Andreas Maier

The person who is talking about his Uncle J.’s funny and oppressive love life is the writer Andreas Maier, who was born in Bad Nauheim in 1967. (...) When it was still his uncle’s room, the nephew did not enter it. As he writes, the author recalls the “darkroom”, the room in the basement of his grandmother’s house in Uhlandstrasse in Bad Nauheim, which was pervaded by a disgusting uncle smell. This is a darkroom that now, many years later, is the study of a man who writes novels about his native Hesse, such as Wäldchestag and Kirillow, to name just two – the previous inhabitants are long dead. That is how what was once the room of his Uncle J., who had had a disability from birth, surreptitiously became a poetic homeland self-fertilisation room. Regardless of whether this book, which is said to be a novel and bears the title Das Zimmer, really is a novel (that is, a self-enclosed unit) or whether it is just the beginning of a series of novels (which would lie in the nature of things, since the story ends abruptly), one thing is clear: you can equate the author with the narrator. This is quite obviously the story of Andreas Maier, who is the most obsessive regional poet we have in Germany at the moment alongside Arnold Stadler and Peter Kurzeck.

Ina Hartwig: „Heimatmaschine Wetterau“
© Die ZEIT, 30 September 2010