Guest of the ilb 2002
Norman Ohler was born in Zweibrücken in Rheinland-Pfalz in 1970. He completed high school as an exchange student in the USA. In 1990, after sitting A-levels in Germany, he wrote his first novella 'Golf'. At the age of 22, Ohler attended the renowned Hamburg Journalist school and the publication of works in 'Der Spiegel' and 'Stern' followed. For 'Geo' he travelled to South Africa to compile a special edition on the country during its period of radical change. In 1993 Ohler moved to New York City where he was co-founder of the 'Tribes Gallery' in Manhattan in 1994. The short story 'The Longer the Better' (1994) appeared in the accompanying 'Tribes Magazine New York'.
In New York, Ohler worked on his first novel 'Die Quotenmaschine', the story of a mute detective named Rutenberg who searches everywhere, above all on the internet, for someone he seems to have known for a long time. He researches his own case, that of a person who was already famous by the time he was a foetus as he was kept alive as a medical sensation in the dead womb of his mother. Step by step, his personal story comes to light in the data network of cyberspace. Here, on the internet, Ohler published his novel in 1995, complete with hyperlinks. 'Die Quotenmaschine' is regarded as the first online novel worldwide. In 1996 it was published as hard cover in Germany and Spain.
Ohler, who is now 32 years old, once again lives in Germany, in the 'Mitte' district of Berlin, directly on the Hackescher Markt. The flat was the starting point for his, as he says, "very autobiographical" second novel: 'Mitte' (2001).
His protagonist Klinger moves from London to Berlin into a secluded flat in 'Mitte' in search of loneliness. But he isn’t really alone. While the 'new Mitte' has taken over the house with its dreams of renovation, the flat is haunted by the ghost of the flat’s previous occupant Igor who burnt to death here while on a drug high. Igor persuades Klinger to inject himself with ketamin. Slowly Klinger grasps that Igor is a 'survivor' of the 'Wende' (the "turning point" during the period after the fall of the Wall) who knows only one aim: that the fight for 'Mitte' will end in his favour.
In 1998 Ohler received the 'Fördergabe des Landes Rheinland-Pfalz', in 1999 the 'Martha-Saalfeld Prize' of the Ministry of Culture of Rheinland-Pfalz and, in 2000, a working grant of the Berlin Senate. During a scholarship stay in the Cismar monastery in Schleswig-Holstein in 1999, he started work on his third novel 'Stadt des Goldes' (2002) which forms the finale to his metropolis trilogy. He tells the story of the young German journalist named Kraner who once again meets, in Johannesburg, the black South African Lucy who, at the end of Apartheid, was arrested in the USA as a drug smuggler. After five years in prison, Lucy’s story continues with her deportation from the USA and her return to Johannesburg where she starts searching for the person who gave her the job at the time. 'Stadt des Goldes' is an urban adventure novel and at the same time an exciting portrait of a city on the edge of social abyss. In 2004, while being town clerk in Ramallah, Palestine, he was one of the last European journalists having the chance to interview Yasser Arafat before his death. The same year he was town clerk of Jerusalem. In 2002 he started writing for the German weekly 'Die Zeit'.
© international literature festival berlin
Norman Ohler online: www.sayheykey.de
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