HAUS FÜR POESIE

Peter Waterhouse (born in 1956 in Berlin) presents with Z Ypsilon X (Matthes & Seitz, 2025) a monumental work in three volumes. In it, he traverses his own family history backwards, as the title suggests — in the reverse direction of the alphabet — a kind of flight into the past, toward one of the many possible beginnings of his family story, to a time before his mother’s birth, when her parents first met: a silent film pianist and a man, a war returnee who longs for nothing more than to become a writer — but who, instead, seemingly against all his principles, rises to the position of chief editor in the service of the National Socialists and later falls at the front. By its very nature, this extraordinary book project could just as well be summarized quite differently: as a text, for instance, about a man who fears silence and who, in Graz, buys the fastest motorcycle in the world.

One of the main protagonists of this work, which refuses to commit to any single genre, is literature itself. Readers follow the narrator into the grandparents’ library, leaf through the inherited books of Karl Kraus or Peter Altenberg, and interpret the dedications and marginal notes — a special kind of deep reading. Yet the book is also about language itself, about silence and the pause before speech, about the difference between „gesagten Etwas und dem gesprochenen Nichts“.

There is, moreover, a movement between languages — English and German — illustrated, for example, through an obsessive reading of David Copperfield. What stands at the center is not what is proverbially lost in translation, but rather what is newly gained: when air becomes Arie, rookery turns into Kräherei, and the simple word daisy suddenly trails a vortex of meanings behind it. Z Ypsilon X is a textual massif through which each reader will blast their own passages — a labyrinth where dozens of Ariadne’s threads intersect.

Reading & Conversation: Peter Waterhouse
Moderator: Beate Tröger