On the death of author Joachim Lottmann: He didn't leave us alone with morals

In the end, you didn't really want to believe it. Lottmann should die? Wasn’t the book he wrote about the corona crisis called “Dying was yesterday”? Wasn't this alleged death simply the next twist that Joachim Lottmann came up with to attract attention again?

Because that's what he was familiar with: distortions, provocations, remote opinions on this and that, falsifications and even simply false representations, but everything wasn't meant to be completely serious, not in the way that the competitors Maxim Biller and Rainald Goetz, who he always mentioned, admired and "more important" did, but always with double bases. “On the Borderline at half past midnight” was the name of another of his books, not necessarily one of his best, but above all that was the name of an unfortunately short-lived taz2 column of his, in which, among other things, he almost maliciously explained to taz readers how great the idea of ​​nuclear power actually was.

Somehow he was always there. Back then, shortly after the cultural anti-hippie big bang called punk in the late 1970s, when the Neue Deutsche Welle and the left-wing intellectual German pop journalism were invented in Hamburg almost at the same time, the FDP politician's son Lottmann was already hanging around with Diedrich Diederichsen, wrote his first novel "May, June, July", which then collected dust in second-hand bookstores for a long time after its first publication in 1987, and his pre-first novel “Port Stanley has fallen,” which has only now been published, as a prelude, so to speak.

Then he moved around with the scene, first to Cologne, where Martin Kippenberger was also at work, hung around, followed the train to Berlin in the late post-reunification period, where he finally experienced his second, actually first spring, because there was now the second wave of new German pop literature and Lottmann had actually succeeded with “The Youth of Today” - a funny, highly ironic book that appropriately deals with the trials and tribulations of young people in particular, Generation Y to Z, yes: made fun.

After this peak, books were thrown onto the market almost every year - mostly as KiWi paperbacks with the help of his major sponsor Helge Malchow. The level, of course, fluctuated. “Lie Bucket” (Goetz) Lottmann reported sometimes funnily, sometimes less funny about the Berlin scene, the art world, fashion, the “Central Intelligence Agency”; complained about Goetz, Biller, Herrndorf and the others; And last but not least, he liked to write about young women who “fucked like a champ” until he finally managed to write a good book again with “Finally Cocaine”.

It goes without saying that anything morally acidic always attracted his amused opposition, and in fact it was often the case that one could be happy about a figure like him: he did not leave us alone with the inflated morals, the bigotry that permeated the German public, whether it came from Green, from the left, from the right, from PC-Wokeistan or from Migrantifa. At the same time, his discourse hygiene, whatever it always was, slipped further and further to the margins; It seemed as if the reaction, both right and left, had completely conquered the field of discourse and won.

Lottmann himself fled to marry a Viennese woman and subsequently to Vienna. Of course, he remained true to his borderline reports, he created his own genre, and after briefly being a member of the Spiegel editorial team, wrote for all papers between taz, SZ and FAS; However, the time in which he could style himself as the “inventor of pop literature” gradually passed. The summer of refugees came, the last leaden Merkel years came, and Corona came.

Sometime during 2026, it was revealed that Lottmann had cancer. “Became known”? Of course, it was Lottmann himself who used his own death in the media; His “Boring Diary” appeared on Instagram and Facebook, with which he kept his followers and enemies up to date, unfortunately sadly. From mid-September onwards, the first obituaries appeared during his lifetime, including in Austrian newspapers. Nevertheless, the suspicion persisted for a long time that this, too, was just an act, another feint from the subtle, cunning joker.

But now, unfortunately, it is a certainty. Joachim Lottmann is dead. He died this Sunday in Vienna after a serious illness. He was 74 years old.