really ground zero: 11. september und folgendes

by Kathrin Röggla

136 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 6, 2016

About the author

Lebt seit 1992 in Berlin und arbeitet dort an Romanen, Essays, Hörspielen sowie Theatertexten.

Reviews

[Manuel Espinoza Proudinat · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got word of Kathrin Röggla and her work while doing prep research for a seminar on contemporary literature in German. I had to research further because until then I'd never heard anything about her, and it turned out that she has made some of the ultimate literary proposals in German, including post-dramatic theater, novels about the business-milieu in Germany, and things like really ground zero: 11. september und folgendes, which slowly has cemented its reputation as a modern classic of DACHL-Literature. Reading this mixture made out of anecdote, gonzo journalism, diary, photo album, interviews, and auto-fiction wasn't neither the most accesible experience nor the most exciting one, considering that the page layout is set on columns, emulating the appearance of a newspaper, and that the style gives the impression of fragmentariness. Only deep into the second third of the book, I realized the general effect caused by this structural arrangement was one of a thorough a questioning of what "real" is and how mass media concocts a reality which responds only to the interests of their patrons and head chiefs (mostly businesspeople and politicians, who in the US are basically the same thing). Although Röggla writes about the immediate aftermath of 9/11, her whole text struck me as extremely and scarily relevant to the way the US are currently managing and deforming information and putting in doubt what the whole world sees as a general proved truth in order to create the kind of confusion that is needed to maintain the status quo intact. Therefore, one can find in Röggla the very Austrian enlightening obsession with those language dynamics we build realities with.