The 1990s were the golden age of pop literature. Even Suhrkamp Verlag didn’t want to back down. In 1998, Suhrkamp placed an advertisement in “Spex”, the pop culture magazine that was still setting the tone at the time, with three large letters on it: POP. The publisher wanted to use it to advertise three of its new titles by writers who were classified as pop literature: Thomas Meinecke’s novel “Tomboy”, Rainald Goetz’s story “Rave” and Andreas Neumeister’s book “Gut Laut”, which was also classified as a novel in terms of genre.
If you follow Thomas Meinecke, it was Rainald Goetz who advocated the word “Pop” in capital letters; But Andreas Neumeister was the one who coined the beautiful sentence “The word pop has no article”. Neumeister, born in Starnberg in 1959, was the pop lyricist among pop writers, a master of sampling and collage, if you will: a literary DJ.
In the context of electronic music
Long before the “Popliteratur” label became one of the most successful on the German-speaking book market at the end of the 1990s, Neumeister experimented with pop-oriented prose in the tradition of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann. In books like “Apples from the Tree in the Gravel” and “Salt in the Blood” he talked about his childhood and youth in Munich, but not in an epic and realistic way, but in the form of small set pieces, loose fragments of memory, and contemporary observations. Lists and and statistics.
In “Gut Laut”, the very novel advertised in Suhrkamp’s “Spex”, which was to literature what ABC’s “Lexicon of Love” was to pop music in the 1980s or like the piece “No UFOs” by the recently deceased Juan Atkins was to techno in the 1990s, Neumeister wrote that he still wanted more “words per minute, words per decade, words per age”; He wanted the book to be set only in the context of electronic music.
He once described his writing in an interview as “a constant oscillation between a song-like structure and more thoughtful passages that couldn’t be broken down to look like a poem.”
Only when the advertising breaks are finally canceled does the matter become really serious.
Andreas Neumeister in his book “Angela Davis deletes her website”!
With the volume “Angela Davis deletes her website” he pursued this program further and combined pop and political thought, asking “Pretending false facts or faking correct facts?” and conceded: “Only when the commercial breaks are finally canceled will the matter be really serious.”
His last book, which was published in 2008, “Could be Cologne”, a journey through the metropolises of the world from Paris to Mexico City to Los Angeles, but also Cologne and Munich, well, is only remotely reminiscent of a novel. Sometimes there is a narrative self and a few characters with whom this self travels.
But the great compiler and collagist Andreas Neumeister hovers over it, carefully stringing together his chains of words and prose or turning on the random generator and writing whatever comes to mind: “Hungry, tired, stiff,” for example. Or he embeds a private memory between topographical discussions of Munich in the early 1970s: “Father always comes home later. Father as a construction manager for buildings that are important for the Olympics.”
Neumeister was often primarily concerned with the sound of the words, with good-sounding prose. He put it this way in his books: “Bilbao effect sounds good, feel-good station sounds better.” Or “Sex architecture sounds good.” Or: “Ku’damm doesn’t sound particularly urban.”
Unfortunately, “Could be Cologne”, for which there should have been at least one prize for the best book title in pop literature, was to become Andreas Neumeister’s legacy. Like a self-respecting musician who would resist any attempt at a comeback, the writer withdrew from the pop and literary business. Now, as Suhrkamp Verlag reports, Andreas Neumeister has died in his hometown of Munich. He was 67 years old.