Zombie Nation

After a year of youth fieldwork, Johannes Lohmer is ready for a sanatorium. He dutifully celebrates Christmas with his wife, dog and mother-in-law – but it’s a disaster. The depressed ex-pop writer asks himself: Who am I? Where do I come from? Why am I obsessed with other people’s families when I don’t have one of my own? He starts going through old documents, visits last surviving relations, and eventually comes to the conclusion that the Lohmers were actually a great bunch of guys, whether Nazi general or hero of the resistance.

The archetypal Lohmer was something like the first pop author, and Jolo is even related to the Prussian dandy Graf Pückler. He tells his publishers he’s writing a Buddenbrooks-style novel. His research turns into a journey into his family’s past, it gives him a new lease of life. He gets high on his ancestors, indulges in an affair and even has sex with his wife again. There’s only one problem: the geriatric land through which his research takes him. He encounters iPod grandpas and punk Goths, he passes through youth-free zones, watches the dance of political vampires and the senior citizen democracy being fed by the young. As he observes the world youth celebrating the Pope and everything coming to an eternal standstill in Germany, a cinema film opens his eyes: genealogy is nowhere as enjoyable as in the country of the living dead, led by ageing babyboomers who don’t realise – or want to realise – they are old, just as zombies don’t realise they’re dead.