Ingo Niermann
| Ingo Niermann | |
|---|---|
Niermann in 2008
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| Born | 1969 Bielefeld |
| Occupation | writer, novelist, artist |
| Genre | Cultural design |
| Literary movement |
Postmodern Utopian |
| Website | |
| www |
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Ingo Niermann (born 1969, Bielefeld, Germany) is a German novelist, writer, and artist.
Niermann was born in Bielefeld and studied philosophy in Berlin. He has lived in Berlin, to the eastern part of which he allegedly moved in late 1989. Niermann lived in New York between 2013–14, before moving to Basil, Switzerland, where he is currently based.
Although mostly known for his book releases (see below), Niermann earlier contributed to German newspapers Sueddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He has also conducted interviews for German literary magazine Der Freund and contributed a series of interviews labelled Die Beste aller Welten [~ "The best of all worlds imaginable"] to the German art magazine Monopol.
In 1999, Niermann first contributed a short story (10 000 Jahre [10,000 years]) to the anthology "Mesopotamia" edited by Swiss writer Christian Kracht. His debut novel Der Effekt was published in 2001. It were mainly these two publications that established a perceived link with Germany’s 1990s "pop literature" movement.
Niermann successfully veered from this perception with his acclaimed 2003 book Minusvisionen [best translated as "Negative-only visions"; also a neologism in German], published by Suhrkamp. The book revived the literary form of the protocol (German "Protokoll"), drawing on motives of interview and oral history. It chronicles the visions, projects and (economic) failure of several young German entrepreneurs.
In 2006, Umbauland appeared, also at Suhrkamp. It presents ten ideas of Niermann – partly conceived with friends and colleagues – on how Germany could be and should be radically reformed. Suggestion include the construction of a large-scale pyramid as tourist attraction and grave site in Eastern Germany, nuclear armament, or a radical re-vamping of the German language ("Rededeutsch").
Late February 2007 saw the publication of Metan ["Methane", misspelled], the product of teaming up with Christian Kracht and climbing up Kilimanjaro. The book describes the mysterious power of methane gas. Another reviewer refers to the book as a parody of "alarmism" and suggested it should be taken as a joke: "But if this book is taken as a joke, it probably is not a bad one." It has been translated into several languages, such as Latvian and Russian.
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Wikipedia