Maxim Biller - Black Saturdays

Maxim Biller - Black Saturdays

Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2026, 301 pages, hardcover. Description

Ari, the first-person narrator of Maxim Biller's new novel, actually thought that the worst was over at the end of the 1970s: after escaping from communist Czechoslovakia, where his father, as a Jew and Zionist, was under surveillance by the secret service, he and his family ended up in an old Hamburg apartment in the legendary Grindelviertel. Where once there was a flourishing Jewish life, when Ari arrived, left-wing high school students and students of the post-'68 generation sat in cafés and seminar rooms and dreamed of the end of Israel. But when he moved to Munich to study in 1982, at the beginning of the golden decade of pop, the clouds of the new-old hatred of Jews seemed to have cleared. Ari never imagined that it would come back, more openly, more radically - until the day in October 2023 when Hamas terrorists, filled with deeply religious, exterminatory anger, attacked the south of Israel.