nature-romantic trip of self-discovery. He finds fulfillment in the homoerotically charged friendship with the charismatic healer Christian. Von Hohenstein discovers the true, the beautiful and the good – and wants to renounce irony for good.
With The nature boy Josefine Rieks has succeeded in writing a merciless novel: She dissects her predecessor generation of writers with fine mockery; she feels indebted to them and yet can no longer fully trust them – a poetological game that abysmally poses the question of the right literature between pop-literary heritage and autofiction.