Christian Kracht - Imperium

August Engelhardt turns his back on European civilization at the dawn of the twentieth century with great hopes. He dreams of an unspoiled paradise idyll when, fleeing from the threatening modernity, he sails to the South Sea colony, German New Guinea. The young man who believes in a nudist and vegetarian lifestyle wants to found a new religion based on faith in coconuts, so that he can show the way to all of humanity by recruiting followers and building a new empire on his small island. However, his confused ideas push him deeper and deeper instead of fulfillment.

Christian Kracht's satire renews the genre of the historical adventure novel, following in the footsteps of Jack London, Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad. The novel revives the grotesque, lost world of the German colonies, while also reflecting on the tragic European events of the twentieth century. However, the real historical facts and figures will be the tools of a bravura writer's game, and the reader will get an entertaining, sometimes shocking picture of the fragile nature of human ideas and aspirations.

"In the background of the Imperium, the shadowy mountains of fate always rise and rise: the twists and turns of German history, which rise behind the withdrawing idealists, who made it all possible by escaping from it when the evil drift of fate stopped for a minute. Adventure novel. No doubt. That there are more like this." (to Elfriede Jelinek)