Weiskern's estate

Rüdiger Stolzenburg, 59 years old, has had a half-time job as a lecturer at a cultural studies institute for 15 years. His chances of promotion tend to be nil, and he gets by on his salary more or less poorly. He is a prototypical member of the academic precariat. This "class" lacks any hope for the future: the self-imposed standards for university teaching cannot be maintained; his own research does not lead to any tangible results. For Rüdiger Stolzenburg's special field, the actor, librettist and cartographer Friedrich Wilhelm Weiskern, who lived in Vienna in the 18th century, neither third-party funding nor publication possibilities can be procured. And then the supposedly sensational new material from Weiskern's estate also turns out to be a fake.
His efforts to meet a back tax demand that is ruining him make it finally clear to him: the world, the economy, politics, private relationships - everything is precarious. They break, they unleash violence, they spend appearances for being on a large scale. In Rüdiger Stolzenburg, Christoph Hein has created a figure in which the dangers to our society and our civilisation at the end of the first decade of the second millennium are prototypically reflected. Christoph Hein has thus succeeded in creating a contemporary, realistic social novel that is shaped in literary terms.