“…I did indeed set about to intervene in another person’s biography, that of an architect in Cologne, who had somehow reached the end of a phase in life. He was about to be honored with an exhibition of his work and had asked me, Burckhardt, to write a text, but not another one of those nice, superficial gestures which spoil the catalogue like theoretical scum, but to write something which would be a complete work-in-itself. At the moment when Brandlhuber asked me, I realized that the decisive factor would not be the parallel text but the intervention, that the only meaning of this act could be an exchange, and indeed a seriously-intended exchange. For this reason, I asked Brandlhuber’s consent to appear as Brandlhuber, to enter his existence, so to speak, to turn Brandlhuber into Brandlhuber material, a malleable material, in other words, to confront him with the possibility of his disappearance.”
Martin Burckhardt, cover blurb of Brandlhuber, A Fiction Read less