Andreas Neumeister was a German writer, DJ and artist whose collage prose helped define the Suhrkamp strand of 1990s Popliteratur. Born in Starnberg on 16 September 1959 and long based in Munich, he died in Munich on 2 November 2026 at the age of 67. German obituaries in taz, BR24, Tagesspiegel and Deutschlandfunk, together with a Suhrkamp notice, marked the loss of a modest, music-obsessed author whose books sampled lists, refrains, media captions and city surfaces rather than conventional plot.
After the Abitur he studied ethnology at the University of Munich. That training left a lasting stance: he watched Munich nightlife and pop culture as a participant-observer, close enough to feel the floor and distant enough to archive it. He wrote a column for the alternative Munich city paper Blatt and, with Christos Davidopoulos, ran the mobile club Medley. Music was never a side hobby. Obituarists called him a literary DJ, and his own motto, taken from a Villa Massimo-era catalogue title, was In dubio pro disco.
His Suhrkamp debut, Äpfel vom Baum im Kies (1988), and Salz im Blut (1990) told childhood and youth around Munich and Starnberg in fragments, lists and observations rather than epic realism. Ausdeutschen (1994) answered German reunification in the same collage idiom. In 1996, with Marcel Hartges, he co-edited Poetry! Slam! Texte der Popfraktion for Rowohlt, an early German forum for slam and pop-affiliated writing. Gut laut (1998) became a signature work of German pop literature: Suhrkamp advertised it in Spex beside Thomas Meinecke's Tomboy and Rainald Goetz's Rave under the banner POP. Neumeister is credited with the line that the word Pop takes no article. The book braided Munich disco and techno memory, cassette culture, club names and looping questions about vanished pop figures, and he preferred to situate it in the context of electronic music.
Angela Davis löscht ihre Website (2002) pushed the method into media truth and political afterimages, mixing apparent facts, fakes and captions until advertising silence became a moral punchline. His last book, Könnte Köln sein (2008), wandered Berlin, Rome, Paris, New York, Moscow, Cologne, Munich and other cities through architecture, politics and history, still more compilation than novel. Between books he wrote Bayerischer Rundfunk radio plays, including ... und die Sirenen heulten lichterloh (1992), Prima Leben Und Sparen with Dolores (Ronald and Robert Lippok, 1998), an Angela Davis adaptation (2004) and MYA - über die Zukunft des Kapitalismus war alles bekannt (2010). He also worked in sound and exhibition: Music for Fascist Architecture at Haus der Kunst during Munich's Architekturwoche A3 (2006); Da Real World / Die wirkliche Welt with slides at Lenbachhaus (2006); The gift / Das Gift at Tranzit Gallery, Bratislava (2008); and the 2024 Munich show Nibelungenland, which used covers, music and clippings to track how pop mocked fascism.
Awards and residencies tracked the literary recognition of the 1990s: the Förderpreis zum Alfred-Döblin-Preis in 1993, the Bayerischer Förderpreis für Literatur in 1996, and a Villa Massimo literature stipend in Rome in 1999, where the catalogue In dubio pro disco appeared. Deutschlandfunk noted that he also read at the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis in Klagenfurt. Later he stepped back from the literary marketplace, turning to Kunst am Bau and short lyrical-concrete lines, convinced, as BR24 reported, that the literary business no longer had much to offer him.
Neumeister is remembered with Christian Kracht, Thomas Meinecke and Rainald Goetz as a first-wave German pop writer who looked under surfaces as well as celebrating styles, and with Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and rap poetry as formal ancestors. Moritz Baßler's taz farewell closed on the invitation to read the books and keep the disco motto. Family beyond a father recalled in Könnte Köln sein as a Bauleiter on Munich Olympic-era sites was not detailed in major obituaries. Cause of death was not made public. What remains is the sound of his lists and the cities he remixed into prose.
lit a candle 2h ago
From social media
4Posts by Andreas, and posts about them, kept here so they are not lost.