Question: “Your novel is based on a criminal case that made headlines some time ago. What about this material appealed to you?”
Answer: “The hounding and isolation of the persecuted. It’s about the case of Bruno F., who was the most-wanted criminal in Germany in the mid-1960s. He was called the moor murderer, the forest dweller, the ogre. But at the outset he was just a burglar who did little things.”
Crime as a lonely struggle for survival and the manhunt as mass entertainment – that is the subject of Dieter Wellerhoff’s new novel “Einladung an alle.” The author takes as his starting point an actual case – one of the biggest and most drawn-out manhunts of the postwar era. He does so based on extensive factual research. And no doubt part of this novel’s particular appeal lies in the fact that Wellerhoff gives readers a detailed account of unfamiliar terrain – in particular, the police and how they work and how their adversary behaves.
Yet the novel competes with non-fiction only incidentally. For it aims to capture the entire multifaceted course of events – their extreme hysteria, violence, fictitiousness. It shows the processes that occur within, between and alongside the characters, in which they are involved as random observers, followers, experts or victims, which suddenly capture their physical bodies, but which also reside in their minds as ideology, information, strategy and delusion. Just as death appears as a personal experience one moment only to reappear as pure mechanics the next, almost all the events in this book arise from shifting perspectives and a narrative style that constantly changes tack. Document, description, montage, internal monologue, free indirect speech and reportage correspond to various cross-sections of the events portrayed as a whole. Through them, the escalation of an aggressive social process unfolds, evidence of whose topicality continues to emerge every day.
