Herscht 07769

The novel takes place in a fictional town of Kana in eastern Germany, a region is “famous” for its demographic decline, economic stagnation, resentment, and a muted atmosphere of hostility. But in this novel, Kana is not merely a backdrop or a background but functions as an active social-political organism, also as a metaphor. Its abandoned buildings, loss of orientation, failing institutions, and restless inhabitants create the conditions under which extremist ideological narratives can take root. Also, the number in the title – 07769 – refers to a Thuringian postal code, placing the narrative in a recognisable geography associated with far-right mobilisation in recent years.

At the centre of the novel stands Florian Herscht, a socially awkward, intellectually limited, emotionally fragile, yet bestial in power and force, young man who lives under the protective, but at the same time suffocating care of his boss. Florian is not a politically articulate individual, and he has basically no connection to ideological programs at all, or to the realm of political issues. He doesn’t know that such a thing exists at all. Instead, he is characterised by obsessive – sometimes funny – routines, naïve moral impulses, and a profound fixation first on atomic physics, and later the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. For the Boss (who is a leader of a decentralized neo-Nazi group, and organizer of the Kana Symphony Orchestra), and then after a while for Florian, Bach embodies a so to say cosmic order, divine harmony, and metaphysical certainty –– an abstract structure that promises coherence in a world otherwise experienced as fragmented, loss of meaning and without clear order.

So Florian’s existence appears trivial at first. He performs small cleaning tasks, helps others with physical chores, writes letters to public authorities (to Angela Merkel about the Big Bang theory and its consequences for the universe and Germany), and becomes involved in what appears to be a “civic initiative” aimed at maintaining order in the town. Gradually, however, it becomes clear that these activities are connected to a broader far-right infrastructure operating beneath the surface of everyday life. A seemingly harmless cleaning enterprise turns out to be a vehicle for ideological networking. Graffiti, coded messages, coordinated local actions, and terrorism signal the presence of informal, yet power-gaining extremist circles embedded in the social fabric of the small town.

Crucially, Florian does not experience a dramatic moment of ideological or political conversion. There is no decisive speech, no ideological awakening for him (yet he sees a video, where it is becoming obvious to him that his boss was the perpetrator in eliminating the ARAL-gas station, owned by migrants). Instead, the novel depicts radicalisation as a slow process of absorption and a shift in character. Florian’s longing for order and transcendence is redirected toward narratives of purity, belonging, cultural defence, and clear goals. His passivity is essential in the novel as he becomes more of a vessel through which structural forces can operate freely (the passivity of ideological thinking, rather he becomes a tool of force and terror). In this respect, the novel resists the conventional psychology of extremism and instead foregrounds vulnerability, loneliness, social invisibility, and banality.

Formally, Herscht 07769 intensifies and depicts this experience through its extraordinary syntax. The novel is written almost entirely as a single, more or less uninterrupted sentence. Paragraph breaks are absent, narrative pauses are minimal –– the novel’s sentences are decentralized and flat. Although it needs to be said that this stylistic decision is not merely aesthetic experimentation of a postmodern novel, but can rather be read as a political form of some sort. The continuous flow of sentences can generate cognitive saturation, and since everything is worth the same language-wise (so a death and an everyday situation are similar and close to each other), there is no stylistic or linguistic separation; readers are denied the comfort of clear segmentation, mirroring possibly the claustrophobic mental environment in which Florian lives. Repetition, digression, and accumulation may mimic the circular logic of ideological discourse and the endless loops of online information streams as well.

The novel’s historical background remains implicit, but almost unmistakable. German reunification in 1990 reshaped Eastern Germany’s economic and social landscape, producing structural inequalities that persist to this day. In addition, the global financial crisis of 2008–2009 deepened economic insecurity, particularly in peripheral regions. The 2015 migration crisis intensified public polarisation, especially in eastern federal states. Although the novel avoids documentary realism and does not foreground specific party politics, its atmosphere resonates with the rise of nationalist movements and the consolidation of right-wing networks in regions such as Thuringia.

The figure of Angela Merkel remains part of this broader historical horizon. The political debates surrounding migration, sovereignty, national identity, and possible solutions during her chancellorship provide the backdrop for the fictional events (wolves arrive in the region, evoking the possibility of reading them as metaphors for migratory animals and for migration as such). Yet Krasznahorkai’s novel refuses to reduce the narrative to contemporary, realist commentary. Instead, he situates radicalisation within a longer trajectory of post-socialist transformation and European disorientation.

It also needs to be mentioned that the Bach motif functions as a crucial counterpoint to this disorientation and loss of meaning experienced in the region and also in Kana. Bach’s music for the Boss and then for Florian symbolises transcendence, mathematical clarity, and theological order. For Florian, it offers the promise of meaning beyond social decay. But he is not really aware of this; he has only feelings toward Bach's music, so it is not exactly a self-reflexive stance. Yet the novel persistently undermines the redemptive power of this aesthetic refuge.

In this sense, the novel poses a question that exceeds the German context. Written by a Hungarian author yet set in Germany, Herscht 07769 displaces the discussion of democratic erosion from a single national case to a broader Central European condition. The structural similarities between post-reunification Eastern Germany and other post-communist regions become visible: peripheralization, loss of status, and the search for symbolic restitution. The novel suggests that illiberal tendencies are not anomalies but systemic vulnerabilities within late modern democracies.

Importantly, Krasznahorkai does not present these extremist actors as charismatic villains. They appear procedural, almost bureaucratic, even banal. Their power lies not exactly in theatricality but in organisation and patience, and also in naive expectations. Radicalization is shown to depend less on a grand ideology (as Herscht also lacks ideological thinking) than on repetition, community formation, the rechanneling of diffuse anxiety, and the sharing of force and extremism. So to say Florian’s “tragedy” lies not in monstrous conviction but in misdirected longing for something clear and safe.

The political force of Herscht 07769 thus resides in diagnosis rather than prescription. The novel does not propose institutional reform or moral lessons. Instead, it stages the conditions under which democratic societies become susceptible to destructive myths and extremist forces. By pushing language to syntactic extremes and embedding a fragile protagonist within dense historical currents, Krasznahorkai reveals how existential insecurity, hopelessness, and dependency can be transformed into collective hostility and terrorism.

Ultimately, the novel confronts readers with a discomforting recognition. Radicalisation is not an external invasion or force but an inside-out development. It can grow from neglect, disorientation, hopelessness, unmet desires for meaning, and passivity. In portraying this process with relentless formal intensity, Herscht 07769 establishes itself as one of the most significant political novels of contemporary Central European literature.