How I wrote my novel “Kaleidokosmos: Zauberberg, Sonnenalp und bestforming in Venedig” in a single writing week between Sonnenalp, four mentors, bestforming and beingloco.
Intro
In the end there is a time stamp that looks as unspectacular as all endings look that one had previously imagined as more dramatic: Friday, January 9, 2026, 1:27 p.m. – “Completion including layout”. That is the kind of ending that suits a work which has spent so long dealing with transitions, thresholds, calendar boundaries and the “out of order” almost cynically well: no explosion, no apotheosis, no fireworks – but a quiet click in a file, a final formatting, a last line that no longer moves.
Yet the title of this report claims something that is more than statistics, and that therefore has to be spoken before it is forgotten: 6 days, 18h and 50min. That is not the pretty exaggeration of a legend, but the actual duration between the moment when the “Mann-machine” started up and the moment when it came to a halt. The starting point was Friday, January 2, 2026, 6:37 p.m. From there to Friday, January 9, 2026, 6:37 p.m. would have been exactly seven days. But the end did not fall at 6:37 p.m., but at 1:27 p.m. – that is, 5 hours and 10 minutes earlier. Seven days minus 5:10, and the writing week shrinks to what the title says: 6 days, 18 hours and 50 minutes.
This number, esteemed reader, dear reader, is not an athletic record to pin to one’s chest. It is the measure of a state. It is Tonio-creation in calendar form: a brief span of time in which I do not write “now and then”, but in which writing becomes a way of life, a cure, a form of self-organization, an attempt to create through speed an order that otherwise does not arise. The fact that the novel itself deals with bestforming, rituals, metrics and logbooks is more than a choice of subject; it is a mirroring. The text is created in a mode of production that resembles the text: time is not experienced, it is measured; the end is not redemption, but proof that form has been found.
And yet this stamp – 1:27 p.m. – is not mere administration. It is a motif. It is the modern variant of the “ending” that Thomas Mann sometimes grants his great machine: not as peace, but as evidence that something could be closed. And because “Kaleidokosmos: Zauberberg, Sonnenalp und bestforming in Venedig” never wanted to be just a novel, but at the same time self-observation, stylistic experiment, declaration of affection and – yes – a politely disguised self-exposure, the span of 6 days, 18 hours and 50 minutes becomes the pivot of a report that is more than a production note. It becomes the trace of an inner process.
Esteemed reader, dear reader, this is the decisive premise of this “making of”: It does not only describe how a text came into being. It describes why it had to come into being in this way – in this density, in this brevity, in this almost impertinent week – in order to relieve, order, stir me up in a certain way and – in the best case – integrate me.
Before Part 1 –
I recommend the “Sonnenalp” (and “the recommendation is the gentlest form of command”)
Esteemed reader, dear reader (here you may take this form of address literally for once),
I recommend to you – I recommend to you – the Sonnenalp.
And I do not mean this as a hotel review, not as a travel guide, not as what people today call a “tip”, but as a recommendation in the old sense: as the handing over of a place that does more than one is entitled to expect from a place. For me the Sonnenalp is not just a building, not just an address, not just a place where one arrives and departs again. It has become a second home to me, a “room on the inside” that I enter as soon as I walk through its doors.
That is something that is hardly possible to describe without becoming kitschy. One then tries it with things: with light falling on wood; with scents that are so unobtrusive that only in retrospect do they feel like a hand; with the sound of footsteps on a floor that does not sound like a street, but like indoors. One tries it with sightlines: the chandelier in the hall like a black sun; the library above it, as if thinking itself were housed one floor higher; the music room as an assertion that culture is not just decor. And one tries it, if one is honest, with a sentence.
“Recommendation” is a tricky word. It sounds friendly, but it has an edge. It pretends to be non-binding and is yet a form of influence. Whoever recommends takes the right to talk into other people’s decisions – with a smile that considers itself harmless. That is why it is good to recall at this point one of my own sentences, which I later put into my novel’s mouth: the recommendation is the gentlest form of command.
For that is exactly how the Sonnenalp works. Not as coercion, not as drill, not as hard rule, but as a system of gentle commands: It recommends rest. It recommends order. It recommends not taking the noise of the valley below seriously for a while. It recommends taking oneself seriously – not in a vain way, but in a cautious one. And it recommends that one may linger here without having to apologize.
What I am actually recommending to you – to you – is not “a weekend”. It is an experience of lingering that has become rare in my world: a peace that does not have to be earned and that does not immediately tip back into a task. And that is precisely why this recommendation is ambivalent. For whoever finds a place that calms them will be tempted to use it. And whoever writes uses places.
