Die Helligkeit der Nacht: Ein Journal

The dead are not dead, least of all in literature, and she herself has something ghostly, nocturnal, but in a loving sense: tenderly she observes life, albeit from afar. And there it is only imperative when a dead person speaks in Dagmar Leupold’s new novel, as recently also in novels by Sibylle Lewitscharoff, Philip Roth or Uwe Timm. Here it is Heinrich von Kleist who, over the centuries, sends airy letters of affection to a woman or makes ghostly records–a journal of concern and questions, of meditations and observations, circling around themes of literature and radicality, history and its hopes, of unconditionality and its abysses.
“You have to come up with the idea first! While the others work and sleep, connections arise that gave them nightmares, they would know about it.” The addressee of this spiritual ghost is Ulrike. Not Kleist’s beloved sister, even if she has similarities to her, but a sister in spirit, in attitude, in tragedy, Ulrike Meinhof. His encounter with Meinhof is no less than a collision, the short circuit of two eras.
Clever and poetic, full of drilling questions and wonderful observations, this Kleist–Leupold’s Kleist, not simply the historical one–seeks ours and Ulrike’s closeness. Occasionally, Ulrike comes to word, delighted as we readers about this unusual “coalitionary” who disregards the factual, the centuries. Such a novel has not yet existed.