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Muttersterben: Prosa
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186 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2002
About the author
Michael Lentz
29 books45 followersMichael Lentz is a German author, musician, and performer of experimental texts and sound poetry.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
July 8, 2026
(This review covers both Schattenfroh & Motherdying.)
“One calls this writing.” One would have to. Despite the fact that Nobody (Neimand in German), stripped of his name, his sight and his freedom, writes nothing over the course of the 335,000 words of Schattenfroh and the roughly 10,000 words of Motherdying. On this long journey, we are with him, Nobody, the whole exhausting way: we are his eyes when he can’t see; his ears when he cannot hear; his pain when he cannot feel; when there is only one set of footprint in the sand it’s because we -- well now, let’s not be hasty. To put it more plainly, we are his witness, or perhaps just a fly on the blindfold box he’s forced to wear, not witnessing, but learning to see alongside him like it’s the first day of kindergarten all over again.
How to summarize a work like this? Does one bother? It seems beyond the point somehow. Reading a book like this is nothing short of an experience, ideally a solitary one, best spread over many late nights and pre-dawn mornings, one that could never be replicated by reading it a second time, yet the breadth, depth and length of the work guarantee rewards with repeated encounters.
The distance Nobody travels is the same as his wordcount: nothing, or barely farther, just around his dank cell, where he is a prisoner of the mysterious, eponymous Schattenfroh. Yet, in this cell, he easily crosses space and time, and any manner of other thresholds -- several of which he ought not cross -- with the minimal, but sometimes excruciating effort of a thought. It’s not exactly clear whose thought is leading the way, though: is it his, or is it Schattenfroh’s?
I spent a day short of 4 months ingesting the one thousand oversized pages of Schattenfroh, plus that one extra day on the one hundred and fifty undersized pages of Motherdying, putting in, I would estimate, 90-100 hours of total reading over that time, and about the same thinking, talking about and being attacked by it. Internally, the story took root in unexpected ways, blooming in unexpected pathways. The religious and the embodied philosophical aspects (as in, there is an optical device called “Hegel”) were of less interest to me than that of the overarching family mythology, the metaphysics, the existential and the allusions to art history (despite more familiarity with Bosch than Triegel or Tübke) and just the scope of the worldbuilding that it forced Lentz to create to accommodate it. The story sprawls over 400-odd years of German history in a single, long chapter. Much of it religious (Catholicism vs Lutheranism, naturally -- though I would tend be believe that the place Schattenfroh holds in Nobody’s personal mythology is purely symbolic, based on the Catholic damage of childhood more than any real God/Devil complex) -- and local history, of Düren, a small town near Cologne in West Germany, and Prüm, about 100km to the south -- with Nobody travelling to 17th century Düren, 1930s Prüm, and various points between, some out of time altogether, and ends around the time the novel was originally published in in 2014.
As good of a book as it was, it was not without its flat points, points where Lentz just seemed unable to stop himself from continuing writing (or just typing, honestly), at one point simply having Nobody and Father shrink an overtalker (and his font) down to ant-sized nothingness so they could move on without the hassle of having to end the conversation rudely or wait out its natural end. Later, he has Mateo, a lackey of Father’s who is perhaps the book’s ultimate villain, use a 17th century printing press as a torture device on Nobody while using the endless description of the laborious printing process to torture us, the reader, whom he can’t reach physically.
Still, conceptually, the book never wavers, and if anything, the writing level actually jumps up in quality considerably at about page 920, at the point when the most important thing in the book happens -- the very thing the book is about, which isn’t exactly a secret (or even particularly a spoiler), but is so deep into such a long book I will not say what it is. The book becomes a meditation cauterizing the novel’s themes at this point, and a different Lentz takes the stage, one that is reflective and introspective, even mournful, his words float across the page in something of a pensive daze.
Motherdying, in turn, reads more like a deleted scene. On first thought you wonder why there was no room for it within Schattenfroh, when you consider it exists inside of Schattenfroh, but it does make sense to be separate. “Motherdying” exists within it as the too-bright-to-read book that illuminates Father’s library/dungeon, where Nobody learns how to read the white script (“eternal life” to the black script’s “death”), but instead of reading it, Nobody simply eats it up before moving on to Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann for sustenance, without ever dwelling on or even cracking the blindingly bright cover open. While there is plenty to discover about mother and her dying, he doesn’t discover it in Motherdying, though by some witchcraft of the brainfluid Nobody uses to write “Schattenfroh” and by which Father has engineered the writing to his will, he has also written “Motherdying” without realizing it.
