There is the photo from the “SF conference for women executives”. Behind us a slogan: “Create & Activate”. Jean, who wants to express that he supports women in leadership positions (starting with his daughter Anne as his successor at OG); I, who explicitly insist on the break with Thomas Mann, and also address my esteemed female readers, and not only my esteemed readers. I am convinced that Thomas Mann would do the same in the year 2025.
And over the years, more and more also: Jean as a public figure, founder, mentor – and I beside him, not as a spectator, but as a participant. In the photo of the OG-50-Year-Celebration my arm is resting on Jean’s arm. No pose, no clasp. Belonging.
The most intimate condensation, however, is contained in the two WhatsApp status pictures. “Me 14:33”, “Me 14:38”. “Sharing his many words of wisdom…” – and below it my own sentence: “So true. I miss you, Jean, that has not changed in 2026 either.” Then once again the photo, and the sentence that says it all:
“RIP, dear Jean Rennette. My business partner, my mentor, my older twin. I will continue to fly straight to the moon like you, even when I haven’t even reached the top of the Eiffel Tower yet.”
The fact that Jean does not appear in the text as an acting figure, but as a narrated presence, is not a weakness, but a form. The barber is not the mentor; the barber is the medium. Jean is the mentor – and he appears, as many dead do: not as a body, but as a narrative.
In this way Jean becomes for me the bridge between beingloco and bestforming. He stands for the right to high spirits that do not destroy, but build; for the permission not to have to become “grown up” first in order to be serious; and for the proof that a person can be at once founder and father, impulse and obligation, stage and kitchen.
~~~
And because all four mentors are dead, the psychographic pressure of this section increases: The commission remains, but the authority is missing. The comfort remains, but the voice is no longer available. From this arises that mixture of gratitude and guilt, of permission and burden, which not only accompanies this work – and its creation – but drives it. I have to authorize myself because the authorities are missing. And I do it by transforming them into characters – not to hold on to them, but to be able to continue talking with them.
The fact that these four mentors are dead turns my dedication into a small realm of the dead at the entrance to the book. In “The Magic Mountain” the sanatorium is a place where time, illness and death are constantly present – even if one resists them with table manners, discussions and celebrations. In “Kaleidokosmos: Zauberberg, Sonnenalp und bestforming in Venedig” the Sonnenalp is the place where optimization masks the illness. My dedication, however, shows: Death is not masked. It is the silent background against which the sentence “finally satisfied with myself” can make sense at all.
And so the dedication and the reception hall motto form a double bracket: here the removed – or more precisely: vanished – lingering, there the absent mentors. In both cases something that could be reassuring is withdrawn. And it is precisely through this that the energy that carries this work arises: a restlessness that does not want to destroy, but must create.
Part 4 – The transformation of the mentors into novel characters
The mentors in my book are not only named; they are transformed. That is a crucial point, because transformation is one of the purest forms of literature: I do not simply say “That’s how it was”, I show “This is how it feels when it was like that”. And because I experience these four dead not as footnotes, but as inner instances, I had to bring them into the text in such a way that they can continue to have an effect in the novel: not as biographical evidence, but as principles that tip scenes, color tonalities, bend decisions.
~~~
Joachim (Goth) does not appear in my novel as a teacher figure with chalky fingers and class register; he appears as an attitude, namely as that rare attitude that does not confuse order with pressure. When I think of Joachim as a Latin and Greek teacher, I do not think first of vocabulary, but of an atmosphere: Latin “without pressure”, fairy tales from all over the world, an education that does not shackle, but opens. This experience is not stored in my novel as a “school scene”, but as a narrative technique: Suddenly there are stories that seem to have been brought along from a lesson, without playing lesson – chameleon at the mountain lake, donkey and tiger before the lion, little didactic pieces that are not lecturing, but comfort, warn, order without punishing. Joachim thus becomes for me in the novel the principle that one may say something serious without belittling the person who has to hear it.
