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Syria will be free only when the last Druze is dead. The Tutsis avenged only when that final trace of tantalum has been scraped from Kivu’s soil. Without tantalum, there’s no phone, no net. The story is well known, yet true: Tantalus, who, as punishment for betraying the secrets of the Gods, spent eternity in a pond whose waters would recede whenever he sought to drink, beneath a tree whose branches would withdraw whenever he reached for its fruit. Tantalus, who as punishment would never again get his fill.
Keeping the situation under control— “situation” meaning the death of those who we just happen not to be; “control” meaning the hand gripping your never-sated throat. Tantalising to hold onto this moment, in one last human-made image.
1
The images I looked at when I wrote this book, the paintings and posts, the leaked documents, and telephoto snapshots, the advertising clips, and magazine covers— they were all made by humans. And if they were fakes, humans had faked them. Today, it’s different. An era of anticipatory obedience has dawned: human writers’ work, made to sound as if already written by machines.
Where is it lurking, the new? I had wondered. The question remains.
2
Much of what’s described here had already disappeared by the time this book was published. The Germany in question seemed changed, blood and soil replaced by a diversity capitalism that anyone, theoretically, could partake in. Some even dared to believe that the conservative parties harboured no ill will against them. They were wrong. Disappearance keeps repeating. The purging of American archives: war photographs, research papers, statistics— gone. Enter the Wayback Machine, enter data hoarders, antiquarian textbooks on medicine or mycology. A quizmaster buys an island on a Canadian lake. Here, he’s safe. The island is not marked on the map, but it does appear on satellite images. His wife, a former wine queen, is now the President of Parliament, where she has banned the rainbow flag, Srebrenica’s white crochet flower, and all representations of watermelons.
The internet is different now, and the maps are different too: Alligator Alcatraz is a prompt, and a place. Charli XCX and Dasha and Lorde strike a pose. Buy this pair of trousers. This new coin. This tank. The weapons that wars are actually fought with require no advertisement. The centre denotes a relational distance to the so-called fringes. The land pulls back, closely followed by the sea. The shoreline’s a stalker’s footprint. To coin something, to mint an expression. The Chancellor complains on American TV about how antisemitism is imported into Germany. Was it the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who thought up the Holocaust after all? Now that both perpetrators and victims are finally dead, their pesky authority over historiography ceases. If the so-called centre is rewriting history, why shouldn’t the radical right do the same? Here, where people were once shoved into wagons, ordinary citizens have spent the past decade dreaming of turning Gaza into Garzweiler; have dreamt, then, of turning city and beach into the torn-up moonscape of lignite mining—extraction and death and land grab. Here, ordinary citizens fantasise about cutting welfare benefits so that the poor will finally be forced to join the army. The sons of those penning these editorials will be sought at the front in vain. How about a German Foreign Legion? A visa, a passport even, in exchange for your life.
3
Content was deleted, profiles blocked. Platforms irreversibly degenerated and flooded with slop. And in front of what remained, a magnifying glass slid, catching the sunlight, focusing it. Where once there was a—no—my subject, all that remains now is a scorched spot in the grass. A thousand spots like that form a geoglyph, an image scratched and burnt into the earth. It can only be recognised from far away. How far?
4
Chancellor Merz—banished by Merkel, laid low at BlackRock, and finally resurrected—picked a new Minister of State for Culture. A symbolic post, they say, and it is indeed to be taken symbolically that the Minister openly talks about preserving German blood. Rivers of Blood— every day, these men feel newly engulfed by them, while the blood truly rising to our knees is barely held back by the lift doors. The weapons we sold, or rather, swapped; the children we blew up whose flesh rained down on the earth like the confetti their mothers did not toss for their birthdays because their mothers, too, were no more—anyone who feels responsible for these things, because they are; anyone who rejects this annihilation, does not belong in our country. Maybe it never was about that preventative strike in Iran, maybe this is the dirty work Merz meant when he said Netanyahu was taking it off our hands: separating the wheat from the chaff.
Some journalists deny crimes as if their lives depend on it—and in a way they do, at least the lives they’d like to lead. Some journalists deny ever having denied a crime, they are deeply saddened by this violence, of course, without uttering the forbidden word ‘genocide’, whose use is punished by expulsion from the German national body.
Words, belated, dragged through the mud, stripped bare, and the role of the press, both liberal and far-right, in marking them as enemy words; the failure of civil society and its institutions, its associations and parties and think tanks—all of this greatly preoccupied me seven years ago, albeit under different, yet related, auspices. A system eroding from within. Courts under attack, fragile dams whose rulings are the last thing keeping the state liberal rather than authoritarian, the last thing promising the centre will remain untouched by the state’s violence.
