Moralische Geschichten

Maxim Biller's celebrated moral stories. Every other Sunday, one must securely place the coffee cup down before reading Biller's short stories in the FAS at the breakfast table, because it can get dangerous: either the roll gets stuck in your throat, or you burst into uncontrollable laughter – usually somehow both.

Intense reactions are guaranteed when Biller turns his attention to the everyday, universally human abysses in the lives of Jews, non-Jews, and other human beings. A leftover lipstick from a wet dream becomes proof of God, the tattooed number on the left arm turns into a lottery win, and a butcher's knife becomes the guarantor of a happy marriage. A ridiculous comedy arises because, with titles like Cosmos, The Meaning of Life, Poetry and Truth, or Apocalypse, the grand themes are introduced, only to be rapidly brought down to the level of everyday life.

Dreams, fantasies, and Freudian slips lead to the most surprising and liberating insights. Thus, the literature student Orlovsky discovers in Kafka's diaries the entry "Sometimes I think I'm just crazy" and gains a completely new image of Kafka, without ever being able to find the sentence again later.

Maxim Biller has been writing his moral stories for twenty years, which have been published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung for the past three years. This selection of mostly unpublished stories is intended as a valuable contribution to entertainment literature and cultural understanding.