So I also recommend the Sonnenalp in a second, more dangerous sense: as a workshop. As a stage. As the kind of second home that makes it possible in the first place to look at the first home – one’s own inner restlessness – without immediately drowning in it. When I say I recommend the Sonnenalp, I am also saying: Here I found the calm I needed in order to write a work that had to take that calm away from the text.
And with that, esteemed reader, dear reader, we are already in the middle of the irony that Thomas Mann would have liked: that a recommendation intended to give peace ultimately becomes a command to literature. For I can recommend the Sonnenalp to you – but I cannot recommend to you what it might do to you if you are an artist, an author or the little mouse Frederick.
Part 1 –
The actual raw material: a place that calms – and therefore must be literarily disfigured
This “making of” does not begin with plot, but with a sentence on a wall.
For what sets the novel in motion is – soberly considered – a contradiction: In the prologue the Sonnenalp is explicitly “second home”, a “room on the inside”, a place of return, of permission, of being held. Precisely for that reason, esteemed reader, dear reader (here I ask you for the second and last time to take this form of address literally), it is so dangerous as material: Whoever really knows a place, whoever is not just a guest there but a returnee, possesses it inwardly – and at the same time is possessed by it. And possession creates responsibility.
Literature, however, if it is to smell of Thomas Mann, does not create responsibility but tension: guilt, displacement, unrest, “unwholesome” in the sense of: it is not comfortable, it stays with you.
This tension – home as reassurance, literature as disturbance – is named in workshop thinking as the core thesis: The author needs peace as a place, but he needs unrest as literature. That is why the real, peaceful, “lingering” Sonnenalp is rebuilt in the fiction into a stage of the threshold: reception desk, chandelier, rituals, programs, metrics, cube cabins, a ring that sees – and above all: a saying that no longer calms the place, but drives it.
This is the first great artistic device – and at the same time the first major biographical hint: Whoever works like this is not working on just any material. I am working on a material that calms me – and I take this calm away from it so that I can write.
Part 2 – The motto error as a larger door: How a photo invented the motto
The second artistic device is an omission – but in its genesis it is not an artistic device in the classical sense, but a process.
In the real Sonnenalp the saying in the reception hall is: “Joy to him who comes. Peace to him who stays. Blessing to him who goes.” Three lines, three states, a small ethic of hospitality. Arrival as joy. Staying as peace. Leaving as blessing.
In the novel, however, it is shortened and shifted: “Joy to him who comes. Joy to him who goes.”
The effect of this shortening is enormous, and it was – this is the real punchline – not initially intention but error. The formula arose because a photo only showed fragments: enough to read “Joy to him who com…”; enough to guess a middle line as “Peace to him w…”; and enough to see at the bottom “…to him who…”, without the decisive term. From this fragment it was quickly concluded that the repetition “Joy” must be conceptual, a symmetrical framing of coming and going.
Thus the motto wrote itself into the text – not as a conscious aesthetic decision by the author, but as an automatic, plausible conclusion from incomplete data. A System 1 moment, one might later say: fast, elegant, wrong – and precisely thereby productive.
Only afterwards did what Thomas Mann would have particularly liked happen: the subsequent attribution of meaning. As soon as the formula was in the novel, it began to work. It became leitmotif, moral knife, ironic motor. The impression arose that the omission was a deliberate “withholding” of peace: as if the author wanted to deprive his second home of the calming middle part in order to force a Mann-like unrest.
This later interpretation is not a lie – it is only temporally wrong. It does not describe the origin, but the result: For even if the omission was not planned, once it was there it was accepted, expanded, defended, mythologized. The error co-wrote – and the work later pretended it had been intentional. Exactly this chain, esteemed reader, dear reader, is Mannian irony in pure form: The work claims control where there was chance; it generates meaning by treating contingency afterwards as necessity. Art arises not only from will, but from what eludes the will and then has to be integrated.
And now comes the second chance punchline that comically marks modernity: that the real saying reads “Blessing to him who goes”. This word could hardly have remained in the novel. Not because the author considers religion “bad”, but because the novel’s world – optimization programs, tracking, resort aesthetics, secular health cult – no longer carries the vocabulary of blessing. “Blessing” sounds like church; the novel works with metrics, not sacraments. “Joy”, on the other hand, sounds like brand, like offer, like event: exactly the semantic surface in which a modern optimization resort morally disguises itself.
