Obituary for pop author Andreas Neumeister: His texts don't want to be images, but rather sound

If you cross the Aa Bridge on the Droste-Lyrikweg near Münster, you can read a poem by Andreas Neumeister - and experience a graphic and acoustic explosion in the middle of Westphalia. Starting from the double vowel of the river, the text plunges wildly associating and alphabetizing into the geological, literary and pop history of the city, which Neumeister re-locates and names in the pop universe:

Alphaville, the filmAlphaville, the play based on the filmAlphaville, the band based on the filmAlphaville, the cityA, Alpha, city on the Aa

In the 1990s, Andreas Neumeister from Munich completed the magical triangle of Suhrkamp pop authors with Rainald Goetz and Thomas Meinecke. In his prose he was the most musical of the three, always close to the poetry slam, for which he published a volume in 1996. His books such as “Gut laut” (1998) or “Könnte Köln sein” (2008) appeared as novels, but their distinctive method is better named with the subtitle of “Angela Davis deletes her website” (2002): “Lists, refrains, illustrations”, whereby the illustrations – a media technology punch line – deliberately remained in writing (“Fig.: Test image Wendelstein”).

He did fine art specifically. Neumeister's texts don't want to become images, but rather sound, and maybe sometimes loud, but not in the sense of anger and indignation (he himself always appeared rather modest), but loud in the sense of disco. Its principle is the ostinative repetition with variations, whereby the repetition is not used here as the mother of contradiction (O. Pastior), but as a groping textual movement according to the motto: From here, completely different paths can certainly be opened up through the encyclopedia of pop!

Neumeister performs pop in a double sense: on the one hand as a sound game with a tactile character that makes reading happy in the here and now, and on the other hand as a breathless guide that takes us into the geological layers, landscapes and labyrinths of a pop culture that has long since become confusing.

Instead of leading the discourse himself like his Suhrkamp colleagues, he relies on an art of discovery that focuses on words (“Alphaville”), places (“Alphaville”) and, above all, proper names (“Alphaville”) with never-ending curiosity. Sometimes the varying lists end in loops, sometimes in tautologies, sometimes they open up new perspectives or leave us with loose ends. An impressive example of this is the question repeated many times from “Gut laut” along the lines of:

What happened to Mickey Finn? What happened to Allison Staton? What happened to Robert A. Moog? What happened to Lee Hazelwood?

Mind you: In the nineties you couldn't simply google the answers, so for all of us these were real questions, calls with the hope of an answer into a rapidly changing pop space, whose chronic forgetfulness these lists both marked and archived. What actually happened to Andreas Neumeister? He died on November 2nd, 2026 at the age of 67 in Munich. Let's honor him by reading his books and sticking to his motto: In dubio pro disco!