Institute of Continuing Education (ICE)
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This weekend course, conducted entirely in German, is designed for those with a command of German at B2 to C1 level, according to the Common European Framework of Reference. It will centre around a core text: Christian Kracht, Imperium, Fischer Taschenbibliothek, Stuttgart 2012, ISBN 978-3-596-51292-8.
Christian Kracht, who rose to fame with his critically acclaimed novel Faserland in 1995, here tells the story (based loosely on facts) of August Engelhardt, a German dropout who at the very beginning of the 20th century founded a utopian sect in the Bismarck Achipelago (German New Guinea), based on nudism and a diet of coconuts. By realising his vision the protagonist seeks to save not only himself but the whole of humanity, just as the European civilisation is preparing to enter modernity and the catastrophes of World Wars I and II.
But in the idyllic seclusion of the South Seas and the doomed colonial lifestyle, the vision of the sunworshipping vegetarian threatens to decend into a spiral of insanity, thereby mirroring and anticipating events thousands of miles away in Germany...
Imperium is a book about visions, about a Romantic, about German History, and all that written in an old-fashioned style, full of irony and humour, so that every page is a pleasure to read. Above all, however, it is an insightful study about the presumptuousness and fragility of human action.
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