Leipzig Book Fair – The Revolutionary Machine

What actually comes after digitization? Is this technical revolution, which is now being forced in the United States under Donald Trump, at some point? Or in other words: Can or does the digitization, which are closely linked to capitalist value creation in its current formation, actually be overcome?

Dietmar Dath explores this in an absolutely fascinating way in his new, opulent, almost 1000 pages thick novel »Skyrmions. Or: a fucking army «. Renate Hofer is at the center of history. As a child, she plunges into a wastewater pool with neuropeptats in the laboratory of her rich father. During a drug -induced enlightenment, it becomes clear to her as a teenager that she will build a machine that changes the world. This process begins in the late 20th century and lasts until the 2070s when the machine takes shape in the size of a city with tens of thousands of residents. She has to ward off a terrible attack in order to complete herself and finally get up.

»Skyrmions. Or: A FUCKING ARMY «is a widely excessive prose structure, as large, complex and complicated as the machine, which is mainly made from language, which Renate Hofer finally builds, but also uses a lot of concrete, glass and other fabrics. What can language, how limited is it or what can be done with her? The novel repeatedly asks this central question and has its countless figures argue about in excessive discussions, writing texts, doing scientific research, making works of art in order to finally leave the digital world as well as capitalism.

However, this generation task is not a consistently emancipatory project. Hofer, “the evil heroine”, as she aptly called Dietmar Dath at the end of February at a digital preliminary book presentation, is very rich and is uncompromising against all resistance, including torture and murder. Can the billionaire daughter, who changes the world with her inheritance, be read as an allegory on Lenin?

Can the billionaire daughter, who changes the world with her inheritance, be read as an allegory on Lenin?

Hofer, at least at some point in a armored railway through China like Lenin, once in the sealed train from Switzerland, where the billionaire daughter also comes from, to Russia. “That means that your mother likes to play revolutionary and world -historical personality. And that she thinks that the Chinese communist party would help the machine, the machine, just as well and as well as the German emperor at the time to the Russian communist, whom she is doing, «says Hofer’s husband of his daughter.

Even if in the text corpus of »Skyrmions. Or: A fucking Army «Find longer essayistic sections about Marxism-Leninism, too simple allegories should be avoided. The Dath’s oeuvre is too complex in this book.

Countless tracks are ejected in all directions – also into the own work. Figures from his other books appear here as side acts, including Cordula Späth, who have been haunted by Dath’s prose for decades. There are various references to his novels “Neptunation”, “The cut through the sun” and “Feldeváye”, and Dietmar Dath itself also occurs several times as a wage writer from Hofer, who is mostly horrified by the machinations of the rich woman, but does his work well. A sympathetically self -ironic swipe at literature and journal.

Skyrmions are over long distances. Or: a fucking army «not very easy reading. It goes in partly very dialogue and monolo-rich sections about science and technology history, mathematics, physics, linguistics and philosophy. But there is a lot of martial action, fantastic things from the future and combat female. From Basel it goes to the east coast of the United States, to Shenzhen in China to Berlin and to many other places on earth and finally also on room stations and on the moon. What begins in our present leads to a wild science fiction story in which Hofer’s machine is attacked by an enemy command and the residents of the city-shaped machine have to defend themselves.

Not all are people. There are also hundreds of diffeverains that are neither a machine nor carbon -based living beings, but rather recovered people from the past, including, of course, many scientists, including the theoretical physicist Tony Skyrme from Great Britain. According to this, the title -giving skyrmions are named, the smallest vertebrae that behave like particles, as well as the apparently infinite, many different, interlocking and adjoining figures, anecdotes, stories, events, fights, hopes and longings, from which this book is composed.

In the science fictional machine, many rules that are valid today have broken up, among other things, capitalism has been overcome in this communitarian community. In addition, June and Ali Hofer, the daughters of Renate Hofer, can fly and network with other technically expanded residents of the city, in which a lot of animals and new mutations also live. This city is located where Berlin is today, it says in one place. Only the world of the future in this novel is largely destroyed by Wasteland, in which the “wrong colors” from Dath’s novel “Gentzen. Or: tidying up drunk «rage or zombotics destroy everything that was not already flattened by wars or climate change.

But the greatest danger for the people in Kerven Tau or Soncha Kapa (borrowed from the SF series “The 100”), as the city is called, is a man who was already haunted by psychosis as a child and has a completely different relationship with language. While Renate Hofer uses the unlimited possibilities of language to build your machine, her opponent Emil Kurland is convinced that there is actually no language at all. With his overwhelming hatred, he tries to destroy the machine, which should remind many readers of those political forces that are currently eager to grind democracy. Accordingly, Soncha Kapa is the epitome of a fantastic-diverse world full of incredible beings and lots of free sexuality, which is also far beyond our social and capitalist attraction.

»Skyrmions. Or: A fucking Army «breaks her own literary work, his political analyzes and longings, as if the many different threads of his work in this not always simple book were collapsed here, with the now 55-year-old author opening even more than usual the forms of the common novel. What exactly Renate Hofer’s machine is doing, what she can do and what people, differs and other living beings do with her is not revealed.

Dietmar Dath: Skyrmions. Or: a fucking army. Matthes & Seitz, 976 pages, born, € 38.