Gerhard Gentzen, born in Greifswald in 1909, was a mathematician and logician, contemporary of Andrei Kolmogorow, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, who independently laid the foundations for modern mathematics before the Second World War. They wanted to find out what can be verifiably calculated, calculated. Dietmar Dath’s novel Gentzen or: clean up while drunk is about it, it is undoubtedly one of the most demanding titles on the long list of the German Book Prize.
As a representative of the Nazi German faculty at the German university in Prague, Gentzen is in prison shortly after the end of the Second World War, where he will die of starvation. Was he a Nazi or a victim of his time? This question can no longer be clarified, it is only clear that genius and delusion are close together in the mathematician’s case. This is always a good starting point for literature.
As bold as it is tricky
What has sprung from his head, it is said at the beginning, will help to program computers. Machines “with which we work, do business, research, politics and art, with which we make opinions and disseminate them. On one of them I’ll write what you’re reading now. ”And what you read from now on is as bold as it is tricky. In various narrative strands, the novel traces the fate of numerous characters who are involved in programming and the design of the Internet and its consequences.
There is, for example, the computer scientist Constance Griffith, who, after experiencing racism, joins the Tinker community (a kind of chaos computer club), which is resisting the capitalist excesses of digitization. Bettina Willner is an activist who leads “Die Internationale”. She is also in close contact with a certain “Dietmar Dawson Leery Cheesecake Substitute Smurf Ponyfucker Filmkritik Dath”. And that same Dath is not only part of a special commission looking for a missing Tinker member who could prevent the devastating future, but also writes a “Gentzen novel” and tells of everyday life in the HE DOESwhose charismatic publisher is racking his brains over the Internet. Similarities to the late Frank Schirrmacher are intended.
Stylistically, this text is queer in several ways. As fiction devoted to science, it is part of a niche culture, in terms of content it places minority positions in the foreground and stylistically it uses a language that is based on attributions rather than properties. He uses anagrammatic expressions to make the potential of (programming) language visible; repetitions help to assign the 140 chapters to the respective narrative threads. Finally, the plot extends from January 17, 1728, when David Hume briefly jumped at the thought, “that no being leads to an ought, from facts to values, from research to morality”, to the year 2130, in which the world is completely different because humans have unleashed “a different kind of life” (transgenic CRISPR beings and more) onto the planet.
“Thinking means: tidying up drunk”, one reads where Dath’s diffuse narrative instance works out the chaotic order of the present, which he calls the “destruction of reason”. This culminates on the one hand “in the maddened social thinking” and on the other hand “in the destruction of scientific research”. Because even the brightest people would be reluctant to study the theoretical foundations of the world. “Not because they are stupid – it’s no harder to learn than anything even the dumbest knew about them – but because they didn’t care. No wait … because other things interested her more … social networks. Buy. Sell. Racism. Anti-racism. Gender dispute. ”Intellectual comfort and hostility to science (keywords: pandemic, climate change, surveillance) play into the hands of neoliberal technology fantasies.
Dath’s novel is full of meta-levels and literary references. The author creates worlds that are magically realistic and speculative at the same time. He releases his fictions into reality and brings reality into fiction without being able to be separated from one another.
Cordula shows up everywhere
Dath has been practicing this principle of using theoretical and philosophical approaches as a catalyst to develop an attitude towards the present for over 25 years. His debut novel was published in 1995 Cordula is killing you in the then newly founded Verbrecher Verlag. He is now reissuing the long out of print work. Title character Cordula Späth disappears after falling out of the window and has haunted his many thousands of pages ever since. Also through the Gentzen novel in the novel, in which she looks at reality from her “viewpoint outside of time”.
Dath’s critics often accuse him of hypocrisy of theory and lament the torment and agony of reading. This cheap indignation at the freedom that he takes for his sprawling texts acts like a jealous bite reflex to the realization that someone is giving them the headaches that they themselves – working in the compulsory mills of capitalism – are no longer allowed to expect from anyone. But if art is denied permission to invite others to (strained) reflection, the way to the renewed destruction of reason is not far. One does not have to agree with Dath’s analyzes to see an antidote to mental decline in his literature. Gentzen or: clean up drunk rethink the value of logic, theory, and philosophy.
Gentzen or: clean up while drunk Dietmar Dath Matthes & Seitz 2021, 604 S., 26 €
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