Thus a reading error becomes a stylistic law. A fragment becomes an ethic. A wrong repetition becomes a correct novel script.
And if one takes this chain seriously, then the saying is not just decor. It is the program that repaints the place from within: The real home says arrival – staying – leaving. The novel says arrival – leaving. Staying is not celebrated, but made into a problem. Not because the author consciously planned it that way, but because the error offered him the harder, more productive formula – and he accepted it in the logic of creation.
Here the deep, almost uncanny fit with Mann becomes apparent: The “Zauberberg” too is full of poetic liberties, date punchlines, self-commentary. And there too the seemingly accidental is often the place where the text shows its real necessity.
Part 3 – Four mentors – four functions – four deaths
If one reads “Kaleidokosmos: Zauberberg, Sonnenalp und bestforming in Venedig” as the product of a writing week, one easily overlooks that in truth it comes from decades – and that these decades consist not only of projects and systems, but of people.
The dedication is the place where these people do not appear as characters, but as source: as authority, as counterpart, as standard. It is thus less ornament than threshold. Before the actual narrative begins it says: Here not only invention takes place, here a report is given – about an inner result.
Four mentors stand there, and all four are dead. All four were considerably older. All four, from the distance of death, give a form of commission, protection and burden. And precisely this constellation changes the entire temperature of this work: It is not only about optimization, but about a kind of belated answer.
~~~
Joachim (Goth)
Joachim (Goth) is the first name, and if I want to understand why in my dedication he does not sound like a “thank you” but like a foundation, I have to go very far back: to the moment when I moved from primary school to the Karls-Gymnasium in Stuttgart – as the only one from my class, because only there did the humanistic Gymnasium exist. That is one of those inconspicuous biographical miniatures in which entire mechanisms later show themselves: a person falls out of a familiar system, not dramatically, but lonely; and then he meets someone who does not save by explaining, but by allowing.
Joachim was my Latin teacher in fifth grade, and he taught Latin without pressure – in such a way that it did not degenerate into a compulsory exercise, but remained interesting throughout all the years. He read us fairy tales from all over the world; that was not “material”, that was opening the world. I did not sit in this class only as a pupil, but as someone who – without knowing it at the time – was gathering an experience that would later recur in my texts: that education is not primarily a program, but an atmosphere in which one is not made smaller.
In twelfth and thirteenth grade this teacher then became a person: advanced Greek course, two pupils, Joachim and me – a relationship that is no longer called “class”, but encounter. After school the contact did not break off, but became a lifelong friendship that also included his wife and his 3 children and that did not end with Joachim’s death; the connection continues as if death were not a break, but a changed form of closeness.
Added to this – as an almost comical, almost touching proof of how serious this relationship was – was a shared idea that rarely occurs in normal acquaintances: the idea of a Platonic democracy with randomly chosen representatives of the people. Joachim was intellectually formative for me; above all, however, he was insanely kind: He let me be as I am, supported me, never disappointed me, was reliable and dear.
In this quartet Joachim is the mentor who does not drive, but holds. And precisely because he is dead, this holding gesture retrospectively acts like a commission: That is how it should have been; that is how it can be; that is how it must be again – if happiness is understood not only as thrust but as relationship.
~~~
Werner (Kieser)
Werner (Kieser) is the second name, and he stands for a mentorship of a completely different kind: not as surrogate father, not as teacher of language, but as someone who recognized me in the world of method and structure – and thereby gave me a form of external legitimation that I had hardly known until then.
The fact that our encounter began with an interview is telling. I asked, Werner agreed, and already in the video conference it was immediately clear that he liked me. This conversation lasted over three hours – not as a duty appointment, but as a resonance space. Afterwards came emails, regular exchange, and finally a joint project: the GYMcube as a franchise, designed in a collaboration that went far beyond business.
Werner sent me his book on franchising for SMEs personally; and at this point this mentorship became almost physically tangible: The handwritten note with “Best regards, Werner Kieser” still hangs on my wall like a small relic. Whoever lives in a restlessness that constantly wants to start anew sometimes clings to a piece of paper in order to fix a relationship that does not consist of blood, but of recognition.
For me Werner was the mentor type “structure as dignity”: less impulsive, less airborne, more repetition, more quiet law – and thus a counter-image to what so readily overruns itself in me. At the same time he was astonishingly bold in his recognition: He would have built with me a personal training concept that could have stood in direct competition to Kieser Training; financially it would have been irrelevant to him, but symbolically it was enormous because he considered my approach the better training.
