The Crucifixion of the Mind – Michael Lentz in Conversation with Shelley Frisch
“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).
Shelley Frisch, a Princeton graduate alumna, is an award-winning literary translator, writer, and scholar specializing in German-to-English translation. She is best known for her translations of major biographies, including Reiner Stach’s acclaimed three-volume biography of Kafka and biographies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Marlene Dietrich/Leni Riefenstahl (dual biography), and, most recently, Hannah Arendt, along with many other works of fiction and nonfiction. She has chaired the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize jury for the past twelve years. Frisch’s translation of Martin Mittelmeier’s Heimweh im Paradies, about Thomas Mann’s years in California, will be published by Princeton University Press in 2027.
