What are the chances of identifying a person’s individuality based on their syntax? And what are the chances of discerning the person themselves from the text? When the nameless protagonist in Philipp Schönthaler’s novella begins to review an unsolicited manuscript by chance – after submitting it to the AI as usual – a strange suspicion creeps into his mind: Could his high school sweetheart, Elektra, be hiding behind the author’s pseudonym? The very same Elektra who, even back in high school, practiced writing as an art form and sparked his passion for literature in the first place? Gripped by a sudden unease, he sets out to get to the bottom of the mystery, only to find that even his electronic assistance systems have their limits. For where desire and reality, longing and goal, where syntax and semantics would align, where unquestioning faith would be placed in the evaluations of standardized computer programs – there might lie nothing but stagnation, control, and death. Mysteria Hysteria tells of the comfortable world of assistive systems and the productive longing for a life in which “the wild beast, the Matrix – in short: hysteria” – still holds mysteries.
Literature
Philipp Schönthaler, born in Stuttgart in 1976, was awarded the Clemens Brentano Prize in 2012 for his narrative debut Nach oben ist das Leben offen. Matthes & Seitz Berlin has published eight of his books; the essay Portrait of the Manager as a Young Author (2016) was translated into English and Turkish. In Pages of the Sky, Schönthaler deepens his theoretical exploration of technology and literature that he started in The Automation of Writing and Literature Counterprograms (2022) and How Rational Machines Became Romantic (2024). He lives in Berlin.
