Tilo Eckardt: Gefährliche Betrachtungen

In the organizer's words:

The case of Thomas Mann. Crime novel

On the 150th birthday of the great author and Nobel Prize winner for literature: a historical crime novel that brings Thomas Mann to life in a way that has never been read before.

The poet had stood up from his beach chair and watched the hunting scenes. As I raised my arms in modest triumph with the crumpled leaves I had picked up, he slapped his thighs and then clapped his hands. "Quite excellent!" he exclaimed, and my heart sank.

A dazzling tribute to Thomas Mann and a thrilling tale of courage, friendship and the power of literature to change the world. A novel that artfully and playfully blurs the boundaries between historical truth and poetic invention.

Nidden in the summer of 1930, an East Prussian fishing village and artists' colony on the Curonian Spit, an archaic stretch of land between the wild Baltic Sea and the tranquil lagoon. Thomas Mann and his family landed on this white coast "so beautifully curved that you could believe you were in North Africa" in July 1930 to move into their new summer house. At home in Germany, the end of the Weimar Republic looms after the dissolution of the Reichstag, and the deeply troubled poet is secretly working on a major speech in his bathrobe in the shade of his beach chair, in which he wants to warn the German people of the growing strength of National Socialism. Then, under extraordinary circumstances, the paths of the world-famous poet and the young Lithuanian translator Žydrūnas Miuleris, whom Mann persistently and insistently calls Müller, cross. And it is this Müller who gets the poet into serious trouble when he loses the manuscript of the explosive speech. The search for it seems to set further mysterious events in motion. Thomas Mann feels he is being followed and watched and a member of his household disappears without a trace. The poet and his translator find themselves confronted with a case that is as strange as it is exciting. Between shifting sand dunes and forest, surrounded by eccentric artists, stoic fishermen and curious spa guests, Mann and Müller must do everything in their power to recover the copies before they fall into the wrong hands.

With this historical crime novel about the not entirely voluntary investigative duo Mann and Müller, Tilo Eckardt creates a very special literary monument to one of the greatest storytellers of the 20th century. The early days of National Socialism are brought to life, as is the writer, who is still celebrated and loved today.