5
It’s no longer considered paradoxical that, on the one hand, the radical right propagates the antisemitic Great Replacement Theory, yet on the other hand, it declares the Muslim, immigrant, foreigner to be unbelonging, a stranger, by declaring him allegedly hostile to Jews in general, to Israel in particular. In this way, the radical right has won: it appears perfectly possible now to be both an antisemite and an anti-antisemite at the same time.
Just recently, Merz spoke of cityscapes spoilt by nonwhite, foreign faces, echoing what Goebbels said a lifetime earlier. The Other becomes an aesthetic nuisance, an obstacle, an enemy whose existence is no longer compatible with our own. And the diaspora: a container to be emptied, its contents spilling out, useless like poetry. Go back to the national state that claims you (there better be one, of course). You: a story too complicated to recall, and nobody likes feeling stupid. Pure blood and pure storytelling. Simple plots, beginning, middle, end, as if written by AI or an out-of-work screenwriter.
Liberalism is being replaced by something both worse than and inextricably part of it—the complete subjugation of souls and bodies in algorithms and trenches.
6
After seven years, every cell in my body has become a different one. After seven years, forgive the debtor’s debt and free the slaves. After seven years, they are still there: the decrepit houses, unfit for habitation, and yet inhabited by ever-new Roma, who on television are still called “Romanians and Bulgarians.” And still, it’s always about them and never about the landlords and their profits. After seven years, I’ve finally read all of Simone Weil. I’ve realised at last that the Romanian reproductive decree was far worse than the Albanian one: monthly examinations ensured no secrets hid in your womb. After seven years, my old flatmate did finally become naturalised. He swore an oath to the king, he signed, he waited with others in a hall. They received a certificate. One hundred foreigners had entered, and one hundred citizens poured out. The word, coagulated into a seal.
After seven years, AfD and Identitarians are publicly fighting over terminological supremacy, while the personnel in the background, the office workers, researchers, donors, remain widely the same.
The question’s this: is “remigration”—that is, the expulsion of thousands who hold legal residence permits and even German citizenship—is “remigration” compatible with what far-right parliamentarians consider their programme? Yes, says Martin Sellner. No, says AfD member Maximilian Krah. Of course he does. In the urban centres of western Germany, it’s the votes of precisely those Sellner wants to get rid of, that Krah’s party depends on. For now. Krah is plotting his career, and so he needs the AfD to become what the Rassemblement National once became: Italian instead of German. A Marine-Weidel-Silicon-Valley-Mussolini-de-Benoist kind of fascism instead of a Jean-Marie-Identitarian-Schnellroda-Bannon-Dugin kind of Nazism that foolishly puts the national body before the might that makes right, instead of using the former to implement the latter.
After seven years, Weidel, in conversation with Musk: Hitler was a leftist. Never again!, an author posts, along with a picture of Meir Kahane. Gertrude Stein writes: there is art and there is official art. They were already buried seven years ago—the elders I remember from childhood. Lilac blossomed in the park, and the Association of the Persecuted paraded past, on their lapels the red triangle whose meaning was astonishingly easy to overwrite. The weary laid a wreath beneath the lapidary. How their wrinkles cut into their cheeks—I could barely believe that they too had been children once.
After seven years, the NSU murders still linger, and the files remain, of course, sealed. New attacks, new deaths, disappearance, repeating: Mercedes Kierpacz falls victim to a racist terror attack in Hanau. Her greatgrandfather was murdered as a Rom in Auschwitz. Armin Kurtović grows up in Germany. He’s safe here in 1995, while genocide ravages Bosnia. In 2019, his son Hamza is murdered, in Hanau, in that shisha bar. Out in the street he would have never come into the perpetrator’s sights. Blond and blue-eyed, he had to die because he was among his dark friends. This is the abandonment that Krah and Sellner and Merz demand: throw under the wheels anyone who cannot hide.
I remember my teacher, at school, outraged at her fellow Germans, would you believe it, they denounced their neighbours and colleagues and sent them to their deaths. People who were just like them, who looked just like them, people you couldn’t tell them apart from, other Germans, really. Of course, this was a psychotic lie, but we didn’t know that yet, we listened to her, fully aware that we did not look exactly the same, that we were not exactly the same.
7
I’ve discovered errors. I’ve changed my mind. I’ve thought about what’s missing. The blind spots of my origin. Secrets I don’t want to keep. Anger I swallowed, sentences that did not make it, and yet they did something, to me at least. I trembled before I first read from this book in my hometown, years after it was published. I hesitated to allow its translation into my first—though not best—language. I suspect I’ve become the one whose outline I thought I saw on the horizon when I clicked send, in that tiny hotel room with the floral sheets, when a column of smoke stood in the evening light at the balcony’s threshold, tantalisingly obscuring what lay on the other side, when this book ceased to be part of my body, when the world and I seemed, for one brief moment, no longer conjoined.
Eiscafé Europa, first published by Suhrkamp Verlag, 2018. English edition published January 2026 by Hela Press (trans. Damien Laing).
