Herbert Schuldt

His skillful forgeries, it has been said, lend the world a new lease of life. His book »In Togo, darkly«, for example, presents accounts of expeditions into pre-1854 Japan, Africa, and the Amazonas jungle. Utterly incomprehensile encounters. The hilarious struggle to make sense of the weirdest things is the animating principle of this book. In the end it is the European who seems exotic. His absurd ideas and customs are hard to believe.

Schuldt does things with language that were never done before. He comes across as an aggressively witty scholar, a mad scientist, a linguistic constructivist. Some of his works are composed as though arising from a musical, mathematical or architectural way of thinking. But he usually executes them in a mean and grating realism. The same duality holds true for his giant pictures of Chinese writing on decaying walls that have been shown the world over.

For the last eight years he has been working on »Opprobrium«, a satirical-critical dictionary of current German, an epochal study of the language and ways of today’s Germany.

Schuldt, born in 1941, grew up in the raucous port city of Hamburg. His debut exhibition »of Nothing« caused a scandal all the way to Japan. He soaked up languages, living in London, Paris, Amsterdam, and in New York City from 1978 to 2000 before vanishing into the remote reaches of China for the better part of a decade. Since then he has written a few books elsewhere and is now back in New York City.

Steinigung der Nacht
Panderma 
Basel, 1960 
Ill: Hans Platschek 
Blut des Metronomen 
Hagar 
Bruehl, 1965 
Zweifel 
DuMont 
Köln, 1967 
Mamelucken antworten 
Edition Neue Texte 
Linz, 1984 
Lustrufe im Garten 
Droschl 
Graz, 1998
Olga at the Cosmic Door. BHs, Parfüms, und Bars – Schlagzeilen aus New York
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König
Köln, 2000

Recently published: 

In Togo, dunkel
[Ethnogr. Berichte]
Rowohlt
Reinbek, 2013
Deutschland aufsagen,
Deutschland nachsagen
[CD Hörspiel, Essays]
Belleville
München, 2015
Stigmata
[Fotos, Essays]
Walther König
Köln, 2015
Skip It If You Can
[Percussion Poems, CD]
Segue Books
New York, 2017
Belleville
München, 2017
Im Frühjahr 2019 erscheint:
Hamburgische Schule des Lebens und der Arbeit
Berenberg Verlag
Berlin, 2019