Part 11 – Industrialization of work: bestforming as a mode of production of the text itself
Another core of the writing week was the standardization of the production process. In the chronicle, the marker T26 stands for this: Production is transferred into repeatable work steps, the text is consolidated after each step, and for each chapter there are two passes: preparation and formulation, with no follow-up questions, no fraying.
This is not just organization. It is a literary mirroring of the material: The novel is about rituals, logbooks, measurements; and its production takes place in rituals, logbooks, measurements.
At the beginning, this way of working was a means of keeping the tone. In the production phase, it becomes a cure: The text comes into being because it submits to a system. Not in order to die creatively, but in order to remain creative.
Biographically, there is a model for this: In 2008, a structure was created in the family business that, with a few hours per week, makes “staying” possible – and thereby releases energy to “go” inwardly, to pursue projects, not to become impoverished. Exactly this structure returns here as a production principle: a minimum of friction so that the thrust is not lost.
Part 12 – The third thrust: The novel descends
A fixed point marks the moment when the text visibly descends: T31 – Tuesday, January 6, 2026, 8:30 p.m. Away from the mountain as a protective space, toward the world. In the final structure, this later becomes the south/Venice axis of the last chapters.
This is a movement in content – and an existential one. The Magic Mountain impulse (time as a problem) is modernized through tracking, programs, lifetime optimization; but behind the optimizing lies a serious sense of time: the inkling that finiteness cannot be optimized away.
With the biographical context, it becomes clear: This finiteness is not abstract. It has a concrete form: psychological derailment, external diagnosis, medicated depression, familial pressure for order – and then the decision to live anyway, to consume anyway, to work anyway, to create anyway.
In the novel, Venice does not become redemption, but an intensification of the problem. “Best form is of no use against inner noise” is, in essence, the intended punchline. Psychographically, this is compelling: Those who build optimization often build it in order to have peace – and then discover that peace cannot be produced when beauty, relationship, and guilt enter the room.
Part 13 – Revisions as dramaturgy: Five reconstructions, one shift in meaning
A writing week does not only leave behind pages, it leaves behind decisions. Some of them are so strong that they shift the meaning of the entire project.
First, the change of address to “esteemed reader (female), esteemed reader (male)”: ethics as a detail of grammar.
Second, the reforming of chapter 8 into the great speech: not lecture text, but novel speech in the room, essay as scene. “Our dilemma, our evolution and bestforming” thereby becomes a modern Settembrini form, but without the old arrogance.
Third, the new creation of chapter 9 as a System 2 turning point.
Fourth, the reorganization of the overall structure after this turning point and the transfer of production into a strictly repeatable double procedure.
Fifth, the paratext: prologue and epilogue in the first person and this “making of” as a second level. As a result, the book is retrospectively reframed: It is no longer just “Hans Castorp on the Sonnenalp”, but also “Benjamin Erhardt writes himself free” – and admits it.
All these reconstructions show a pattern: The author does not write only in order to tell a story. He writes in order to find a form in which he can take responsibility. That is precisely why he must remain capable of revision. Those who do not revise remain stuck in error or in myth. Those who revise, integrate.
Part 14 – Completion and aftershocks: From “I write” to “I am”
One could end this “making of” with a single line: “Completion including layout on Friday, January 9, 2026 at 1:27 p.m.” One could pretend that the end of production is also the end of the story.
But completion is not only the end of a text. It is a psychological state that ends abruptly: the Tonio thrust, the production machine, the hyperfocus – everything that carried through the week falls away as soon as “finished” appears. And then the question arises that comes after every major work, but is particularly sharp here because the work has been autobiographically crafted in mask form: Who are you when you are not currently writing?
At this point, a “making of” becomes a psychographic key: The novel is an attempt at integration. Not as therapy, but as an artistic device. It builds a hotel as a stage in order to seat parts at a table on this stage: the creator (Tonio), the crazily generous one (Gustav), the systems thinker (AuDHS), the relationship person (Morgenstern), the one who stays and goes (Hans), and bezoo as an early synthesis figure of trickster, artist, and desired identity.
If you take that seriously, then completion is not just layout. It is the shift from “I write” to “I am”. And that is – to stay in this vocabulary – another form of bestforming: no longer optimization, but self-care and reflection as a transitional state that is repeatable.
Part 15 – Why this report is more than a workshop: shifts in meaning instead of a collection of events
Esteemed reader (female), esteemed reader (male), the interesting thing about a “making of” is rarely that “a lot has happened”. The interesting thing is that the meaning shifts.
At the beginning, the focus was mainly on the axis: Mann-technology, Sonnenalp setting, bestforming as a modern cure.
