The Crucifixion of the Mind

“The task of literature is to remember the dead,” Schattenfroh declares. At the heart of Michael Lentz’s eponymous 1,000-page novel SCHATTENFROH (2018) lies a profound meditation on death, memory, and remembrance. A narrative of epic dimensions, Schattenfroh unfolds as a baroque exploration in which imagination and materiality engage in a dynamic interplay of synthesis and destruction, transforming its erudition into a labyrinthine literary experiment.

Niemand (“Nobody”), the first-person narrator held captive by Schattenfroh somewhere at the center of the book’s vast panorama, deliberately summons some memories; others overtake him unbidden. Still others are invented, displaced, or recombined. Recollection becomes a mode of production: memory is not simply retrieved but made and remade in the very movement of narration.

Rather than “helplessly surrendering” (Die Zeit) before a book that is at once “prodigiously learned” (NYRB) and “compulsively readable” (PRoB), we will enter Schattenfroh through Max Lawton’s translation, awarded the 2026 Kurt Wolff Prize. Writer and translator Shelley Frisch, who served on the jury for the Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, will lead the conversation, guiding us through the novel’s extraordinary citational cosmos, populated by historical and fictional figures and literary voices, and inhabited by paintings.

Students are invited to join this exploration of a densely layered and formally audacious novel from both literary and translational perspectives, and to venture into its linguistically exuberant “inverse projections” (Ralf Simon) of images into an uncanny interior space in which memories appear and dissolve.

Following readings from both the German original and its English translation, the discussion will offer a rare opportunity to hear an author and translator reflect on the challenges of creating such an idiosyncratic work and carrying it across linguistic and cultural boundaries.

Michael Lentz is a writer, musician, and editor. He holds the Chair of Creative Writing at the Institute of Literature at Leipzig University (Deutsches Literaturinstitut Leipzig). His most recent publications include the novel Schattenfroh (2018/2025), the volume Innehaben. Schattenfroh und die Bilder (2020), the poetry collection Chora (2023), and the novel Heimwärts (2024), all published by S. Fischer Verlag (Frankfurt).