The scene in the barber shop is more than a realistic intermezzo; it is a model. The barber briefly puts the scissors aside and says: “Olivia Garden”. Not like a brand name, but like a proper name. From the abbreviation “OG” a person, an origin, a myth is made. And then comes the sentence in which Jean and Micheline are posited as the origin: Jean (Rennette). Micheline. Always together. St. Tropez, before “this here” existed. A jetty, built with their own hands, for a water-ski school. Wigs at the beginning. 1967 the founding in Belgium. Small. Clean. Persistent. 1976 an invention – “no more aerosol” – and suddenly the company history takes on the tone of legend: the barber names Steve Jobs, as if every modern age needed its saint in order to understand what invention is.
What matters here is not whether every detail is objective; what matters is how it works. The barber tells it the way people tell things when they are not “reporting” but honoring. He searches for the word “reliable” and finds it. And thus Jean (Rennette) in the novel becomes exactly what he is in my life: a figure of reliability that is not stodgy; a figure of departure that does not boast; a figure of creation that does not display itself, but acts.
The fact that Gustav hears this story in the mirror and comments dryly – “From tent to world domination” – and that he recognizes Zieser in it, is the literary knot with which I pull Jean (Rennette) into the great machine hall of my novel. Suddenly Jean does not stand isolated as a private mentor on the sidelines, but as a resonating body next to Kieser and Zieser: entrepreneurship as legend, training as religion, invention as consolation. In this way Jean becomes the bridge between beingloco and bestforming, without my having to utter these words at all in the scene. For in the barber story there is both: the child on skis that cannot exist, and the company that turns persistence into world-class format.
And here lies at the same time the correction of an earlier misreading – and its rescue: in an old interpretation it seemed as if the barber himself were the mentor because he is the one who tells the story. In truth it is Jean (Rennette) who is the mentor – and the barber is the proof that mentorship continues even when the mentor is dead. Someone tells him. Someone carries him on. Thus the mentor who is missing is nonetheless present.
The fact that I recognize myself in images from Jean’s life as a twin by choice is, in the logic of my novel, not a subordinate clause but a key: I am not only looking for teachers, I am looking for kinship. Not blood kinship, but kinship of souls, kinship of function, kinship of rhythm. Joachim as substitute father of order. Borucki as the first who understood. Kieser as the law of repetition. Jean as the impulsive brother who flies straight to the moon. And in exactly this way – as a quartet movement – “four dead mentors” do not become a mere list of mourning, but a structure that carries my work: four voices that are missing, and four voices that continue to speak in the text because I have written them into it.
~~~
These transformations are psychographically significant: they show how I build myself support. Not by simply quoting mentors, but by transforming them into functions that can act in the novel. The dead person can then no longer contradict – but he can continue to have an effect as a figure principle. And precisely in this lies the duality that I constantly felt while writing: it is gratitude and burden at the same time.
Part 5 – The starting point: tone before action – and ethics in grammatical detail
In the workshop chronicle there is a fixed point that works like an ignition: T00 – Friday, 2 January 2026, 18:37. There “the man-machine starts up”: from a style dissection a project emerges that sets itself the task of a parallel to “The Magic Mountain” – later expanded through Tonio Kröger and Death in Venice as mirror and guiding star.
What is important is what appears at this point as a “small” decision and in retrospect proves to be a programmatic deviation: the switch to the form of address “esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader”.
This is not only political decency, not only a correction of a patriarchal tradition, but, literarily speaking, a signal: it is meant to sound like Mann – but it must not be Mann. The novel claims the right to imitation as a tool, but it asserts deviation as its program.
In the beginning the tone was “close to Mann” as an achievement of imitation. With the form of address it becomes “close to Mann” as a conscious choice – and thus as its own voice. The effect is subtle but fundamental: no longer does the narrator speak “from on high” into a male norm; he speaks into a present in which narration itself bears responsibility.
Part 6 – The week as production form: Tonio-creating, but in systems
The “Making of” speaks of “manic” – explicitly as a literary metaphor, not as a clinical attribution. And from this it draws a line that became particularly visible in this writing week: speed is possible when it runs on rails.
The author writes fast, but not chaotically. He writes fast because he builds himself order. Work plans, repeatable update rituals, standardized work instructions – all this becomes an external infrastructure on which an internal speed can run safely in the first place.
Here the biographical deep layer opens up without turning the text into diagnosis. 2003: cocaine-induced psychosis. Afterwards a false bipolar diagnosis. A medication-induced depression that ends after eight months through discontinuation on his own authority. Afterwards a paradoxically stable everyday life, continued cannabis use, the obligatory “staying” in the family business – and at the same time the inner “going” into his own projects.
This constellation explains the writing week in retrospect like a model: form stabilizes. Form is not only achievement, but rescue mechanism. The creative urge is not only ambition, but self-soothing through shape.
That is why bestforming in the novel is not lifestyle, but a cure form of the present that both consoles and tyrannizes. Anyone who knows the need for form out of necessity describes systems differently from someone who consumes them out of fashion.
