A Writer’s Coming-of-Age Story  This is Clemens

In his new book, readers can accompany Clemens J. Setz on his journey towards becoming a writer, gain insight into his thinking and learn very personal details about him. It is a document of remarkable openness.

Clemens J. Setz is one of the most original authors writing in German and always good for a surprise. With his work Das Buch zum Film (The Book About the Film), published in October 2025, he has pulled off another coup. By “film” he means the film of his life. The book brings together selected diary entries from the years 2000 to 2010, arranged chronologically.

At the beginning of these sometimes very personal notes, Setz is 18 years old and starting his alternative civilian service at an institution for people with disabilities in his home town of Graz. Over the following 170 pages, the reader accompanies the author through his life and thoughts; the book tells his coming-of-age story as a writer. Borrowing from an internet meme, the foreword reads: “This is Clemens. He is the concept that emerges when you read the following years.”

The Messiness of Everyday Life

As Setz explains in an interview with Deutschlandfunk Kultur, he initially planned to turn his life story into a narrative or a novel. However, he was dissatisfied with these attempts because they lacked the “messiness of everyday life, the not-always-being-at-one-with-oneself”. Unlike literature, life is not coherent. An incoherent novel character is hard to grasp, even though there is, of course, experimental literature that attempts stylistically to capture the confusion of human existence. Setz eventually concluded that a “curated” diary, with entries kept as short as possible, was best suited to portraying the jumpiness of existence.

It is astonishing what Setz read at a relatively young age: very esoteric authors such as Thomas Traherne, a 17th-century mystical English poet, but also the British neurologist and popular science writer “Oliver Sacks, Oliver Sacks again and again, my literary pick-me-up”. Some entries consist solely of title ideas, which themselves sometimes sound rather odd: “Concern about the satyr play in winter. (Title for a story)” or “A story about abattoir flies”.

A Sense of Catastrophe

Violent fathers are also a theme in the book: on the one hand the father of an early girlfriend, on the other his own father, at whose hands Setz himself suffered: “J. is at home with her parents in Innsbruck, with her brutal father, who God knows how often has abused her; worse than my own ever did to me.” His father repeatedly disappears, sometimes for days on end. The resulting domestic “sense of catastrophe” wears the son down and gets on his nerves: “Who cares about his bloody secret.” Of his mother, there is this note: “A self visits his mother. His mother is also a self. Great confusion.” He finds a sense of security listening to the radio late at night on a a shortwave radio receiver.

Alongside many everyday observations, Setz reflects on literature and on his own literary status: “So far nothing of what I produce is really mine,” he writes in March 2002. By March 2005, however, he is at least convinced of his imagination: “There are things that only I in the whole world can think. But I always end up writing down only the others …”

Man with a Hat

When he is invited to the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2008, he forgets to take off his hat before the reading and is addressed as the “man with the hat”. Ulf Erdmann Ziegler, who was also invited, apparently thought him “completely bonkers”. Still, Setz wins the Ernst Willner Prize for a “highly ingenious story about weighing things up”, showing what excessive meat consumption can turn men into. By the end of the entries in January 2011, he has already written two novels and received several awards. That same year, his career really takes off with the Leipzig Book Fair Prize (for his collection of short stories Die Liebe zur Zeit des Mahlstädter Kindes).

Das Buch zum Film is a quarry of thoughts, ideas and fragments from Setz’s life. He also supplies the music for the film of his life, whether by the American rock bands Eels or Blind Lemon, the British electronic duo Underworld or the Hilliard Ensemble. I can only agree with Michael Wurmitzer’s verdict in Der Standard: “One of the tenderest, most enchanting new releases of the season.”

May 2026