Herscht 07769
In a Thuringian town where he fears a quantum catastrophe and works for a violent neo-Nazi patron, Florian Herscht turns on the Boss after discovering the group's role in a deadly arson and ultimately hunts its surviving members before ending wounded beside two blind wolves.
Overview
Herscht 07769 follows Florian Herscht, a physically powerful young man in the Thuringian town of Kana who works cleaning graffiti for the Boss, the leader of a local neo-Nazi group. The Boss has given Florian work and an apartment and repeatedly pressures him to join the group, but Florian fears its members and resists becoming one of them. At the same time, Florian studies physics with Herr Köhler and becomes convinced that the instability of matter could cause the universe to vanish. He writes repeatedly to Chancellor Angela Merkel and eventually travels to Berlin seeking her attention. When wolf-head graffiti marked 'WE' begins appearing at sites connected to Johann Sebastian Bach, the Boss turns his group toward finding the vandal while Florian increasingly finds consolation in Bach's music.
Köhler disappears after trying to correct Florian's interpretation of particle physics, then unexpectedly returns months later. Florian takes Köhler's joking response about having been at the United Nations as confirmation of his own explanation for the disappearance, even as Köhler later undergoes a severe cognitive decline. Around Kana, a wolf attack badly injures the Ringers, the Boss tracks and kills the wounded animal, and a series of explosions and violent incidents intensifies the town's fear. After Jürgen rapes Nadír, the Boss gives Florian a Nokia phone and tells him to support a fabricated history of calls that would place the Boss at home. The Aral gas station is then revealed to have been deliberately burned, killing Nadír and Rosario.
After the Boss and two men at the Burg are found murdered and Ringer is suspected, the narrative later reveals what happened. Florian discovers video on the Nokia showing Andreas, Fritz, Karin, and Gerhard carrying canisters at the Aral gas station while the Boss records them. The footage turns Florian against the man he had trusted. Florian kills the Boss and two men at the Burg, leaves Kana, and begins hunting the surviving members of the group. Karin independently kills Jürgen; Florian kills Andreas and Gerhard, and Uwe's final scene ends as the narration shifts to Florian nearby. A golden eagle begins following Florian during his months outdoors, while Karin eventually becomes his final target.
The last section brings Florian and Karin back to Kana, where each stalks the other. Florian also finds the teenage Bach-site vandal, who says unknown callers paid him to paint the wolf-head tag and an unfinished 'WE ARE COMING' message, leaving the clients unidentified. Karin kills the people at Ilona's pension and later shoots Florian's eagle. Police recover the Nokia evidence and intensify their search for Florian. In the final confrontation Florian breaks Karin's neck, but her pistol fires as she falls and wounds him in the thigh. He makes his way to the Saale and finds two blind wolves whose injuries are traced to a failed, concealed NABU experiment. Florian sits beside them as the Bach music in his head stops, and the book ends with all three listening to the river in the darkness.
Main Characters
- Florian Herscht - a physically powerful young man who works for the Boss, writes to Angela Merkel about an imagined quantum catastrophe, and later hunts the Boss's neo-Nazi unit after discovering its role in the Aral station arson
- The Boss - Florian's employer and patron, leader of the local neo-Nazi unit and Kana Symphony, whose Nokia records expose his involvement in the Aral station attack
- Herr Köhler - Florian's physics teacher, whose lessons fuel Florian's fears about matter before Köhler disappears, returns, and later undergoes severe cognitive decline
- Karin - a highly capable member of the Boss's unit who kills Jürgen, attempts to erase remaining traces of the group, and becomes Florian's final target
Central Themes
- Scientific misunderstanding and dangerous consequences of incomplete knowledge
- The intersection of high culture with extremist politics
- Existential emptiness and the search for meaning in a fragmenting world
Mood & Atmosphere
Fragmented, paranoid, and increasingly violent, with an underlying sense of cosmic dread and existential dissolution punctuated by moments of transcendent beauty through Bach's music
Source Edition
Herscht 07769, New Directions; translated by Ottilie Mulzet. The source is a one-sentence novel divided by thirteen typographic section headings; a table-of-contents fragment was removed from the generated guide. How sources are recorded.
