SINCE THE PUBLICATION OF HER FIRST NOVEL Adler und Engel (Eagles and angels) in 2001, Juli Zeh, born in 1974, has developed an impressive reputation in the German literary world as a writer and public intellectual. To date, Zeh has published three other novels: Spieltrieb (The drive to play, 2004), Schilf (2007; Dark Matter, 2010), and, most recently, Corpus Delicti (2009), based on a theatrical work by her that premiered in September of 2007. In addition to her novels, Zeh has produced many essays; she frequently engages in political debate in German newspapers and magazines, and in 2005 she publicly supported the Social Democratic Party in the federal election. Zeh is eloquent proof that the younger generation of German writers is not necessarily averse to politics and does not always separate literary from political activity. Indeed, in a 2004 speech Zeh proclaimed that “literature per se has a social and, in the broadest sense of the word, political function,” since it “bears the responsibility to close the gaps that are exposed through journalism’s attempt to present a supposedly ‘objective’ — and therefore distorted — picture of the world.”

Zeh is also a legal expert. She has studied law and international relations in Germany and Poland, completed two Staatsexamen, interned at the United Nations in New York in 2000, and worked in Zagreb and Sarajevo in the aftermath of the conflicts in southeastern Europe in the 1990s. Zeh’s interest in the theory and practice of law have had an impact on her novels, in which legal issues play a prominent role. As a fourth area of professional activity, Zeh has also worked as an instructor at the Deutsches Literaturinstitut Leipzig (formerly the Johannes R. Becher Institut), Germany’s major professional training program for creative writers, where she was once a student.

Nihilism

In all of her novels, Zeh is concerned with central issues of human existence in Europe in the early twenty-first century. The novels include ample references to current events in Europe and the rest of the world, from the wars in the former Yugoslavia, through the terrorist attack on New York on September 11, 2001, to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.