»We’re going to crash, pray for me« – this is the text message a father receives from his daughter in the middle of the night in a hotel room in North America. This is the bombshell that opens Michael Kumpfmüller’s novel, a novel that brings back politics into German literature. The father who receives this message is minister of the interior of a European country which is just plunging into a serious crisis. Strikes, social unrest and diffuse terrorist threats leave Minister Selden no time to grieve.
In Nachricht an alle Michael Kumpfmüller drives a probe through the layers of western democracy. He is interested not only in Selden’s private and political fate but also in the monstrous mechanisms of domestic security, the infiltration of private and public spheres, the penetrating argumentation of the media and experts and the voice of the people – background noise that follows and undermines political discourse.
Kumpfmüller paints a shimmering contemporary portrait of simultaneous events: while decisions are made in the air-conditioned offices of the elite, down below in the skyscraper-lined streets, on the seething edges of society, a group of people begins to stir, waiting to pull off their grand coup. Politics and society have not been written about in German literature so knowledgeably, absorbingly or astutely for a long time. In this expansive, linguistically refined and multi-voiced novel, Michael Kumpfmüller proves he is one of the most outstanding novelists of our time. He was awarded the Döblin Prize 2007 for the unpublished manuscript of this novel.
»This novel searches for current sources of unrest, proximity to politics, to activists who bring train services to a standstill, and to their opponent, Minister of the Interior Selden. He is the hero not of a Latin American novel about tyrants but a novel about an employee in a western European democracy. Selden is an employee of power. For the reader, he is a man in a moment of shock; shock spreads from its epicentre, penetrating political routine and crisis management. Employees of power and their challengers, both caught in moments of shock.» Lothar Müller, laudatory speech for the Alfred-Döblin Prize 2007
