Cherrypicker | Literature   From Pop to Prose

More and more musicians are writing novels – sometimes dark and poetic, sometimes brash and direct. Jan Göthlich takes us on a journey through musical literature and asks why lyrics often play only a subordinate role.

Career-changers are not an uncommon phenomenon in the German-language literary scene. Booksellers, journalists and teachers who have written successful works of literature are of proof that: graduates of literary institutes by no means are the only writers who get published round here. Pop musicians, who try their hand at writing, have gained a great deal of attention - even if they do not always earn the esteem they deserve, particularly because their works are quickly labeled as light literature—and that, despite the fact that many of them have written superb texts. We‘d like to introduce a few of those writers to you here.
 
In spring 2025, the Berlin-based Swiss singer and multi-instrumentalist Sophie Hunger has gained critical acclaim with her recently published novel: Walzer für Niemand. At first glance, the story about an aspiring musician and her best friend “Niemand” (cf. Nobody), would appear to be a classic coming-of-age tale. However, the novel’s dark atmosphere and formal strengths set it apart from works of a similar genre. The memorable imagery, the fragmentary narrative style, and the prominent role of music reveal Sophie Hunger as the songwriter behind the prose. Stylistically, this debut impresses with its astonishing maturity and elegance.
  Charlotte Brandi has chosen a different sound for her literary debut. Brandi first gained renown with her band Me & my Drummer and then later as a solo musician. The language in her novel is flippant, fresh and yes, sometimes vulgar. Fischtage (Fish Days) follows a few days in the life of 16-year-old Ella - but those few days truly pack a punch. With its fast pace, compressed timeframe and happy ending, Fischtage can be considered much more of a novel for young people than Sophie Hunger’s darkly Swiss panorama. Both employ idiosyncratic elements of pop music and themes in this sort of pop literature, such as young people searching for their identity — oscillating between rebellion and conformity, friendship and family, love - and, of course, lots of music. One song in particular plays a key role in Fish Days: the eponymous nameless fish - a battery-operated specimen of its own kind - that reliably plays Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” every time the protagonist is in danger. When he’s not sounding the alarm, Ella can carry on a nice conversation with the fish and come up with a plan for finding her missing brother. This magical element contributes significantly to the book’s charm.

Kurt Prödel can be considered at least a part-time musician. The drummer of the punk band The Screenshots is probably better known to many as an internet humorist. Along with  Fischtage, his prose debut Klapper was also published by park x ullstein in 2024, and was awarded the lit.COLOGNE debut prize in 2025. Similarly to Hunger and Brandi, his novel focuses on an adolescent searching for himself. The 16-year-old protagonist, who everybody calls Klapper because his joints crack, is an outsider at school. However, he quickly makes friends with the new girl in class named Bear, who is into Hip-Hop. The plot includes a foray into revealing some of his deeper feelings, a failed party and a tragic incident. Prödel, who claims that he rarely reads books, impressively attempts to create multi-layered characters and a vivid 2010s period atmosphere, even though you might say that there is much room for improvement stylistically (many, way too many adjectives). Nonetheless, his discovery of poetic moments in the lyrics of gangster rapper Kollegah is worthy of recognition. Thorsten Nagelschmidt comes from a similar musical background as Prödel. In contrast to the debutants, however, the singer of the indie/punk rock band Muff Potter is now an established author. His novel Arbeit, published in 2020, was described by the Süddeutsche Zeitung as “the first great Berlin novel of the 21st century.” In Soledad, also published by S. Fischer in 2024, the protagonist, who is burdened by a trove of personal problems, ends up on the Caribbean coast of Columbia, where she remains (because of the Corona pandemic) for the duration of the novel. Nagelschmidt tells the story with aplomb and does not overload the coronavirus subplot with socio-political issues. Instead he stays focused on his troubled protagonist. Many other coronavirus novels of recent years might also have benefited from such an approach.

Sven Regener and Heinz Strunk are far better known than the previously mentioned authors. The former is still active as lead singer of the band Element of Crime, while Strunk’s musical work dates back much further. Apart from their precise descriptions of people and milieus, the vast number of books the two have written share a witty way with words. Where Strunk usually dissects our clichés in a wickedly cynical manner, Regener’s absurdly humorous dialogues are always underpinned by warm human kindness. His “Herr Lehmann”- books has many fans and each new novel is guaranteed a place on the bestseller list (most recently Glitterschnitter). In 2024, Heinz Strunk published Zauberberg 2, an homage to Thomas Mann’s original novel. He has largely remained true to his flippant style though.
The city of Hamburg, where Heinz Strunk resides, seems to be an excellent breeding ground for writer-musicians. His former partner Rocko Schamoni (from the band Studio Braun, later Fraktus) also counts several books to his name. Most recently, he sent his readers into Hamburg‘s punk scene of the 1980s, in his autofictional novel Pudels Kern. A few years later, so-called discourse rock caught on in Hamburg. Bands such as Blumfeld, Die Sterne and Tocotronic attracted attention, not least for their intelligent German lyrics. It is hardly surprising that a few songwriters from this milieu later also tried their hand at the long form, such as the singers of the aforementioned bands: Jochen Distelmeyer (Otis), Frank Spilker (Es interessiert mich nicht, aber das kann ich nicht beweisen) and Dirk von Lowtzow (Aus dem Dachsbau; Ich tauche auf).

Andrej Murašov, aka Partizan, proves that German hip hop can also produce working writers. He published his second novel Der Himmel ist so laut in 2025, which he combined with a soundtrack under the fictitious artist name AK602. In 2022, Hendrik Bolz, aka rapper Testo, who is part of the duo Zugezogen Maskulin, published his highly acclaimed Nullerjahre with Kiepenheuer & Witsch. In an autofictional turn, Bolz tells the story of a “youth of landscapes in full-bloom”, as the subtitle suggests. The author impressively describes how, above all, the post-reunification and 00s years in East Germany were a heyday of violence. Young boys and adolescents had to learn early on to act tough, because it was a dog eat dog world. Manja Präkels has written an afterword for the paperback edition (2023) that is well worth reading. Präkels herself became famous in 2017, with her young adult novel Als ich mit Hitler Schnapskirschen aß and in 2022, published the essay collection Welt im Widerhall oder war das eine Plastiktüte? (both published in 2022 by Verbrecher)- and is also a singer in the band Der Singende Tresen.
  In the end, let’s take a look beyond prose: Why do so few musicians actually make a name as poets? (Such as Tobias Bamborschke, an exception who proves the rule). Most likely because song lyrics have always been considered poetry, which at very latest was proven when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Needless to say, the poetry we find inside a bookcover is not likely to provide a second source of income. That said: German-language songwriters are considered expert wordsmiths. Campino, for example, was invited to be a guest professor at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. In 2024, the Toten Hosen frontman gave two lectures on “Gebrauchslyrik von Kästner bis Kraftwerk” and the “Kakophonie unserer Zeit”. His lectures were subsequently published by Piper. Perhaps the university could have invited even more accomplished lyricists - as they already had started 30 years ago, when they invited Wolf Biermann as a visiting professor.

07/2025