Part 7 – Image work as world-building: why the Sonnenalp feels “real”
A decisive workshop factor was the image work. The Sonnenalp was not freely invented, but built from lines of sight: reception hall, chandelier, library above, music room, outdoor facilities. The place arises from concrete things that recur and soak up meaning.
This is Mann technique, modernized: leitmotifs are not just symbols, they are workhorses. They organize relationships and moral tensions.
The chandelier, for example, is explicitly named as a central object that tips from decor into eye: ornament becomes surveillance. And this logic runs through everything: the ring not only measures; it sees. The photo booth not only records; it makes visible. The cube (GYMcube) is not only a training room; it is confessional, cell, cabin – a modern lying hall in solitary confinement. The powders are not only nutritional supplements; they are ritualization of the day, substitute religion.
At first images were “adaptation”: rooms, light, lines of sight were supposed to fit. Later images became “motor”: the setting co-wrote because it supplied objects that could work. This shift is more than craft; it is psychology. Those who think in images build themselves a world in which objects feel by proxy.
Part 8 – The core of modernization: from sanatorium to optimization resort
“The Magic Mountain” had cure, lying hall, temperature curves. The “Kaleidokosmos-Sonnenalp” has ring, values, programs, Dr. Porsche as warm-professional doctor-manager with a crack, Zieser as ascetic priest of success, AuDHS as meta-interpreter.
This is the modernization axis: bestforming is transformed from a word into a cure form of the present.
Here one of the most important content movements becomes visible: the novel was saved from becoming pure self-improvement propaganda. The text is full of values, rituals, measurements – but its moral focus tilts at the end toward relationships: lilies, teamwork, removing leeches. The hidden punchline is: bestforming is only pleasant if it does not work against the lilies.
Esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, this is perhaps the decisive friction of this entire project: optimization without relationship is only order. Relationship without form is only intoxication. The novel attempts to force both into a tension-capable coexistence.
Part 9 – Characters as functions: the staff as inner conversation
The secondary characters are psychographically revealing because they are less “people” than “functions”. They are inner voices dressed in outer costumes.
This becomes particularly clear as soon as one knows the identity architecture behind the novel. Earlier the self-description was “Dr. ADHD”. In 2025 this becomes AuDHS: the simultaneity of ADHD and autism as a more precise version. And then the next reversal: Dr. AuDHS is not identity, but mask; the identity is Philipp Morgenstern.
This explains why the novel circles so persistently around masks, aliases, visibility and controlled truth: Hans lives with an alias. The photo booth and the masks work on the question of visibility. The ring as eye is the gaze of control.
When Dr. AuDHS can speak morally in the novel without exposing himself, this is not just a literary device. It is protection. And the crack in this figure – that it itself needs solutions, that it is not finished – is the honest leak in this protective architecture.
Morgenstern in turn is the relationship person who does not preach System 2 but lives it – with lilies and leeches. And the clarification is important: the leeches are people in the environment who exploit good-naturedness; the leeches on oneself are addressed through the five resolutions. This makes the figure more social and less moralistic: it is not about self-punishment, but about boundary work.
Tonio, Gustav, bezoo finally are the art and illness shadows that pull the novel into a second depth dimension. Tonio stands for creation as justification for existence. Gustav for generosity, play, the madness of the Mad Hatter, for money as medium of exchange. bezoo as an early synthesis figure of trickster, artist-ego and desired identity shows: today’s integration has a prehistory. The novel’s conversation with itself is older than this novel.
Part 10 – Chapter 9 as turning point: System 2 as ethics of time and relationship
A “Making of” becomes interesting when it does not pretend that everything was planned from the beginning. Here lies one of the clearest revisions: Chapter 9 was completely rebuilt as “Chapter 9: System 2”.
Hans in top form. Walk Hans–Morgenstern–AuDHS. The donkey fable. AuDHS orders donkey, tiger, lion. System 1 versus System 2, Kahneman as modern Naphta/Settembrini substitute. And then the relationship advice: focus on lilies, remove leeches.
Up to that point bestforming was above all cure. With Chapter 9 bestforming becomes method – not only for blood pressure, sleep and training, but for thinking and relationship. It is the point at which the novel dares openly not only to describe but to interpret: what is clever? What is dignified? Which conflicts are donkey conflicts? Why is it sometimes the most intelligent thing not to argue?
Psychographically this revision is no coincidence. It mirrors the self-description: happiness as euphoric hyperfocus – but the price of this euphoria is often getting sidetracked, wrong battles, too much energy on the thought highway. System 2 is the literary form of the wish not to lose hyperfocus, but to guide it.
And here, almost eerily, the circle closes back to the motto error: that error too arose from a quick conclusion. The later attribution of meaning was System 2. The novel teaches what it has done itself: recognize error, integrate meaning, not confuse myth with truth – and still be grateful for the productive power of the mistake.
