Abused bestselling author Juli Zeh: ‘Some call me a Nazi brain’ Truck gets stuck on a level crossing and is hit by a train

That was not flattering. After her novel “Über Menschen,” she was described as a “Nazi understander,” Juli Zeh said in a “Focus” interview. “Nazi understander” is just as pejorative as “Putin understander” and always means approve, defend. Which in the case of Juli Zeh is nonsense. It just goes to show that “even understanding has become a moral problem these days”. She, who joined the SPD in 2017, says: “I’m not saying you’re angry, I’m just saying why I shouldn’t vote for the AfD.” A phrase that characterizes the doctor of law and honorary judge: curiosity instead of condemnation, attitude instead of emotion, result-oriented instead of moralizing.

The novel “Über Menschen” about a village in Brandenburg was the best-selling novel in Germany in 2021 with more than half a million copies. The literary criticism was not so gracious: witty dialogues, but exoticism in the land of platitude-like language. But she hit a nerve. That she spoke sensitively about the “village Nazi” Gote, among other things, stuck in her throat. Born in Bonn in 1975, Juli Zeh is used to headwinds.

Offended liverwurst as a contemporary figure

With Juli Zeh, however, the strict separation between literature and politics is more difficult than with other authors. Her novel characters utter sentences that can also be found in Zeh’s political interventions. In the epistolary novel Between Worlds, which is high on the bestseller lists, the sympathies are clearly divided: here the desperate organic farmer in East Germany who feels abandoned by politics and radicalized into a nationalist conspiracy group, there a woker, but essentially a career-focused journalist pandering to climate activists. Tragedy vs caricature. Perhaps people overlook the fact that this novel is also a satire: the offended liverwurst as the central figure of the present.

Since Juli Zeh has been living in a village in Brandenburg with her family and horses for 15 years, the shadow of the author is almost indispensable in “Z Zwischen Welten”. And when the organic farmer writes to her friend in the novel about the war in Ukraine: “War has always been a bad producer of CO2. If you were to take the climate seriously, you would have to demand an immediate end to it,” sounds like last year’s “Peace” letters from German artists and intellectuals. Together with the philosopher Richard David Precht, she was the figurehead: instead of supplying more weapons, chancellor Olaf Scholz had to push for a ceasefire and peace negotiations. Nuclear war is imminent. In the current “Manifesto for Peace”, however, Juli Zeh no longer appears among the signatories.

Your literature is not a fair-weather party

Even if people read her tasty literature more to diagnose the times than for her special use of language, I must emphasize again: good literature is not a fair-weather party, but dangerous. Because the characters in the novel are ambiguous, stubborn or violent, the reader is also questioned. After all, reading novels as mere self-affirmation of one’s own worldview is vain. It is precisely because of her contemporary themes that Juli Zeh became a best-selling author. For example, in the dystopian 2009 “Corpus Delicti”, where she processed a health dictation with a warning about a surveillance state in a thriller-like way.

The outrage about the author is apparent from the interview that Juli Zeh gave to the NZZ in January. In it, she described the curfew during the corona pandemic as a “totalitarian criminal situation”. At every opportunity, however, she emphasizes that what matters to her is the proportionality of measures, which distinguishes her from fundamentalist groups such as ‘Moderate’ or AfD.

She pointed out the 2015 refugee policy as the trigger for the division in society: anyone who expressed a different opinion about the welcome culture was immediately put in the right corner. Still, she found the East German Merkel haters “unbearable.” This is typical of their thinking, which always aims at the basics: here the danger of irreconcilable polarization, as seen in the US. The fact that she receives the applause of the extreme right as a member of the SPD is part of her self-image as a bridge-builder.

Maybe you can learn from horses

The predictable storm then raged in comment columns and on social media. The publicist Stephan Anpalagan accused her of “there was no finer way to downplay right-wing extremism,” and the political scientist Katharina Nocun, who published her non-fiction book “Fake Facts. How conspiracy theories shape our thinking” became a bestseller in 2020, even saw an increasing “radicalization” of the author Juli Zeh.

You might understand why Juli Zeh is so concerned about the polarized culture of conversation with her passion for horses, which she even wrote the non-fiction book “Instructions for Horses” about. These sensitive animals are exemplary. Most horses would “always offer first: look, here I am, who are you? Are we together? There is this offer. Being able to make something of that is an exciting process.” Sounds a bit cheesy in its friendly naivety – but can still be taken to heart by some outraged people.