Born in Prague, Biller moved to Germany at the age of ten and at seventeen began studying – the Germans, their books, their women, their mistakes. In the style of a novel, Biller’s autobiographic book tells the tragicomic tale of a Jew who becomes a writer in a country where there weren’t supposed to be any more Jews.
This self-portrait is about finding one’s self, one’s friends and one’s enemies. In Maxim Biller’s case, the Jews and the Germans, it doesn’t matter in which order. He writes casually, wryly and poetically about a young man who is repeatedly told he shouldn’t insist on being the person he is. It’s not until he starts writing that he finally makes clear to everyone that there’s no keeping him back.
This is the story about an artist as a young man who is looking for his place in life. The author and his first novel were almost blown to bits in an attack during a trip to Israel: however, and maybe fortunately, the book was still never published. Biller was an author long before he became a journalist. He writes for the ZEIT, Spiegel and he also agreed to write the Tempo column “100 Zeilen Hass” which was created specially for him, something he has since occasionally regretted. When Jews in Frankfurt demonstrated against Fassbinder’s controversial play Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod, he preferred to go to a brothel with his friend Donny Gold instead. And Donny! One day he goes to Israel only to discover that the Israelis aren’t really Jews either.
This book brings back the 80s, Munich, pop and New Wave, and always books: Pasternak’s Safe Conduct, Mordecai Richler’s The Street and later Bob Dylan’s Chronicles. Biller’s autobiography is written in this tradition, as an artist’s biography. Or as he would put it: "At twenty we know everything, at thirty we really know everything, at forty we know nothing any more."
