Joachim Lottmann inspected Germany as a journalist and by means of his very personal reporter’s method, which never sticks to plain facts alone. His literary reports are great moments of a slightly different way of establishing the truth.
In the last couple of years, Joachim Lottman, whom many scholars take for the inventor of German pop literature, has made his way all across the republic as a reporter. And he always did so in disguise: he was a worked-up Wallraff epigone and »Graf Lottmann« on the annual meeting of the nobility in Karlsbad (Europe’s biggest marriage market), and a polite paparazzo, who supplied frontline reports which »did not always carefully separate fact from fiction«, (taz). On his journey to the end of the culture industry he met them all: Bob Geldof, Reich-Ranicki, Tokio Hotel, Bazon Brock, Maxim Biller, the Strokes and Philipp Boa, Uschi Obermeier, the Pope, …. He was in the small town Schlitz, and at the KaDeWe department store in Berlin, and travelled from Kiel to Karlsruhe. The social, aesthetical and political thruths, as derived by Lottmann from reality, add up to shape a subjective history of customs and manners in this country.
