Rainald Goetz is one of Germany's most prominent and contentious authors. His work is marked by an enormous intellectual curiosity and a willingness to immerse himself in the midst of the cultural developments that concern him, which have ranged from rave culture, the blogosphere, the high art market, and insane asylums to the sociopathic world of high finance. Goetz made his explosive debut onto the German literary scene at the readings for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1983 when, clad in a staid suit, with his blond hair jutting out in all directions, he slit his forehead open with a razorblade while intoning passages from his first novel IRRE (INSANE). But Goetz is far from a petulant provocateur: a holder of doctoral degrees in both medicine and history, he gives the lie to Benjamin Kunkel's recent assertions about the dovetailing of intellectual rigor into the casual acquaintanceship with grand ideas characteristic of newspaper readers.