In the course of events, it becomes clear: The novel was also identity work. Away from a pure system figure (“AuDHS as identity”) toward a person who allows herself to acknowledge relationship as the main driver without devaluing creation. And it was an attempt to counteract an old threat – recognition only for performance – with a work of one’s own that is worthy. “Now I am also satisfied with myself” is, in this light, not a literary effect, but a result.
This makes the report more than a description of production. It shows how a novel is built as a machine – and how this machine at the same time newly describes the author.
Outlook – More Kaleidokosmos and, in the end, a psychographic biography between beingloco and bestforming
This “making of” could end at the time stamp. In reality, it does not end there – but not only because a book has aftereffects, but because at this point I have to correct an error in thinking that too easily creeps in if you look only at the first volume: “Kaleidokosmos” is not this one novel.
If you look at it from the perspective of the universe, the Kaleidokosmos is the galaxy in which my fictional world spins away from me: its own space with its own rules, its own gravitation, its own timekeeping – and with its own repetitions that behave like leitmotifs. “Kaleidokosmos: The Magic Mountain, Sonnenalp and bestforming in Venice” is, in this logic, not the Kaleidokosmos, but a planet, perhaps the first that is visibly inhabited: a volume, an orbit, a beginning that already shows how this galaxy works.
Alongside it, there are other galaxies. The most important is that of my reality – the Benny galaxy, named after the nickname my wife uses, basically my “real” name. And as in any serious model, it is not the case that these galaxies are hermetically separated. There are overlaps, transition nebulae, shared matter. My start-ups belong to both for me: to reality, because there they have money, responsibility, deadlines, risks – and to the Kaleidokosmos, because there they appear as character material, as system metaphors, as questions of ethics and style. Conversely, this novel is quite clearly Kaleidokosmos galaxy – even if it knows the Benny galaxy completely, as if it had mapped it in order to be able to push itself away from it consciously.
In this sense, the time stamp of January 9, 2026 at 1:27 p.m. is not only the end of a writing week, but the moment when a cosmos confirms that it is viable. And that is precisely why, literarily, after “The Magic Mountain, Sonnenalp and bestforming in Venice” it does not simply continue – it continues in the Kaleidokosmos.
This is not a vague declaration of intent, but already material: For my second novel, a finished manuscript already exists: “Kaleidokosmos: The Brothers Morgenstern”. “Morgenstern” is actually my mother’s name, and the “brothers” are my grandfather Gerhard – that is, my mother’s father – and his brother Siegfried, called Friedel Morgenstern. I wrote this manuscript on my honeymoon with my wife in 2015. It is there – but, like much that arises in beingloco, it has not yet been transferred into its final form. That is exactly the next step: finally formulating it fully, not out of nostalgia, but because this family material has its own gravitation in the Kaleidokosmos galaxy.
After that comes “Kaleidokosmos: The Robbers” – as a new version of the novel that I published under a pseudonym in 2008. I do not want to simply “revise” this text, but to bring it back into the Kaleidokosmos: to give it a new language that is compatible with the tone of this galaxy, and at the same time to take away the shame that sometimes surrounds old texts simply because one has since become different.
After that comes “Kaleidokosmos: Confessions of the Great-Grandson of the Impostor Felix Krull”. With this fourth novel, I will then temporarily conclude my Thomas Mann phase – not as a turning away, but as the conscious end of a literary orbit: I take the closeness as long as it is productive, and I end it before it becomes a pose.
Only after that – and this is the new, clean order – comes the next publication, which no longer takes place in the Kaleidokosmos galaxy, but in the Benny galaxy and in its overlaps: the psychographic biography. Its title will be:
“Being bezoo, Dr. AuDHS, Philipp Morgenstern, Tonio Kröger, Gustav von A. and I: A psychographic halftime biography”
This book will not pretend that there is only one narrator figure called “Benjamin Erhardt”. It will call my inner cast by name – not as a masquerade, but as a functional doctrine of my own life: bezoo as an early laboratory, Dr. AuDHS as translator of the systems, Philipp Morgenstern as border worker, Tonio Kröger as creative engine, Gustav von A. as aesthetic pull – and I as the one who mediates between them, as long as I do not accidentally take myself for one of these roles again.
On January 9, 2026 at 1:27 p.m., a novel was finished. But the Kaleidokosmos was not thereby “completed”, but opened. And the material that was exposed in this week – home, error, guilt, masks, creation, mentors, start-ups as transitional objects, and the question of how one can go and stay without losing oneself – did not stop. It only began to show itself as a form of life and as a form of work.