We find a different father here, too, more meek, more supplicant to Mother’s needs in certain ways, though still married to his job and his social standing in others. Not older than the Father of “Schattenfroh”, but more aged and feeble, not the dominating, overpowering paterfamilias, who beats Nobody with a cane or with his open hand, who would later take a place in his mind as the other holy trinity, as Father-God-Devil.
Despite the hilarious difference in size of the two books (I measured that you could fit 20 Motherdyings into the space of 1 Schattenfroh), it’s difficult to separate the two works. They are umbilically linked, as it were, in story, characters, writer, editor and translator, Max Lawton, who was once again guided by the “courage of his perversions" to trap Lentz’s obscure and dense text and release it into the wild with a natural feeling of minimal intrusions on the original, and received the Kurt & Helen Wolf Translation Award last month for his efforts.
This was my experience with it at least. Clearly a book of this nature, of this size is not going to be for everyone, and that’s all right. In the end though, I found it to be an absolutely incredible, insane, mindnumbing, humbling, embarrassing, harassing, elating, accosting, disgusting, beautiful, confusing, edifying, mindfuck of an adventure to the precipice and back, a psychological acid trip on a crazy-ass German reengineer of Carl Sagan’s Ship of the Imagination.
“One calls this writing.” One would have to. Despite the fact that Nobody (Neimand in German), stripped of his name, his sight and his freedom, writes nothing over the course of the 335,000 words of Schattenfroh and the roughly 10,000 words of Motherdying. On this long journey, we are with him, Nobody, the whole exhausting way: we are his eyes when he can’t see; his ears when he cannot hear; his pain when he cannot feel; when there is only one set of footprint in the sand it’s because we -- well now, let’s not be hasty. To put it more plainly, we are his witness, or perhaps just a fly on the blindfold box he’s forced to wear, not witnessing, but learning to see alongside him like it’s the first day of kindergarten all over again.
How to summarize a work like this? Does one bother? It seems beyond the point somehow. Reading a book like this is nothing short of an experience, ideally a solitary one, best spread over many late nights and pre-dawn mornings, one that could never be replicated by reading it a second time, yet the breadth, depth and length of the work guarantee rewards with repeated encounters.
The distance Nobody travels is the same as his wordcount: nothing, or barely farther, just around his dank cell, where he is a prisoner of the mysterious, eponymous Schattenfroh. Yet, in this cell, he easily crosses space and time, and any manner of other thresholds -- several of which he ought not cross -- with the minimal, but sometimes excruciating effort of a thought. It’s not exactly clear whose thought is leading the way, though: is it his, or is it Schattenfroh’s?
I spent a day short of 4 months ingesting the one thousand oversized pages of Schattenfroh, plus that one extra day on the one hundred and fifty undersized pages of Motherdying, putting in, I would estimate, 90-100 hours of total reading over that time, and about the same thinking, talking about and being attacked by it. Internally, the story took root in unexpected ways, blooming in unexpected pathways. The religious and the embodied philosophical aspects (as in, there is an optical device called “Hegel”) were of less interest to me than that of the overarching family mythology, the metaphysics, the existential and the allusions to art history (despite more familiarity with Bosch than Triegel or Tübke) and just the scope of the worldbuilding that it forced Lentz to create to accommodate it. The story sprawls over 400-odd years of German history in a single, long chapter. Much of it religious (Catholicism vs Lutheranism, naturally -- though I would tend be believe that the place Schattenfroh holds in Nobody’s personal mythology is purely symbolic, based on the Catholic damage of childhood more than any real God/Devil complex) -- and local history, of Düren, a small town near Cologne in West Germany, and Prüm, about 100km to the south -- with Nobody travelling to 17th century Düren, 1930s Prüm, and various points between, some out of time altogether, and ends around the time the novel was originally published in in 2014.
