Christian Kracht - Journalism and Collaborative Work

Journalism and Collaborative Work

In the 1990s Kracht worked as a journalist for a number of magazines and newspapers in Germany, including Der Spiegel. In the mid-1990s he lived and worked in New Delhi as Spiegel's Indian correspondent. Kracht then moved to Bangkok, from where he visited various other countries in South East Asia. During this period he authored travel vignettes that were serialised in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper and later collated in the book Der Gelbe Bleistift ("The Yellow Pencil") in 2000. In November 2006 Kracht was a regular columnist for the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. His fortnightly column, which originally had the title "Letter from...", later changed to "Letter from the Past".

Kracht has regularly collaborated with other authors and artists. In 1998 he worked with Eckhart Nickel to co-author Ferien für immer (“A permanent vacation”), collated musings on the ‘the most pleasant places on earth’. In 1999 Kracht took part in the performance piece Tristesse Royale with Stuckrad-Barre, Joachim Bessing, Eckhart Nickel and Alexander von Schönburg. The book is an edited transcript of a recording made by the contributors in which they discuss globalised popular culture while staying at Berlin’s Hotel Adlon. For some commentators this publication constituted the high-water mark of so-called Popliteratur - a literary marketing phenomenon for which Kracht was the supposed figurehead. The author has repeatedly distanced himself from this epithet and has, for example, refused permission for his work to be republished in an anthology of that genre. This notwithstanding, Kracht was the editor of the anthology Mesopotamia – a collection of short stories, fragments and photo montages by authors associated with the pop literature, including Rainald Goetz, Andreas Neumeister and Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre. First published with the subtitle 'Ernste Geschichten am Ende des Jahrtausends' ("Serious stories at the turn of the Millennium”), this subtitle was dropped in its 2001 republication by Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag in favour of an ‘Avant-Pop-Reader’. The relabeling notably coincided with the deflating currency of the term 'pop literature' in the early years of the new century.

Between September 2004 and June 2006 Kracht published the independent literary magazine Der Freund in collaboration with Eckhart Nickel. He initially lived in Kathmandu while working as the magazine’s editor before leaving Nepal during a period of political unrest. The chiefly German-language magazine was ultimately completed in San Francisco with a total of eight editions as originally planned. The magazine featured regular contributions from Ira Cohen, Reinhold Messner and Rem Koolhaas amongst others as well as the musician Momus and the American performance artist, David Woodard.

February 2007 saw the publication of Metan ("Methane"), the product of a climbing expedition on Kilimanjaro with Ingo Niermann. The book describes the mysterious power of methane gas. Early reviews varied from the critical to the bewildered, one describing it as "großer Quatsch" ("a load of nonsense"). Another reviewer refers to the book as a parody of "alarmism" and suggested it should be taken as a joke: "But if this book is taken as a joke, it probably is not a bad one".

More recently Kracht has published an exchange of letters with Woodard in the 2012 compendium Five Years. Although this text is essentially a performance piece, certain episodes in their correspondence were deemed controversial, especially references made by Woodard to Nueva Germania. Indeed, in February 2012 one critic writing an opinion piece published in Der Spiegel alleged that Five Years exposed racist, right-wing sympathies supposedly present in Kracht’s latest novel Imperium. This minority perspective put forward by critic Georg Diez was widely contested and rebuked by established critics and authors alike during a sustained literary debate in German-language newspapers and magazines.