At what point does research tip over into obsession? When does art begin to become toxic for its “creator”? And is there any material or themes that literature can’t take on because they’re too toxic?
Initially, it seems like normal preparatory work – particularly difficult preparatory work, but nothing unfamiliar. After all, writing always means adaptation; really familiarizing yourself with the material is absolutely necessary. But what happens when the material can’t be mastered and begins to take on a destructive life of its own? The author’s research trip to Hitler’s “arenas” leads him ever deeper into the world of his protagonist’s thoughts.
Yet it is also a journey back in time, to his own youth in the town of Dachau in the mid-1980s, where he attended school not far from the site where the Nazis built the first concentration camp in 1933. Sitting at his typewriter, the writer tries to both unleash his character literarily while at the same time exorcizing him. And, bit by bit, he begins to lose control of his project and, increasingly, also of himself.
