As if he stood on another planet
For his new book, the German writer Steffen Kopetzky sought out contemporary witnesses from the Leipzig art scene of the 1980s. In this short story presented here, Kopetzky looks back on his visit to the Kalaizis studio, describing the cigar smoke and his approach to the round-painting "Hotel Noir".
Before an opera is composed, a novel written, a painting brought into being, they exist in a more magnificent
form of the mind than anything that can ever be realized. The future creator beholds the work — feels it, hears
it — and yet remains impossibly distant from it, as though standing on another planet. This secret, carried within and shared with no one, gives rise to a solitude one might call sublime, but which must, in any case, be endured. Just wait until you can hear, read, see — then at last you will understand why I remained so guarded, what I could not reveal for so long, what I have always seen.
Fragrant veils, gliding in a kind of cosmic composure
I was searching for witnesses of the time who could tell me about Leipzig’s art scene in the 1980s, for it was there that the novel I was writing would unfold. I had already formed certain notions of that distant world and
of the extraordinary works created there — like a researcher deriving hypotheses from the faint signals of the Venera probes with which the Soviet Union once sought to explore Venus, the planet of fire. But what I
needed, urgently, in order to draw my text down from imagination into language, were people who had seen that vanished world — that distant planet of old Leipzig — with their own eyes.
“I don’t know if I can be of help,” Aris Kalaizis wrote back after I, a stranger, had sent him an email asking to meet. “But we can certainly talk.” And so we did. We drank Riesling and watched the pale smoke of his cigars
drift through the studio like fragrant veils, gliding in a kind of cosmic composure before dissolving again.
It is difficult to say what an author truly seeks when researching the past — certainly not what most would expect. More often than not, it is the smallest details that open a passage into the distant world one hopes to
reach. Aris led me there: to underground concerts of the punk bands of the time; into canteens, pubs, cafés. He showed me the inner workings of a large Leipzig offset printing house, where discarded print sheets allowed apprentices and young workers like him to piece together books otherwise available only in the West — rare and coveted texts. And Aris, as he told me, had always been a devoted reader. That caught my attention. How had it come to be?
Latent violence. Cosmic indifference. Magnificent color
“Very simply,” he said, drawing on his cigar, “we printed for Insel Verlag, Suhrkamp, and other Western publishers. High quality — but much cheaper.” With this — and with many other glimpses into Leipzig in the
1980s — he quieted the hungry research-demon that sometimes burns within me, and left us both deeply satisfied. He had placed in my hands something invaluable: living fragments of that strange, compelling world I wished to bring back to life in my novel.
Only then did we turn to the painting behind me, half concealed until that moment, newly completed: Hotel Noir. I encountered painter and painting almost at once. The first impression of this not insignificant tondo—
radiating a dark, almost physical luminosity — was startling. Latent violence. Cosmic indifference. Magnificent color.
Mars Theatre. Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind
What came to mind at once: Mars Theatre. Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind, that vast theatrical work composed entirely of original quotations, chronicling the moral convulsions and madness of the First World War, was conceived for such a stage — or so it says in my 1984 Suhrkamp edition, which may well have passed through Aris’s hands in those years.
Yet when Aris, a little later, asked whether I might write a short text on the painting, I agreed readily — but soon abandoned “Mars Theatre” as a guiding notion. I felt drawn instead toward something like a “planetary mechanism.” I did not want to interpret so much as to set something in motion: to translate into language the singular privilege of encountering painter and painting at the same moment, and of the strange chain of circumstances that had brought me to that armchair in his studio. Perhaps something like a Möbius fold within a masterwork.
How many worlds can inhabit a single image?
Just as Kalaizis’s tondo is divided into three planes — perhaps echoing Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo, itself shaped by a kind of staged composition — the short text written upon its completion unfolds across three layers. And yet the image beneath it suggests that even this tripartite order is meant to be surpassed — that it must continue beyond itself. Here, the act of painting becomes paradoxical, pointing beyond what it shows. From this, a further, more expansive question emerges — one that Hotel Noir seems to ask: how many perspectives can a story hold? How many worlds can inhabit a single image?
©Steffen Kopetzky, 2026
Übersetzung: Rachel Kaplan
Steffen Kopetzky, born in 1971, is an author of novels, short stories, radio plays, and stage plays. In 1997, he was honored with the State of Carinthia Prize at the Ingeborg Bachmann Competition; in 1998, he received the Baldreit Scholarship from the city of Baden-Baden; and in 1999, he was awarded the Else Lasker-Schüler Playwright Prize. His widely acclaimed novel "Grand Tour" in which he draws on his experiences working as a sleeping-car attendant on night trains across Europe — was published in 2002. His novel "Monschau" (2021) spent months on the SPIEGEL-bestseller list, as did his geopolitical novel "Risiko" (2015, longlisted for the German Book Prize). "Propaganda" (2019) was nominated for the Bavarian Book Prize, and his novel Damenopfer (2023) — centered on the revolutionary Larissa Reissner — was also enthusiastically received in Italy. Kopetzky published the novel Atom in 2025, followed in 2026 by the narrative non-fiction work Die Harzreise. Eine Deutschlanderkundung, which immediately became a bestseller. From 2002 to 2008, Kopetzky served as artistic director of the Theater-Biennale Bonn. In 2007, he co-founded the Neue Pfaffenhofener Kunstverein (New Pfaffenhofen Art Association), serving as its volunteer president until 2023. In 2024, he was honored with the Literature Prize of the Stahlstiftung Eisenhüttenstadt. In 2026, he was appointed a member of the Bavarian Academy of the Arts.
He lives with his family in his hometown of Pfaffenhofen.