A Collection of European Dreams  Europe and the Undramatic Sadness

For five years, Wolfram Lotz collected dreams from internet forums – from Russia to Portugal. The result is a strange, quiet book: no political Europe, no manifesto, but a portrait of a tame continent from within.

When we dream, suppressed desires and longings reveal themselves to us, along with bizarre figures and distorted spaces, things frightening and unsettling. Yet not all dreams are so drastic – many are enormously unremarkable and utterly pointless. One could simply forget them. Or gather them into a book. That is precisely what playwright and author Wolfram Lotz has recently done with Träume in Europa, once again living up to his reputation as an unorthodox literary figure.

The Legend of the Holy Scripture

Over the past fifteen years, the Hamburg-born writer has become something of a cult figure in the German-language literary scene. He made his breakthrough with the plays Einige Nachrichten an das All, Der große Marsch and Die lächerliche Finsternis. Celebrated as a theatrical genius, he received numerous awards, including "Newcomer Author of the Year" (2011) and "Playwright of the Year" (2015).

Then silence fell around Lotz. With the exception of the spoken text Die Politiker (2019), no further work by the Black Forest-raised dramatist appeared for some time. All the more surprising, then, was the 2022 publication of his 900-page monumental "total diary" Die Heilige Schrift I. In it, he writes about his life in Alsace with his partner, who works there professionally, and their two children. Over years, he meticulously documents the madness of the profane everyday, writing himself into a kind of mania – 3,000 pages, countless files on an old computer on the verge of crashing at any moment. He deletes most of it. A liberating act, as Lotz puts it. 900 pages survive nonetheless, almost by chance, when friends take notice and the texts eventually find their way to his publisher. An "endless, unreadable mess that immediately turns him into a legend."

Merkel and Johnson in the Back Seat

With Träume in Europa, Wolfram Lotz has now delivered another singular book. In nearly 30 internet forums, the author – who now lives in Leipzig – collected dreams from across the continent. Dreams from the Ural to the Tagus, from Russia, Hungary, Poland, Finland, Denmark and Portugal. Placed one after another, they form a vast collective subject, not least because their authors remain anonymous and are never named.

The range of dreams is wide. Sometimes just two sentences, sometimes five pages. In one dream, an apple and an apricot mate and produce a peach; in another, someone is fleeing an aggressive MacBook or sitting in the back seat of a car with Boris Johnson and Angela Merkel.

As is common in dreams, much is surprising: Tina Turner speaks Danish as a matter of course and urgently needs eye drops "in grey". People frequently encounter things in their dreams that hold no interest for them in waking life – Reese Witherspoon, for instance. Or Australia.

Lotz's Principle of Enumeration

One might reasonably ask: what does all of this mean? Where lies the literary achievement of an author who compiles existing texts into a slim volume? And what does any of it have to do with Europe?

Some illuminating answers can be found in a conversation with the author on the publisher's website:

The Book as an Open Puzzle

As in his other texts, Lotz proceeds according to the principle of enumeration. One dream follows the next. It is a continuous "and, and, and" – tedious for some, illuminating for others, particularly when nothing obviously exciting is happening. Yet it is precisely where the "adventure potential simply runs out" and a dream ends in nothing that things become interesting for Lotz. In Europe, as he observes, things tend to work out in the end – you fall ill, go to the doctor and get better; you descend a mountain, skid, and arrive safely at the bottom. It is this unremarkable "strange matter-of-factness" that Lotz followed as a thread through the dreams he found – "a sadness that is simply more undramatic."

Alongside the tame and uneventful dreams, the collection also contains absurd, unsettling and obscene ones. In one, a woman is horrified to realise she is Adolf Hitler. In another, relatives gather for an orgy of oral sex. Lotz's achievement also lies in shaping these polyphonic and layered texts into an open puzzle: each reader will connect the loose ends in their own way and create their own dreamscape.

The prose itself, meanwhile, reads as if cast from a single mould. And yet the book leaves you with more questions than answers. But isn't that precisely the feeling with which one wakes from a dream?

March 2026