As good of a book as it was, it was not without its flat points, points where Lentz just seemed unable to stop himself from continuing writing (or just typing, honestly), at one point simply having Nobody and Father shrink an overtalker (and his font) down to ant-sized nothingness so they could move on without the hassle of having to end the conversation rudely or wait out its natural end. Later, he has Mateo, a lackey of Father’s who is perhaps the book’s ultimate villain, use a 17th century printing press as a torture device on Nobody while using the endless description of the laborious printing process to torture us, the reader, whom he can’t reach physically.
Still, conceptually, the book never wavers, and if anything, the writing level actually jumps up in quality considerably at about page 920, at the point when the most important thing in the book happens -- the very thing the book is about, which isn’t exactly a secret (or even particularly a spoiler), but is so deep into such a long book I will not say what it is. The book becomes a meditation cauterizing the novel’s themes at this point, and a different Lentz takes the stage, one that is reflective and introspective, even mournful, his words float across the page in something of a pensive daze.
Motherdying, in turn, reads more like a deleted scene. On first thought you wonder why there was no room for it within Schattenfroh, when you consider it exists inside of Schattenfroh, but it does make sense to be separate. “Motherdying” exists within it as the too-bright-to-read book that illuminates Father’s library/dungeon, where Nobody learns how to read the white script (“eternal life” to the black script’s “death”), but instead of reading it, Nobody simply eats it up before moving on to Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann for sustenance, without ever dwelling on or even cracking the blindingly bright cover open. While there is plenty to discover about mother and her dying, he doesn’t discover it in Motherdying, though by some witchcraft of the brainfluid Nobody uses to write “Schattenfroh” and by which Father has engineered the writing to his will, he has also written “Motherdying” without realizing it.
We find a different father here, too, more meek, more supplicant to Mother’s needs in certain ways, though still married to his job and his social standing in others. Not older than the Father of “Schattenfroh”, but more aged and feeble, not the dominating, overpowering paterfamilias, who beats Nobody with a cane or with his open hand, who would later take a place in his mind as the other holy trinity, as Father-God-Devil.
Despite the hilarious difference in size of the two books (I measured that you could fit 20 Motherdyings into the space of 1 Schattenfroh), it’s difficult to separate the two works. They are umbilically linked, as it were, in story, characters, writer, editor and translator, Max Lawton, who was once again guided by the “courage of his perversions" to trap Lentz’s obscure and dense text and release it into the wild with a natural feeling of minimal intrusions on the original, and received the Kurt & Helen Wolf Translation Award last month for his efforts.
This was my experience with it at least. Clearly a book of this nature, of this size is not going to be for everyone, and that’s all right. In the end though, I found it to be an absolutely incredible, insane, mindnumbing, humbling, embarrassing, harassing, elating, accosting, disgusting, beautiful, confusing, edifying, mindfuck of an adventure to the precipice and back, a psychological acid trip on a crazy-ass German reengineer of Carl Sagan’s Ship of the Imagination.
February 23, 2024
November 16, 1944 - the German city of Düren's blackest day
Motherdeath - short story by German author Michael Lentz. Katy Derbyshire's English translation is available here: https://shortstoryproject.com/stories...
MOTHERDEATH
"Mother disappeared on the twentieth of August nineteen ninety-eight at around eleven fifty at night. At around eight thirty in the morning of the twenty-first of August nineteen ninety-eight, Father called and informed me: 'Mother died at around eleven fifty last night.' I went back to bed and continued reading the duck comic I had set aside the previous evening."
So begins the author's harrowing account.
Michael Lentz is renowned for delving into avenues that bring us closer to the reality of our physical, material world, which often eludes adequate expression through language. Perhaps this is why the time and date of his mother's death are reiterated in the opening lines. In essence, akin to minimalist music and its persistent repetition of a straightforward musical motif (consider pieces such as Philip Glass' "Music in Twelve Parts"), Michael Lentz utilizes repetition to intensify our understanding of his journey surrounding his mother's passing.
"It’s certainly the case that I last saw Mother at around ten in the morning on the sixth of July nineteen ninety-eight. I wave back again and the heavy grey door with the handle rubbed smooth to the touch slips slowly and safely closed. On this ward, a broken foot lies next to death. Everyone leaves via the corridor. Mother is having difficulties with her tongue but her voice is unupset. She is having trouble swallowing and has to drink artificial saliva."
