Ritter Alles über alles

Why does the Earth rotate faster at the equator? What were aqueducts built for? Max Hofler has the answers ready: It is the acceleration forces of the nimble springbok and the spiky impala that cause the ground to spin, and in the high pipes, Lambrusco and Veltliner were once meant to flow for the haute volée. These are the questions from the Trivial Pursuit game that Hofler uses in Everything About Everything as a starting point for speculations about the nature of the world, formulated in a strictly formulaic manner and always as counter-questions. The canon of largely useless knowledge has become ineffective as a distinguishing feature of so-called elites. Max Hofler lets this dissipate in grotesque explanations and drives out the educational pretentiousness of its bearers. A hybrid artistic language, which exploits the creative energy of the idioms of tough guys, petty bourgeois poseurs, and catchphrase merchants of private TV, usurps the pedagogical German of the social game. New Zealand fighting sheep and berserker penguins tackle the topic of post-factuality, and various clickbaits and images that take aim at us readers expose hierarchies of knowledge generation. Everything About Everything offers as much extravagant entertainment as it does deconstruction, and even more: When the encyclopedist explains the origin of the red color of the Golden Gate Bridge with the blood toll that the workers paid during its construction, he touches on knowledge formations that are not only swept under the rug in trivial party games.