For many years, Christine Wunnicke was something of an insider’s secret. Now the Munich-based author is receiving the Georg Büchner Prize. Her novels, populated by eccentric scientists, poets and other outsiders, rank among the most original works in contemporary German-language literature.
For a long time, Christine Wunnicke was considered something of a secret. The Munich-born author is uncomfortable with the public side of being a writer. While many of her colleagues are happy to talk about themselves and their work, Wunnicke dreads having to explain what she does: writing, in a manner entirely her own, about the defining moments in the history of knowledge, language and technology.Her heroes and heroines are eccentric outsiders, champions of ideas that are far ahead of their time. In Wunnicke’s work, they are granted a grand final appearance, often centuries after their deaths.
Invented illnesses and slapstick in India
The Fox and Dr. Shimamura (2015) is a novel about hysteria, the malady of the fin-de-siècle. Wunnicke portrays a young Japanese doctor on a tour of Europe, who is tasked with bringing the findings of European hysteria research back to the Japanese Empire. The book turns out to be a linguistic vaudeville:“After many cases of tuberculosis, one of meningitis, three simple flus, and all manner of nonspecific paralytic disorders, Shimamura had had enough and with no real justification he diagnosed one case of choreatic mania, simply because he liked the sound of the words, as well as one of gravidity psychosis.
No longer a well-kept secret
Already the holder of the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize for The Lady with the Painted Hand, Wunnicke is now being honoured with the prestigious Georg Büchner Prize. The media-shy author is no longer a well-kept secret, but proof that good books can find an audience even without extensive self-promotion.Through unforgettable character portraits, Wunnicke shows how the pursuit of knowledge is always an all-consuming struggle. Her protagonists are visionaries, but also driven souls who often pay a high price for being outsiders. Yet she grants them one thing: they are never alone.
One of her finest literary odd couples appears in a photograph from 1875. It shows a laboratory scientist and a medium, both dressed in pristine white. Taken in London, the photograph forms the basis of Wunnicke’s novel Katie (2017), which tells the story of the English physicist William Crookes, who carried out precise measurements on the medium Florence Cook.
When scientists still believed in ghosts
Florrie, as her contemporaries affectionately call her, is a contortionist from North London, who can fold herself into a cabinet and, while bound with ropes, materialise as a sixteenth-century ghost. In the laboratory of the sceptical yet curious William Crookes, Florrie is subjected to tests with ropes and nails. She is a natural-born fairground performer: a woman with no bones, capable of wriggling free from even the tightest restraints, only to reappear as someone else. There is a touch of sadomasochism about her, we may say today, for she “then gathered up her skirts to bare her ankles, raised her clasped hands towards Crookes, and breathed, ‘Tight … please, tight …’”.In the second half of the nineteenth century, the search for ghosts and hidden dimensions was not only the obsession of occultists. Even proponents of so-called hard science were fascinated by it. Anything that could not be explained had to be measured.
Wunnicke was awarded the 2026 Georg Büchner Prize for her “surprising and masterfully conceived narrative oeuvre.” | © Berenberg Verlag | Albino Verlag
In Katie, a scholar in the age of the natural sciences sets out to challenge the fashionable belief in ghostly apparitions. But suddenly, there is a ghost in the room: Florrie’s ghost. Erotic tension brings the machinery of the Crookes household to a standstill. The story culminates in an occult stage spectacle at Piccadilly Circus. It is supreme comedy, but also high drama, in which supposedly ideology-free science is brought to its knees by life’s unfathomable mysteries. The novel explores the modern struggle between emotion and precision.
Gay cowboys and shy botanical illustrators
“In a modest rented room on Great Ancoats Street in Manchester, in August 1832, the court reporter Douglas Fortescue dyed his hair black and resolved to reform the art of English poetry.” This is the opening sentence of Christine Wunnicke’s 2006 novel Missouri. In it, Wunnicke brings this would-be reformer of English poetry face to face with a wild, young train robber from Missouri. Out in Missouri, everything is done on horseback: shooting, escaping, negotiating – and desiring. Joshua Jenkyns abducts Douglas Fortescue from a stagecoach full of Mormons. Why he does so is not entirely clear, even to himself. Only around the campfire do new possibilities begin to emerge. And just when you think you are reading another tongue-in-cheek Wild West novel, heavy with the smell of gunpowder, you find yourself knee-deep in the unironically earnest territory of a maladie à deux.Wunnicke’smost recent novel, Wachs (Wax), like Katie, once again explores an anomaly within the scientific world and, like Missouri, a homoerotic friendship. Wax focuses on the life of Marie Bihéron, who lived in Paris in the mid-eighteenth century and became a world-famous anatomist thanks to her illicit hobby: dissecting corpses. She lives and works in a studio in the Jardin du Roi with the botanical illustrator Madeleine Basseporte. “Madeleine Basseporte was a tall beauty, of such a type and kind that she drew gasps, gossip, sighs, and, worst of all, poetry.” Madeleine has no time for such nonsense. And Marie has no time for adolescent infatuation. The two women have more important things to do. Their passion is science, not romance.
All the heroes and heroines in Wunnicke’s novels are resolute nonconformists, driven by their particular talents or predilections: post-Puritan poets and gay cowboys, eccentric experimental physicists and occult mediums, passionate female anatomists and reclusive painters of plants. By bringing them together so congenially in her characteristically slim novels, Christine Wunnicke makes them a little less lonely –enriching us, her readers, with glimpses into new worlds of experience.
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October 2026