Once more, Michael Lentz aims to delve into the essence, the precise reality, of experiencing being present in that room with its heavy gray door, handle worn smooth, watching his dying mother for the last time, his mother enduring such acute suffering that swallowing becomes arduous, necessitating the consumption of artificial saliva.
This autofiction serves as a reminder to English readers of Karl Ove Knausgård. Michael Lint writes autofiction with a specific purpose: the German author, known for his experimentalism, strives for a reality that is more immediate, more dynamic, and more authentically raw than traditional fiction.
"Now at last I rest my hand with no pressure on the blanket, beneath it her absolutely emaciated legs. Intuiting legs. She is so gaunt that the tendons in her neck grow out of her body like dry branches so gaunt. Her larynx protrudes as though it wanted to be alone. Her arms threaten to snap away, her whole body an ungoverned marionette whose strings somebody tangled."
This is just a snippet from a long paragraph. We're closely following the sensitive, twenty-four years old narrator as he vividly describes everything he observes. Pay attention to his description of his mother, whose "whole body an ungoverned marionette with tangled strings," which is a metaphor rather than a simile, making it more direct, more powerful. The scene, which is agonizingly intense, concludes with him realizing that he never asked his mother if she was contemplating death. He is acutely aware of how close his mother is to dying.
"Mother was not from this society. I think she was from the war, and she compared everything to its equivalent from the war. There weren’t many exact equivalents. She didn’t bring up her children at the level of society, I mean this society was always in the way of her bringing us up, I mean this society was always in her way."
After her death, the narrator reflects on the trauma his mother likely endured during the war, witnessing the devastation of her hometown, Düren. With bitter irony, he muses, "A town ninety-eight per cent destroyed in the war, ought never to have been rebuilt. They should have left it all as it was to rot away. Then they could have taken people and women from all over the world there fifty years after the war and said: THAT is war."
"German grammar always emits such an extreme stench of decay. This permanently papally blessed German language. This bargain language. This philosopher’s language. This money-back deposit bottle of a language."
It sounds like the narrator (and perhaps author Michael Lentz) has lost faith in his native language. If language no longer can be trusted to express our deepest, most intimate emotions, what does this say about our inner lives? Additionally, how reliable is our memory? Can works of a high literary standard come to our aid? Questions and ideas to keep in mind as your read this heart-wrenching tale of Michael Lentz.
Michael Lentz, born 1964
May 27, 2026
"This must be a plot. Something is happening here."
Muttersterben: Prosa won the Ingeborge Bachmman for a then-unpublished short story. Motherdying is the English translation of that work as the centerpiece of this collection of five experimental prose pieces, tone poems and stories all centered around meditions upon the death of the author's mother.
As in Scattenfroh, Lentz plays with words and sounds as he struggles with watching his mother wither away before him; and he questions whether or not his mother's hometown of Duren, Germany should have been rebuilt after WWII in order to give the survivors (and the survivors' decendants) a chance at a life not consumed by decay.
It's difficult to describe this avant-garde autofiction except to say that it leaves the reader with more questions than answers.
"Death is expected sometime between now and tomorrow. Death is punctual. Mother, sixtyeight years old."
Muttersterben: Prosa won the Ingeborge Bachmman for a then-unpublished short story. Motherdying is the English translation of that work as the centerpiece of this collection of five experimental prose pieces, tone poems and stories all centered around meditions upon the death of the author's mother.
As in Scattenfroh, Lentz plays with words and sounds as he struggles with watching his mother wither away before him; and he questions whether or not his mother's hometown of Duren, Germany should have been rebuilt after WWII in order to give the survivors (and the survivors' decendants) a chance at a life not consumed by decay.
It's difficult to describe this avant-garde autofiction except to say that it leaves the reader with more questions than answers.
"Death is expected sometime between now and tomorrow. Death is punctual. Mother, sixtyeight years old."
February 5, 2026
Laat ons zeggen dat deze review met een korrel zout moet genomen worden. Ik lees een Engelse vertaling en niet het originele Duits.