And he insisted on precision: equipment, not machines – they do nothing by themselves. In this pedantic correction lies an ethic: It is not the system that does it, but the human being. His death in 2021 cut off this project before the first visible success appeared. And yet it is precisely this interruption that makes Werner so effective for me: He left an open loop that acts not as frustration, but as a door to the future.
I am taking up this franchise again today – now from a state of contentment – and, following Werner’s methodology, I am setting about building a modern, digitalized structure for managing franchise companies together with AI.
But the decisive sentence that makes Werner in my life a kind of inner antidote is his last piece of advice, given in a moment of my impatience:
“Be patient, dear Mr. Erhardt, you are still so young and have so much time ahead of you.”
I was 41 at the time. I have finally understood that. And if one takes that seriously, then Werner is not only a mentor of my projects, but a mentor of my time.
~~~
Ulrich (Borucki)
Ulrich (Borucki) is the third name, and – like Werner – he is a mentor whom I do not remember as a pure figure of warmth, but as an ambivalent, yet indispensable intervention in my way of life.
Even the entrance door is typical of this modernity in which roles are not cleanly separated: Ulrich is a dermatologist, but I did not meet him as a skin doctor, but as a nutritionist for a concept called “Metabolic Balance”. In this setting Ulrich immediately recognized ADHD – not as a fashionable label, but as a diagnostic glance: as someone who saw something others did not see.
I met Ulrich in 2010; in 2015, when I was “doing” the startup AGILEMENT, my behavioral therapy with him was completed in the sense in which I understood my progress at the time. These five years were not a closed block of therapy, but a laboratory. Ulrich taught me not only techniques, but above all not to “dock” onto other people – and thus the first step towards my own needs, boundaries and relationship.
And yet Ulrich remained ambivalent. For years he billed dermatological treatments because he did not officially conduct the ADHD behavioral therapy. That was good on the one hand, because it took place at all; on the other hand it was bad, because classification, control and a larger framework were lacking. He did not classify many things correctly; I did not understand the big picture.
Above all: Ulrich did not see the autism. And so, after all the progress, a residue of foreignness remained that could not be explained by “that’s just how ADHD is” – because even compared to other people with ADHD, including my wife, I always experienced myself as different. This blind spot is not incidental. It is the reason why method eventually reaches its limit.
Ulrich helped me with many things – AGILEMENT is a direct result here – but he could not heal everything that cried out for healing, because not everything is method that cries out for method. Added to this is a second, unpleasant note of modernity: In his medical approach – not in his character – Ulrich carried something of that approach that in the novel is attributed to Dr. Porsche: profit logic before medical necessity.
And finally the temperature of grief also belongs here. Ulrich – like Werner – occupies a different position than Joachim and Jean. I say openly that his death did not affect me with the same depth. He remains indispensable nonetheless: as the first who understood – and who at the same time showed me that understanding is not identical with completeness.
~~~
Jean (Rennette)
As the fourth mentor Jean (Rennette) is the one who appears least “by the book” – and precisely for that reason one of the clearest figures in my psychographic tableau.
Joachim Goth can be called the good teacher and surrogate father: the order that does not shackle, but holds. Ulrich Borucki was the first who understood – not only in diagnosis, but in practice. Werner Kieser is the mentor type “structure as dignity”: less impulsive, less airborne, more repetition, more quiet law.
Jean, however, is the exceptional figure, esteemed reader, dear reader: mentor as elective affinity, as elective twin, as energy that does not order, but ignites. The fact that I recognize myself in the pictures from Jean’s life as his elective twin is not mere sentiment; it is a precise self-description of my closeness to a principle. Jean stands for “I do it because it does not yet exist” – and thus for a form of creation that does not ask for permission.
The pictures are not decoration in this sense, but evidence of a mentorship that consists of action. There is the photo with the line:
“At 18 months, Jean teaches Pierre to ski. He made the skis because they didn’t exist that small!”
The sentence is so casual that it almost sounds like a joke; and yet it contains an entire relationship to the world that I immediately recognized as related to mine: If what is necessary does not exist, you build it. If the world is too big, you make it smaller.
Another picture bears the laconic sentence: “Removing his cast with lobster scissors”. Not just cutting off the cast himself with any scissors, no, with lobster scissors. That is Jean in pure form – improvisation as care, beingloco as service to the concrete. If something has to go, you find a means. If you have no means, you invent one. And in this I recognize not only the mentor, but the brother in impulse: this quick trust that the world is repairable if you just touch it.
Then the sentences “Always teaching…” and “Always staying busy…” – and those pictures in which Jean works with children, kneels, gardens, builds. Busy not against the world, but for it. They are scenes that, precisely in their unspectacular nature, show the core of mentorship: not the grand lecture, but the repeated gesture in which a child – and I – learns that things are allowed to be made.
And then the quieter pictures in which closeness and work do not appear as opponents. Jean on the phone, a child leaning against him, asleep. Jean on the couch, laptop open, a toddler beside him. Jean at the table, paper, computer, pen; two children writing along. As I look at these pictures, I realize why they affect me so much: They show a way of life in which work is not played off against relationship, but fits into it.
There is the picture 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 male readers. I am convinced that Thomas Mann would do no differently in 2025.
And over the years more and more: Jean as public figure, founder, mentor – and I beside him, not as spectator, but as participant. In the photo of the OG 50-year celebration my arm rests on Jean’s arm. No pose, no clamp. Belonging.
The most intimate condensation, however, lies in the two WhatsApp status pictures. “Me 14:33”, “Me 14:38”. “Sharing his many words of wisdom…” – and beneath 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 have not even reached the top of the Eiffel Tower.”
The fact that Jean does not appear in the text as an acting character, but as narrated presence, is not a weakness but 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 body, but as narrative.
Thus Jean becomes for me the bridge between beingloco and bestforming. He stands for the right to exuberance that does not destroy, but builds; for the permission not to have to “grow up” first in order to be serious; and for the proof that a person can be founder and father, impulse and obligation, stage and kitchen at the same time.
~~~
And because all four mentors are dead, the psychographic pressure of this section intensifies: 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 that not only accompanies this work – and its creation – but drives it. I have to authorize myself because the authorities are missing. And I do so by turning 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 makes my dedication a small realm of the dead at the entrance to the book. In the “Zauberberg” the sanatorium is a place where time, illness and death are constantly present – even if one resists them with table manners, discussions and festivities. 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 content with myself” makes sense at all.
And so dedication and 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 reassure is withdrawn. And it is precisely thereby that the energy arises that carries this work: 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. This is a crucial point, because transformation is one of the purest forms of literature: I do not simply say “That is 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 tilt scenes, color tones, 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. In my novel this experience is not stored as a “school scene”, but as narrative technique: Suddenly there are stories that seem to have been brought along from a class without playing class – chameleon at the mountain lake, donkey and tiger before the lion, small didactic pieces that are not lecturing, but comfort, warn, order without punishing. For me Joachim becomes 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 that, even as I was writing, struck me as a Mannian punchline because it is at once touching and unwholesome: Joachim becomes literal in that a moral “upright posture” becomes a physical one. In my dedication stands 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 staying. That is not a 1:1 transfer, esteemed reader, dear 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 not “the crowd” decides, but the counterpart. And even our shared political idea – Platonic democracy, randomly drawn representatives – resonates as an undertone whenever I interweave chance and order: switching evening, threshold, System 2 ethic. Joachim is thus not only a figure behind my text; he is a grammar of my text: order as kindness.
~~~
Werner (Kieser) becomes the most visible figure in my novel because he could be condensed into an artistic 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. Whoever knew Werner also knows this special mixture of calm and persistence: the insistence 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 quiet 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 empty scenery. 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 entrepreneurial mentor, franchising as meta-craft always resonates 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 mode of producing the novel. And Werner’s most important sentence, which in my life serves as a counter-agent to impatience – “Be patient, dear Mr. Erhardt, you are still so young and have so much time ahead of you” – acts like an invisible stage direction behind Zieser’s didactic severity: first the king sentence, then the backoffs; first the process, then the fantasy. Zieser is thus not only a training figure. He is the literary elevation 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 biographically Ulrich himself was a person who mixed roles: dermatologist, nutritionist (Metabolic Balance), ADHD behavioral therapist, diagnostician from a chance encounter – 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 one 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 works 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 convert 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 get along too well. The real doctor of my Sonnenalp is a different type; but in the novel’s world 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 that 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. From this arises in the text the basic tone that not everything becomes “healed by method”, even if it cries out for method. The ring can deliver values, the plan can deliver rituals, the lecture can explain evolution – and yet a zone remains 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 effective everywhere: Everything is explainable, but not everything is wholesome.
~~~
Jean (Rennette) is not introduced in my novel as an acting character, but as 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 does not take place through “instruction”, but through narration: Someone tells of Jean, and through the telling Jean becomes effective again.
The scene in the barber shop is more than a realistic interlude; it is a model. The barber briefly puts down the scissors 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 set as
