Christian Kracht (; born 29 December 1966) is a Swiss author, journalist, and screenwriter.
His writing deals with key themes of popular culture and consumerism, and his novels often show disillusioned conclusions. His work has been subject to some critical controversy. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages.
Early life Kracht was born in Saanen in the Canton of Bern. Kracht's father, Christian Kracht Sr., was chief representative for the Axel Springer publishing company in the 1960s. Kracht attended Schule Schloss Salem in Baden-Württemberg, Germany and Lakefield College School in Ontario, Canada. He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, New York, in 1989.
Journalistic career Kracht worked as a journalist for a number of magazines and newspapers in Germany, including .Weychardt, A., Christian Kracht (Seattle: Getty Images, 1995+). In the mid-1990s, he lived and worked in New Delhi as Spiegel's Indian correspondent. Kracht then moved to Bangkok, from where he visited various other countries in South East Asia and authored travel vignettes which were serialised in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper, and in 2000, collated in the book Der gelbe Bleistift (The Yellow Pencil) . In November 2006, Kracht was a regular columnist for the newspaper . His fortnightly column, which originally had the title Letter from..., later changed to Letter from the Past. He also traveled to and wrote pieces on the Panjshir Valley, Mogadishu, Mount Kilimanjaro and about the Safavid architecture of Imam Ali Shrine in Iraq.
In 1998, he worked with Eckhart Nickel to co-author Ferien für immer (A permanent vacation), collated musings on "the most pleasant places on earth". In 1999, Kracht took part in the performance piece Tristesse Royale with Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre, Joachim Bessing, Eckhart Nickel, and Alexander, Count of Schönburg-Glauchau. The book is an edited transcript of a recording made by the contributors in which they discuss globalised popular culture while staying at Berlin's Hotel Adlon. For some commentators, this publication constituted the high-water mark of so-called Popliteratur – a literary marketing phenomenon for which Kracht was the supposed figurehead.Frank Finlay: "Dann wäre Deutschland wie das Wort Neckarauen": Surface, Superficiality and Globalisation in Christian Kracht's Faserland, in: Stuart Taberner (Hrsg.): German Literature in the Age of Globalisation. Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2004, pp. 189–208 The author has repeatedly distanced himself from this epithet and has, for example, refused permission for his work to be republished in an anthology of that genre.Kerstin Gleba and Eckhard Schumacher (Ed.), Pop seit 1964, Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2007, p. 398. This notwithstanding, Kracht was the editor of the anthology Mesopotamia – a collection of short stories, fragments and photo montages by authors associated with the pop literature, including Rainald Goetz, Andreas Neumeister and Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre. First published with the subtitle "Ernste Geschichten am Ende des Jahrtausends" ("Serious stories at the turn of the Millennium"), this subtitle was dropped in its 2001 republication by Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag in favour of an "Avant-Pop-Reader." The relabeling notably coincided with the deflating currency of the term "pop literature" in the early years of the new century.
Between September 2004 and June 2006, Kracht published the independent literary magazine Der Freund in collaboration with Eckhart Nickel.Der Freund website (in English or German) He initially lived in Kathmandu while working as the magazine's editor before leaving Nepal during a period of political unrest. The chiefly German-language magazine was ultimately completed in San Francisco with a total of eight editions as originally planned. The magazine featured regular contributions from Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Ingo Niermann.
In February 2007, he published Metan (Methane) as the product of a climbing expedition on Kilimanjaro with Ingo Niermann.See also the illustrated reportage by Kracht and Niermann, "Kilimanjaro", in Qvest, vol. 23 (6 Dec./Jan. 2007), p. 59-71. The book posits that the effects of methane gas on the Earth's atmosphere are part of a vast cosmic conspiracy. Early reviews varied from the critical to the bewildered,According to Harald Peters in the journal Welt am Sonntag, 4 March 2007. "Über kleine und größere Stinker" one describing it as "großer Quatsch" ("a load of nonsense").Volker Weidermann in Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung, 4 March 2007, p. 30 Another reviewer refers to the book as a parody of "alarmism" and suggested it should be taken as a joke: "But if this book is taken as a joke, it probably is not a bad one".Christoph Bartmann, "Eine große Weltatemtheorie", Süddeutsche Zeitung, 16 April 2007, p. 16.
In 2012, Kracht published an exchange of letters with David Woodard entitled Five Years. Although this text is essentially a performance piece, certain episodes in their correspondence were deemed controversial, especially references to Nueva Germania. In February 2012, Georg Diez opined in that Five Years exposed racist, right-wing sympathies supposedly present in Kracht's latest novel Imperium. This view was widely contested by established critics and authors alike during a sustained literary debate in German-language newspapers and magazines.http://kurier.at/kultur/autoren-kritisieren-spiegel-artikel-zu-krachts-neuem-roman/771.122 Autoren kritisieren "Spiegel"-Artikel zu Krachts neuem Roman in Kurier, 15 March 2012
Personal life Kracht is married to German film director Frauke Finsterwalder with whom he has a daughter who was born in 2009. They live in Zurich.
