Simon Strauss turned 17 the year Angela Merkel won her first election and has known no other German leader in his adult life. But there is little of his chancellor’s famous pragmatism in the debut novel that set the literary world alight this year.



Strauss’s Sieben Nächte (Seven Nights), which has caused the Tagesspiegel newspaper to hail the 28-year-old as “one of the greatest talents of his generation”, tells the story of a protagonist who has grown tired of rational consensus-seeking and embarks on a quest to experience the seven cardinal sins on seven consecutive nights.

Sieben Nächte by Simon Strauss. Tagesspiel newspaper hailed the author as ‘one of the greatest talents of his generation’. Photograph: Aufbau veralg

“Compromises compromise – they weaken your handshake,” says the narrator as he sets forth into the night. “The only desire that counts is that for a beating heart.”

Strauss is the most prominent member of the “Merkel generation” engaged in a controversial revival of romanticism, the creative artistic movement of such painters as Caspar David Friedrich, writers like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel, which put German culture on the world map in the late 18th century but played an equally important role in its darker chapters.

“After the steely ideologies of the 20th century and the fidgetiness of postmodernism, it is not just a new generation that is looking for identity,” wrote a conservative commentator, Wolfram Weiler. “Strauss offers us a signpost where it could be found … in the blue flower, a neo-romantic longing for better understanding.”

In a manifesto published by a small Berlin publishing house, Korbinian, earlier this year, a young author, Leonhard Hieronymi, announced the dawn of “ultra-romanticism” in German literature, declaring an end to the “unofficial ban on ecstatic feeling” and calling on his fellow writers to create a “Romantic variation of cyberpunk” inspired by Blade Runner, ET and the films of Werner Herzog.

A still from the 1982 film Blade Runner, with Daryl Hannah and Harrison Ford. Photograph: www.ronaldgrantarchive.com

Germany’s new Romantics have found their intellectual lodestar in the Korean-born philosopher Byung-Chul Han, whose series of talks on romanticism at Berlin’s University of the Arts last year saw prominent artists, architects and novelists jostling with undergraduates for floor space in packed lecture theatres.

Han has championed the Romantic cult of the broken heart as a symbol of resistance against what he sees as a modern cult of “smoothness”, spanning iPhone design via Brazilian waxing to the “Teflon chancellor” Merkel.

“To me, the Romantic world of [German poet Friedrich] Hölderlin is the world of the future,” said Han, whose lectures also featured lengthy playbacks of Schubert’s Winterreise cycle.

Germany’s relationship with the Romantics remains an ambiguous affair, however. For its rich legacy in music, painting and poetry, many Germans remember how easily the movement’s obsession with nature, folklore and purity were absorbed by National Socialism, a movement that the novelist Thomas Mann described as “Romantic barbarism”.

Winter Landscape, c 1811, by Caspar David Friedrich, one of the key figures of late 18th-century German romanticism. Photograph: © The National Gallery, London

At Germany’s federal elections in September, more first-time voters cast their ballot for Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union than any other party. But the latest batch of neo-Romantic manifestos suggest a less liberal-leaning youth than the statistics imply.

Hieronymi’s ultra-romantic manifesto rails against “impostors” for whom their “homeland is a grave to be urinated upon”, while Strauss prophesies that “strangers” are “a danger for all those who believe that their life will continue as it did until now”, even though he remains ambiguous whether that could also be a positive.

Praise for Strauss’s debut has been countered by scepticism. Few critics have declined to mention Strauss’s controversial father Botho, himself a leading novelist and playwright who has equated the refugee crisis with the decline of Germany’s intellectual tradition.

In a column in Die Zeit, German Jewish writer Maxim Biller went as far as hinting at a fascist dimension in Seven Nights’ imagery, saying that the book reminded him more of the arguably Hitler-sympathising Scouts movement founder Robert Baden-Powell than poets such as Rainer Maria Rilke.

Protesters in Berlin demonstrate against the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party becoming part of the Bundestag for the first time. Photograph: Axel Schmidt/Reuters

“In Germany, we have a tendency to focus on romanticism’s perversion rather than its original promise,” replied Strauss when confronted with the criticism. “But there was something powerful in the Romantic movement’s origins: an attempt to explore humanity in its inner form, to search inside ourselves for hidden currents. It was a rejection of uptightness and Biedermeier conformity.”

“Romanticism should be like religion in that way: an individual affair, rather than the opium for the masses it became under National Socialism.”

Strauss was approached to write his book after he wrote an article headlined “I yearn for more quarrels” in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, where he works as a theatre critic.

Tom Müller, an editor at the traditionally left-leaning publishing house Aufbau, challenged Strauss to write his book about the seven sins in just seven nights.

“We wanted immediacy, we wanted it to be raw, we wanted it to carry all virtues and flaws of youth, the lack of moderation, and we wanted paradox and opposition,” Müller said.

In the 2014 article that inspired the book, Strauss had said that he yearned for “conflicts of attitude in moral questions” – words that sound prophetic in the light of Germany’s recent elections, which saw an overtly nationalist party return to the country’s parliament for the first time in half a century. Did Strauss yearn for Alternative für Deutschland?

“Of course I was shocked by how well the AfD did in the elections,” Strauss said. “But with it also came a moment of relief, because it means the populists can no longer rail at ‘those at the top’. It is better to have the AfD in parliament than for these currents to ferment in the underground.”

“My generation now has something like a historical mission, to make the parliamentary tradition and the European idea our own again,” he continued. “We have to find a new, more Romantic language to talk about Europe – that is something that Macron has started to do.”