My books

My novels are not conventional genre novels. I am interested in transitions: between past and present, documented history and invention, memory and identity. Historical research is not merely scenery but becomes part of the narrative itself. The stories bring scientific and historical material together with very personal, sometimes mysterious experiences of the characters.

Galois Schweigen is the clearest example. The novel combines mathematics, history and the present with questions of identity and reality. My research into Évariste Galois became so extensive that it developed into a separate, detailed biography. The long work on that biography originally had a concrete literary purpose: I wanted to be able to quote in the novel from a life of Galois that I had reconstructed myself.

A parallel project was my website galois-group.net, where I collected and made accessible letters, historical documents and biographical sources about Galois. Biography, website and novel thus grew side by side: historical reconstruction, source collection and finally literary transformation.

For another central thread I obtained the rare original 1839 edition of F.-V. Raspail’s Lettres sur les prisons de Paris through interlibrary loan. The copy was so fragile that I could use the two volumes only in the reading room of the Konstanz library, so I photographed them page by page. Those photographs can now be browsed as a facsimile on galois-group.net.

Raspail’s account was valuable because he did not describe Galois from historical distance. He knew him from Sainte-Pélagie and wrote from the world in which Galois had actually lived. In the novel’s chat sequences, fiction and reality then begin to merge. Together with the main character we encounter Galois — and at the same time someone who is Galois and yet is not Galois.

Etrusker AG takes a different, more adventurous narrative route. For this novel I immersed myself in the world of the Etruscans, a highly developed culture from which almost no continuous literature of its own has survived. What we know has to be reconstructed from thousands of mostly short inscriptions, graves and wall paintings, a few longer texts and later Greek and Roman accounts. This silence of a vanished culture fascinated me.

Both novels can be read here in full in their available original editions. Galois Schweigen is also available as a complete English translation, Galois’s Silence. The Galois biography is freely available as well — not merely as background to the novel, but as an independent approach to the short and extraordinary life of a mathematical genius.