Novels The protagonists of Kracht's fiction embark on journeys that take them in search of an elusive moment of immersive, utopian experience or spiritual enlightenment often located in a different nation or culture. Their journey usually, but not always, results in disappointment, failure or even death. The theme of travel was introduced in Kracht's debut novel, Faserland (1995). While the first wave of the novel's criticism identified Faserland as a novel about the affirmation of brand names and consumer culture, a second wave of criticism suggested that the novels evinces the protagonist's dissatisfaction with his lifestyle and existential "ennui". Early criticism of the novel suggested the influence of Bret Easton Ellis on his work, with some commentators even accusing him of plagiarism.See, for example, Ina Hartwig, "Standpunkt verschleiert" in Frankfurter Rundschau, 23 December 2003 Since the critical re-evaluation of Faserland, however, critics have observed the potential influence on his work by younger German-language writers such as Leif Randt with his 2011 novel Schimmernder Dunst über Coby County (The glistening haze over Coby County).http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/romane-des-monats-nach-middlesex-nun-also-meta-liebe-a-790606.html Christian Buß in Der Spiegel, 12 October 2011
The setting of Kracht's second novel 1979 is Iran. It begins in medias res against the backdrop of the revolution of the Ayatollah Khomeini during the titular year. This novel also deals with alienation and a chiefly Western form of consumer existence, but it depicts the fragility of an apparently decadent Western-metropolitan value system and its powerlessness before the Eastern-totalitarian models of Islam and Maoism.Review of 1979 (in English) After the supposed frivolousness of Faserland, Kracht was now seen as on the way "towards genuine seriousness"See Stefan Zweifel, Trash Total Trash Total in FACTS, 7 April 2005 in his writing, a view held by critics that was no doubt informed by the context of the September 11 attacks with which the novel's publication coincided. Kracht is skeptical about such a reading of his work and argues that he writes literary "light entertainment" and "comedies."Interview with Volker Weidermann and Edo Reents, "Ich möchte ein Bilderverbot haben", Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 30 September 2001 Thus, during a television appearance on the popular Harald Schmidt show in 2001, Kracht argued that his book was essentially kitsch.Christian Kracht appears on Harald Schmidt Show , October 2001
His 2008 novel Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (I will be here in sunshine and in shadow) imagines an alternative history of the twentieth century in which Lenin never returned to Russia from Switzerland, but instead founded a Swiss Soviet Republic – a communist state engaged in the colonization of Africa and in perpetual war with other totalitarian empires, notably with a federation of British and German fascists. Channeling Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle and Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, the plot of the novel traces a black Swiss political commissar's journey to the heart of the empire to arrest the rogue officer Brazhinsky in the Réduit. It quickly garnered acclaim in the German-speaking literary world. Broadsheet Die Welt called it a "glorious horror story."Elmar Krekeler (22 September 2008). "Christian Kracht bringt Krieg in die Schweiz" (in German). Die Welt. Retrieved 25 September 2008. The Süddeutsche Zeitung praised the writing as not only deeply reminiscent of Ernst Jünger, but also as the "most beautiful German prose currently on offer."Gustav Seibt (19 September 2008). "Es roch nach Menschentalg" (in German). Süddeutsche Zeitung. Retrieved 25 September 2008 But the Frankfurter Rundschau reviewer discounted Ich werde hier sein as "simply moronic," and Die Tageszeitung found the text to be too diffuse and incoherent, amounting to just "drug-clouded scenery.""Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten" . Perlentaucher.de. Retrieved 25 September 2008.
Kracht's 2012 novel Imperium follows on from Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten both in its critical reception and as a reimagining of history. In this sense, the novel bears some similarity to Die Vermessung der Welt (Measuring the World) by Daniel Kehlmann, an author with whom Kracht corresponded while composing Imperium. The novel follows the travails of the historical figure August Engelhardt in the Bismarck Archipelago (now Papua New Guinea) at the beginning of the twentieth century. Engelhardt is an idealistic German emigrant who establishes a plantation on an island and founds a colony of "cocovoress:" radical vegetarians nourished exclusively by coconuts. Engelhardt's history is interspersed with cameo appearances by other figures from German cultural history, such as Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. The first of Kracht's novels not to be narrated in the first-person, the omniscient narrator informs readers of the protagonist's thoughts and contextualizes Engelhardt's life within the broader scope of twentieth-century history. Imperium created a stir in Germany even before its publication; writing in Der Spiegel, critic Georg Diez suggested that the novel "above all shows the author's proximity to extreme right-wing ideas."Georg Diez, Die Methode Kracht , Der Spiegel, 13. February 2012 The accusation of racism levelled at Kracht was repudiated by other figures in the literary industry, including publisher Helge Malchow and fellow authors such as Daniel Kehlmann, Feridun Zaimoğlu, Necla Kelek and Elfriede Jelinek.See 'Offener Brief an die Spiegel-Chefredaktion zu Kracht] , 17. February 2012. Reviews of Imperium in the German-language press praised the novel's language, and it has been favourably compared to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in terms of both theme and style. Imperium has been translated into over 25 different languages, including English.
Reception
His work has appeared in The Paris Review and in Harper's Magazine.