Dit boek leest voor mij als woorden achter elkaar gezet in een volgorde. De zinnen klinken ijdel en vormen geen geheel. Ik kan jammer genoeg niet geraakt worden of een nut zien in dit “Motherdying” hoe tragisch dat ook mag zijn. En dat is misschien ook het punt… er is geen nut aan deze sterfte.
Ik krijg enkel van moeder een duivels en angstig gevoel en dat draagt de ziekte die zij heeft misschien mee.
Moeders verdienen een meer positief licht of een sprankel hoop in literatuur naar mijn menig.
Dit boek leest voor mij als woorden achter elkaar gezet in een volgorde. De zinnen klinken ijdel en vormen geen geheel. Ik kan jammer genoeg niet geraakt worden of een nut zien in dit “Motherdying” hoe tragisch dat ook mag zijn. En dat is misschien ook het punt… er is geen nut aan deze sterfte.
Ik krijg enkel van moeder een duivels en angstig gevoel en dat draagt de ziekte die zij heeft misschien mee.
Moeders verdienen een meer positief licht of een sprankel hoop in literatuur naar mijn menig.
March 22, 2026
Beautifully written with a very poetic style. the first half of the book borders on an emotional stream of consciousness and eventually resolves into something coherent. The main drawback is that it says nothing profound and offers no perspective that resonated with me. In that way it felt merely like a self-indulgent reflection on the author's own experience.
May 27, 2026
there are some very beautiful moments that strike right to the heart of the matter so to speak but at other times the translation feels like a stilted sieve and im left wondering what im missing may my family and i die quickly and easily godwilling
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November 25, 2025Este wey escribió un libro madremuerta y es del 15 de mayo. Si yo creyera en estos esoterismos………
January 8, 2026
Not for everyone but it really worked for me
June 5, 2026
one of those translated books so beautiful in english, that i think being able to read its mother tongue would give me a spiritual awakening
June 15, 2026
I became aware of Michael Lentz through the hyped-up translation of his 1001-page opus ‘Schattenfroh’, but before I fully committed to such a long work, I wanted to dip my toes into what Lentz is able to achieve in a smaller capacity through his writing. ‘Muttersterben/Motherdying’ is an unbelievable collection of short stories or prose fragments that are mainly about stylistic experimentation and linguistic playfulness rather than creating full cohesive narratives or concrete plots. These are all written in a purposeful sequence that connects back to what was displayed previously in a story, either through thematic links, story callbacks or stylistic reference. What he is able to do with his sort of rhythmic stream-of-consciousness consisting of raw emotion, rich poetics or pun-comedy is sort of marvelous, especially in how he is able to capture such a dark and deeply moving topic in ways that can go from extremely hilarious to utterly heartbreaking from one page to the next.
Not all fragments here work entirely well, but they manage to enrich the whole and make the longer passages even more effective. Especially that last titular part was endlessly beautiful, bleakly tragic and gut-wrenching that it felt like one of the greatest literary attempts at understanding grief (or at least an attempt at capturing how impossible it is to understand grief). I cannot stress enough how amazing it is to know that there are German writers like him that still feel inventive, creative and singular in the current day. This is such an intentful and complex collection of prose, I love just how entertaining and yet deep-cutting it can be, it’s not perfect and I’d imagine him maturing and evolving this style over time with his ‘Schattenfroh’ now (which I’m eager to read soon), but he is such an underrated figure in literature today.
Not all fragments here work entirely well, but they manage to enrich the whole and make the longer passages even more effective. Especially that last titular part was endlessly beautiful, bleakly tragic and gut-wrenching that it felt like one of the greatest literary attempts at understanding grief (or at least an attempt at capturing how impossible it is to understand grief). I cannot stress enough how amazing it is to know that there are German writers like him that still feel inventive, creative and singular in the current day. This is such an intentful and complex collection of prose, I love just how entertaining and yet deep-cutting it can be, it’s not perfect and I’d imagine him maturing and evolving this style over time with his ‘Schattenfroh’ now (which I’m eager to read soon), but he is such an underrated figure in literature today.
March 28, 2026
No I don’t know German I read the English translation I’m a fraud I’m sorry 😔
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews