Hannes Stein

I was born in Munich, Germany, in 1965. Grew up in Salzburg, Austria, alas. As soon as I could I fled to Hamburg, where I studied English literature and some philosophy. In Hamburg I also met the great German singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann (look him up!), who became something like a mentor to me. In 1989 I went to Scotland where I became a very unsuccessful German teacher, which is why I missed the fall of the Berlin wall, which is a shame. At around the same time, I started working as a journalist. I have written for almost every major German publication – “Der Spiegel,” “Frankfurter Allgemeine,” you name it. I’ve now been with “Die Welt” (www.welt.de) for more than 18 years. A successful marriage of convenience.

In 1998, I wanted to be a good Zionist and become an Israeli. As you will find out, I was not entirely successful in this endeavor, but I did live in Jerusalem for two years and managed to learn Hebrew. I also understood the most important lesson the Middle East has to offer: real conflicts do not have a solution – they only have a history. After this little excursion, I lived in Berlin for seven years. Then, in 2007, fate intervened in the form of a green card (I won it in the lottery). So I packed two suitcases and moved from Berlin to New York City.

I had never written fiction before. I was much too awed by writers I admire – Nabokov, Cervantes, Thomas Mann, Grimmelshausen. (Not to mention Shakespeare and the authors of the Hebrew Bible.) But then an idea caught me in its clutches und dragged me from the bottom of reality: what if World War One had never happened? What if Auschwitz still were an insignificant town in Galicia and Lenin an unimportant journalist in Zurich? What if the Hapsburg Empire were still alive and kicking (or rather: half asleep and totally peaceful?). Thus “Der Komet” came into being, an alternate history novel set in a Vienna which – anno Domini 2000 – is still ruled by a good old “kaiser”. One English critic remarked that I had produced a narrative which “combines the best bits of Douglas Adams and Jules Verne with some good old-fashioned romance to produce a hugely entertaining book that deserves to be on everyone’s reading list”. “Der Komet” even was a commercial success. But the book never got translated. The Americans and the British hardly ever translate anything. Nebbich.

My next novel – “Nach uns die Pinguine” – is set on the Falkland Islands after World War Three. It is an old-fashioned mystery. The governor has been bludgeoned to death with a Churchill bust, and my sleuth – a Jewish boy from Brooklyn who converted to Mormonism and got stranded on the Falklands when the world came to an end – yes, it’s complicated – has to find the culprit. The novel has lots of theological overtones. It ends (I’m not giving away too much) with the arrival of the Messiah in a submarine. Again, the reception was quite friendly: one journalist called the book “very interesting and turbulent, very whimsical, very odd, witty and ironic”. And, needless to say, there was no English translation.

So now here is a novel which is somewhat different: very desperate and very hopeful, gloomy and full of light, a dark, dystopian vision which cannot quite decide whether it isn’t a rosy pipe dream after all. “The Splendid Cities”. The title comes from a verse in a prose-poem by Arthur Rimbaud: À l'aurore, armés d'une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides villes. And this time around, ladies and gentlemen, the book is in English.

Perhaps in a final flourish I should mention that I live in a beautifully boring part of the Bronx called Riverdale; that I’m married to the most wonderful woman in the world; and that we have a son called Yonatan whose first word was “elbow”. No dogs. No cats. No iguanas.