Weisse Nacht

Finally available in paperback: David Schalko's bitter parable about society's shift to the right.

In "White Night," David Schalko takes a journey into the dark heart of right-wing ideologies - ten years after its publication, his poetic satire about a political leader and his lackey is more topical than ever.In 2008, Jörg Haider, the prototype of today's European right-wing populists, died in a car accident. The bizarre veneration of saints that his death triggered in Austria inspired David Schalko to write an artful satire about the homoerotic relationship between a naive young man and a messianic politician who knows how to preach sermons about fairy-tale promises like that of an endless summer. The result is a magnificent literary grotesque that seeks to fathom the core of the new right in a wild mixture of fascistoid and esoteric linguistic images, abstruse conspiracy theories, and kitschy savior myths.