WHEN DIE VERMESSUNG DER WELT (Measuring the world) appeared in 2005, Daniel Kehlmann could hardly have been described as a new writer. He had already published three other novels, a novella, and a collection of essays, with the most recent previous novel, Ich und Kaminski (Kaminski and I, 2003), achieving a print run of thirty thousand copies in hardback alone. However, where the author had spent the previous ten years slowly making a name for himself in publishing circles, now he suddenly became a household name even for those with only a passing interest in German literature. The novel spent thirty-five weeks at the top of the Spiegel bestseller list and was quickly translated into over forty different languages, while Kehlmann was awarded numerous prizes and called upon to give countless media interviews. Indeed, over the following months he was repeatedly confronted with his own authorial persona to such an extent that he made the public’s interest in the famous author into a guiding theme of both his Göttingen poetics lecture series, Diese sehr ernsten Scherze (These very serious jokes, 2007), and his next prose work, Ruhm (Fame, 2009). Die Vermessung der Welt thus marks the beginning of a new stage in Kehlmann’s career that coincides with the point at which he was publicly “made” as a noteworthy young author. He entered into the world of international literary acclaim and the processes of celebrity and intellectual fetishization that this entails.

The spectacular success of Die Vermessung der Welt encourages us to think about the nature of what I am terming, following the celebrity studies scholar Chris Rojek, “celebrification.” Celebrity, as a product of sophisticated mediation, relies on the way in which a famous person is both socially removed from the public and yet appears so familiar in all the intimate aspects of his or her personality as to be a part of our everyday lives. This curious mix of social distance and personal proximity is maintained by the “celebrifying” media, which prioritize image over substance. Their coverage concerns the way in which a person represents public achievement, rather than offering an in-depth engagement with the achievement itself, and thus for many cultural critics, such as those of the Frankfurt School, celebrity is a fundamentally empty phenomenon that reflects negatively on the nature and quality of human relations in contemporary society.