And then there is the second, sharper transformation, which in writing itself seemed to me like a Mann-style punchline, because it is at once touching and unedifying: Joachim becomes literal, in that the moral “upright posture” becomes a physical one. In my dedication there is the sentence “to die standing”, and in the text Kautsonik appears, who wants to die standing, in the reception hall, on duty, as if remaining standing were the last dignified form of remaining. This is not a 1:1 transfer, esteemed female reader, esteemed reader; it is a translation. Joachim, who held me as a pupil and later as a friend, becomes the figure of holding in a hotel that lives from coming and going. Even the intimate experience of the advanced Greek course – two pupils, one teacher, no audience, only encounter – finds a quiet equivalent in the library and conversation rooms of my novel: places where it is not “the crowd” that decides, but the counterpart. And even our shared political idea – Platonic democracy, randomly drawn representatives – resonates as an undertone whenever I slide chance and order into one another: switching evening, threshold, System-2 ethics. Joachim is thus not only a figure behind my text; he is a grammar of my text: order as goodness.
~~~
Werner (Kieser) becomes the most visible figure in my novel because he could be condensed into an art figure – already in the name. Prof. Zieser is not Werner Kieser, and he is not Frank Zane; he is the literary fusion: body aesthetics and system ethics, stage and machine, discipline and elegance. Anyone who knew Werner also knows this special mixture of calm and persistence: the persistence that is not loud, but consistent. That is exactly what Zieser is in the world of the Sonnenalp: a man who explains training as if it were a silent law, and who thereby appears like a priest of modernity – not because he has pathos, but because he takes repetition seriously.
The fact that Werner always insisted on a distinction – equipment, not machines; they do nothing by themselves – is not mere pedantry in my novel, but metaphysics. The apparatuses are everywhere, yes; but without human action everything remains an empty backdrop. The cube, the GYMcube, is the spatially realized Kieser idea: small, clean, persistent, a structure that does not talk chaos away, but offers it a form in which one can act. And because Werner was never just “training” for me, but also an entrepreneurial mentor, franchising always resonates as a meta-craft in the Zieser complex: the idea that one can not only operate a system, but build systems.
The fact that I designed the GYMcube with Werner as a franchise shimmers through in the novel when the cube is not only a training room, but a production cell: a standardized ritual in the hotel operation – and thus at the same time an ironic reflection of my own method of producing the novel. And Werner’s most important sentence, which in my life serves as an antidote to impatience – “Be patient, dear Mr. Erhardt, you are still so young and still have so much time” – acts like an invisible stage direction behind Zieser’s didactic hardness: first the king sentence, then the backoffs; first the process, then the fantasy. Zieser is thus not only a training figure. He is the elevation into literature of the permission that patience is not giving up, but the only way to live long enough to create anything at all.
~~~
Ulrich (Borucki) is not “performed” as a person in my novel, but distributed as a functional trace – and it is precisely this distribution that is his most precise literary transformation. For Ulrich was biographically himself a person who mixed roles: dermatologist, nutritionist (Metabolic Balance), ADHD behavioral therapist, diagnostician from a chance acquaintance – and at the same time someone whose practice contained the ambivalence of modernity: help and billing, insight and blind spot, method and market. From such a figure you cannot make a “therapist in an armchair” in the novel without lying; so I had to write Ulrich into the text as a structure: as something that is at work everywhere without clearly showing itself.
One part of Ulrich lives in Dr. AuDHS: in the ability to see, to name, to translate; in the idea that language and systematics can be salvation because they transfer chaos into modules without betraying the human being. Another part lives in Dr. Porsche: in the medical aesthetics of optimization, in the proximity of necessity and offer, in that smooth professionalism that at the same time has a crack – because it knows that profit logic and promise of healing sometimes understand each other too well. The real doctor of my Sonnenalp is a different type; but in the world of the novel I needed this composite figure because I am describing precisely this present in which help and business, practice and market cannot be cleanly separated.
And then there is perhaps the most important Ulrich shadow, which gives my novel its truthfulness: the blind spot. Ulrich saw the ADHD, but not the autism; he helped me to “undock”, to feel boundaries, but he could not fully classify the whole. It is precisely from this that the basic tone arises in the text that not everything becomes healed “through method”, even if it cries out for method. The ring can provide values, the plan can provide rituals, the lecture can explain evolution – and yet there remains a zone in which meaning is not measurable. Ulrich thus becomes the invisible source of a novel sentence that never has to be spoken because it is at work everywhere: Everything is explainable, but not everything is edifying.
Jean (Rennette) is not introduced in my novel as an acting figure, but as a narrated presence – and that is crucial. For Jean is not the barber; the barber is the transmitter, the bearer of a voice that can no longer sit in the room, but can be heard in the room. Mentorship here therefore does not happen through “instruction”, but through narration: Someone tells of Jean, and through the telling Jean becomes effective again.
