INTERVIEW - «Reading is about putting aside your own little self and empathizing with other characters,» says author Michael Maar

Michael Maar is the great dowser of world literature. He makes the most beautiful discoveries where others wouldn't even think to look more closely. In his recently published volume, "The Violet Little Dog," he focuses on inconspicuous details that can, however, be meaningful if you let them speak, as Maar does. And as in all his previous books, Michael Maar shines here as a dedicated storyteller.

Mr. Maar, one of the most beautiful anecdotes in your new book is the one about the Duke of Charost. He was still reading in the cart that took him to beheaded, and before he lay down under the guillotine, he dog-eared the last page he had read. Are you also the kind of reader who always carries a book with him?

There are even times when I don't feel like picking up a book at all. But since I've done nothing but read and write about it for forty years, it's become such a part of everyday life that, of course, I can never go without a book for long.

And do you, like the Duke of Charost, believe in the idea that reading could be a life-prolonging measure?

I'm fairly free of such superstitions, although it's said to actually prolong life.

You have achieved what hardly any other German author has managed: a judge at the Supreme Court of the United States quoted from one of your books.

It was a complex case involving Nestlé's plagiarism lawsuit against Andy Warhol. The ultimately losing judge quoted from the English translation of my "Lolita" book.

So you have achieved a kind of immortality?

People in the know told me to forget all other awards. I was now, as it were, part of the American Constitution, which emerges from the Supreme Court's jurisprudence. My name now appears in some footnote, in some folio of the Supreme Court records. That's forever. And of course, something like that is flattering.

Your book about Nabokov was about the fact that you had discovered a predecessor to his novel “Lolita” a few years ago.

It was a strange coincidence, triggered by my then two-year-old son. He was making a lot of noise in our old Berlin apartment, which made us constantly feel guilty about the neighbor downstairs. Then this neighbor once invited me to a birthday party, which I would never have attended without this guilty conscience. However, I met someone there who told me about a book he had bought at a flea market. It was a novella called "Lolita," about a middle-aged man falling in love with a young girl. That can't be true, I said, I know all about it. A few weeks later, he pressed the book into my hands.

How did the story continue?

I then spent a year researching just to find out who the author was. And it took me a few more years to figure out why Nabokov quotes him so extensively, as if he didn't want to cover his tracks, but rather to reveal them.

What did you learn about the author?

I discovered that the Nabokovs, who changed apartments in Berlin every few months, stayed in one apartment for an astonishingly long time: three years. They also knew the landlady very well. It turns out that Heinz von Lichberg, the author of this original Lolita, was related to their landlady. This means that Nabokov had met Lichberg. And they exchanged books. It wasn't plagiarism; Nabokov pointed to the previous book on many occasions, but hardly anyone other than his wife could decipher these allusions.

On the one hand, you tell stories in your book. On the other, you create constellations. For example, quite surprisingly, Hemingway and Proust. Hemingway begins "Fiesta" in Paris at the very moment Proust finishes "Recherche." These are two authors you wouldn't think of together. How did you arrive at that?

It wasn't planned, but I thought it would be appealing to juxtapose such figures. Virginia Woolf and Colette, too, who wrote about similar themes at the same time, each relatively well-known or even famous, but separated by the Channel.

Such constellations also open up the imagination. One imagines that Hemingway and Proust could have met in Paris. That would almost be the subject of a novel. In your book, you describe in more detail the encounter between Thomas Mann and Theodor W. Adorno. The philosopher's behavior toward the writer, who is almost 30 years his senior, is at times downright subservient.

For Adorno, this was almost a love affair, albeit a very one-sided one. My essay boils down to the fact that Adorno wrongly believed he was the model for one of the devils in "Doctor Faustus." In reality, Thomas Mann modeled the devil after a portrait by Gustav Mahler and then gave him horn-rimmed glasses, like those worn by Adorno.

Thomas Mann kept Adorno at a distance. Was the philosopher too intrusive for him?

He greatly appreciated Adorno, but he also used him. Adorno wrote Leverkühn's compositions, as we know today. Thomas Mann wrote "The Origin of Doctor Faustus" not least to honor Adorno's contribution. Afterward, Thomas Mann wrote in a letter that the spotlight he had now shone on Adorno, in whose light he felt him swell somewhat unpleasantly, could create the impression that Adorno had written "Doctor Faustus." Adorno's vanity annoyed him.

In a letter to Thomas Mann, Adorno writes that their encounter was a blessing for him in theological terms. Isn't it strange that Adorno, of all people, resorts to this pseudo-religious terminology?

This shouldn't be overstated. For Adorno, meeting Thomas Mann was something like the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. Every author, every writer, has idols. Although it's not always advisable to meet them personally.

How are you doing with your household gods? Would you have wanted to meet Vladimir Nabokov?

If I ask myself who I would have liked to spend an evening with, it certainly wouldn't be Thomas Mann. And not Nabokov either. It certainly wouldn't be Virginia Woolf. She would have written nasty things about me in her diary afterward. She could be very venomous and was a merciless observer. I would have loved to spend an evening with Chesterton. But my English would probably have been too poor for that.

In your enthusiasm, you tend to use superlatives. You say that Hemingway writes the best dialogue after Mark Twain. Which of the two writes the best dialogue?

There are probably five others who write equally great dialogues.

You're designing a Mount Rushmore of 20th-century literature. You're singling out four authors whose monumental busts should be carved in stone, modeled on four presidents of the United States. Is this a literary world championship?

These are small jokes, perhaps higher jokes, but my pantheon of world literature is very large, it can accommodate a lot of people, and of course there are no gold medals to be handed out.

And yet, it's remarkable who you single out: You name William Faulkner, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Vladimir Nabokov. Proust and Joyce make sense because they shaped the 20th century like few others. But Nabokov and Faulkner?

I don't know Faulkner's complete works, but what I have read has touched me deeply. But yes, these are exaggerated works. Yet there are books after reading which you wonder how anyone could have dared to write another book. Such reading experiences don't come about very often. That happened to me with "Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel García Márquez. But Nabokov is just as unique as Joyce. Or Anthony Powell with the 12-volume epic "A Dance to the Music of Time."

Are you a voyeur as a reader? You write that you would rather take Robert Musil's "Man Without Qualities" with you to a desert island than Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain." Partly because you want to finally find out whether the siblings Agathe and Ulrich will have sex, as Musil says, or coitus.

That's a joke. I know "The Magic Mountain" by heart, that's why.

Even though it's a joke, you're still signaling a voyeuristic interest.

Ultimately, I don't care what the siblings do or don't do. I'm more concerned with Musil's metaphors: Nine out of ten are good, one is messed up. Okay, eight.

Or do you find yourself in the books, as Proust said?

That's a cliché. And like every cliché, it has a kernel of truth. Of course, everyone reads themselves, because everyone reads the way only they read. The two can't be separated. But I find these egocentric readers unsympathetic; they only assess everything to see if it affects their own sphere. It's about empathy, and therefore precisely about putting aside your own inner self for a moment and empathizing with other characters with whom you otherwise have nothing to do, who may even be completely foreign to you. That's one of the layers of meaning in literature: to awaken interest in the unfamiliar.

Michael Maar: The Violet Puppy. Great Literature in Detail. Rowohlt-Verlag, Hamburg 2025. 592 pp., Fr. 49.90.