Hettche, Thomas 1964-

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HETTCHE, Thomas 1964-

PERSONAL: Born 1964. Education: Studied philosophy and German.

ADDRESSES: Home—Frankfurt, Germany. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 19 Union Square West, New York, NY 10003.

CAREER: Writer. Ingeborg Bachmann competition, Klagenfurt, Germany, member of jury.

AWARDS, HONORS: Robert Walser Prize.

WRITINGS:

Ludwig muss sterben (novel; title means "Ludwig Must Die"), Suhrkamp (Frankfurt am Main, Germany), 1989.

Inkubation, Suhrkamp (Frankfurt am Main, Germany), 1992.

Nox (novel), Suhrkamp (Frankfurt am Main, Germany), 1995.

Animationen, DuMont (Cologne, Germany), 1999.

Der Fall Arbogast (crime novel), DuMont (Cologne, Germany), 2001, translated by Elizabeth Gaffney as The Arbogast Case, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS: German author Thomas Hettche's novel Nox "sparkles with allusion to the urban poetry of expressionists and to fiction from Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz to Grass's Hundejahre, glitters with elegant sentences and literally terrific images, and virtually fulminates with allegorical freight," according to Ulf Zimmerman in World Literature Today. After the novel's narrator, a writer, gives a reading of his work in Berlin on the night of November 9, 1989—the day the Berlin Wall fell—he meets one of the attendees for casual sex. Unexpectedly, she cuts his throat, not because of his writing "but rather because he fails to satisfy her demands for violent sex," Zimmermann noted. Death is not the end for this narrator, however, as he continues to describe the decomposition of his body in gruesome detail and provides a detailed report of the woman's nocturnal activities in places throughout the city. An amnesiac, a German border patrol guard recently escaped from East Germany, and a Greek myth also populate Hettche's novel, as do metaphors of disrupted cultural identity, divided self, and the eventual reunification that followed the fall of the wall.

The Arbogast Case is Hettche's fictionalized account of a famous criminal case involving marital infidelity, violent sex, and a likely miscarriage of justice in postwar West Germany. In September 1953, Hans Arbogast, a married traveling billiard-table salesman, picks up a female hitchhiker near Germany's Black Forest region. The hitchhiker, Marie Gurth, is a refugee from East Germany seeking a new life outside the wall. Arbogast and Marie have mutually consensual but violent sex, but when she dies shortly afterward, he panics and dumps her body. When he reconsiders and later reports the situation, he is arrested on suspicion of murder. Arbogast maintains that he did not kill her but that she died of natural causes following rough sex. Despite his assertions, he is tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison.

The evidence against Arbogast is minimal and the testimony that led to his conviction is suspect. He "is convicted on a moment's speculative hearsay, and examination not of the crime scene or the body, but of a photograph," wrote Chris Lehmann in the Washington Post Book World. Arbogast spends the next sixteen years withering away in prison for a crime he says he did not commit, deteriorating physically and mentally while trying to get a new trial from a monolithic bureaucracy that refuses to admit any mistake. "The political atmosphere is . . . stifling in a stern postwar West Germany intolerant of both Arbogast's sexual impropriety and any questioning of its leading forensic pathologists," noted a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. Eventually, through the efforts of a trio of crusaders for justice—Swiss journalist Fritz Sarrazin, West German attorney Ansgar Klein, and East German forensic pathologist Katja Lavans—Arbogast is granted a new trial and is acquitted.

The Arbogast Case "challenges readers' preconceptions of guilt and innocence; its untold story is as powerful as its narrated one," remarked Booklist reviewer Frank Caso. In Hettche's account of Arbogast's long imprisonment and futile attempts to get a new trial, "the book becomes something else again, or rather two other things: a bleak and existential meditation on the psychic toll that confinement in prison takes on a person, and a somewhat Kafkaesque tour through the detailed and harrowing business of getting a legal bureaucracy to admit a terrible mistake," commented Lehmann. "With this story about an unlikable man who may have been wrongly imprisoned," wrote Charles Wilson in New York Times Book Review, "Hettche forces us to abandon rigid ideas of justice, morality, and even redemption." "Sometimes it is said of a crime novel that it is so good it transcends its genre to become a work of art. . .," commented Roger K. Miller in the Chicago Sun-Times. Hettche "has accomplished somewhat the reverse," the critic added: "He has written a work of art that happens to deal with crime."