Joachim Lottmann

Joachim Lottmann was a German novelist and journalist who spent nearly four decades insisting, with a straight face and a wink, that he had invented German pop literature. He died in Vienna on 25 October 2026, aged 70, after a long and very public struggle with cancer that he chronicled almost daily on Instagram and Facebook under the deliberately modest title "Langweiliges Tagebuch" (Boring Diary).

Lottmann was born on 6 October 1956 in Hamburg, in the Hochkamp quarter. For years he told interviewers that he had spent his childhood in the Belgian Congo; the place he actually meant was Straubing in Lower Bavaria, a typical Lottmann joke in which the truth was dressed up as an exotic fiction. When he was 13 his family moved back to Hamburg. His father, he later recalled, ran three times for the German Bundestag without success. As a five-year-old Lottmann produced a little daily newspaper, dictating it to his brother until he learned to write at school, and he kept a handwritten diary for the rest of his life. From 1976 he studied theatre history and literary studies in Hamburg.

His first published novel, "Mai, Juni, Juli" (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1987), appeared years before Christian Kracht's "Faserland" and is widely credited as one of the founding texts of the new German pop literature. It follows a young writer who desperately wants to write a novel but cannot decide what about, and ends up writing about his own life in the orbit of the music magazine Spex, including merciless sketches of real people such as the painter Martin Kippenberger. In 2002 the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung named it one of the most influential German books of the previous twenty years, and it was reissued in 2003.

For years afterwards Lottmann made his living as a writer for Spex and as a freelance reporter for papers including B.Z., Die Zeit and Die Welt. His second novel, "Deutsche Einheit. Ein historischer Roman aus dem Jahr 1995", followed in 1999, the same year he edited the anthology "Kanaksta". Under Matthias Matussek he worked for about a year on the culture desk of Der Spiegel (2005 to 2006), and at the taz he wrote the blog "Auf der Borderline nachts um halb eins", which became a book in 2007. His taz pieces on the SPD and Gerhard Schröder, including "Er war mein Kanzler" (2005), showed his trademark technique of praising things to death in a tone of feigned innocence.

That technique came with a loose relationship to facts, which he never hid. Rainald Goetz wrote that with Lottmann everything played on the border line of the fictional, and Lottmann summed up his own method as reinventing everything and lying until the beams bend, but so astonishingly intimately that everyone believes it. Critics later saw him as an early figure of autofiction; scholars including Innokentij Kreknin (2014) and Nils Wiegand (2015) devoted studies to his staged authorship.

Kiepenheuer & Witsch, where his editor Helge Malchow championed him, published a long run of novels: "Die Jugend von heute" (2004), "Zombie Nation" (2006), "Der Geldkomplex" (2009), "Unter Ärzten" (2011), "Endlich Kokain" (2014), "Alles Lüge" (2017) and "Sterben war gestern" (2021). Other books appeared elsewhere, among them "100 Tage Alkohol" (Czernin, 2011), "Happy End" (2015), "Hotel Sylvia" (2016), "Der Mann ohne Meinungen" (2023) and "Die Euphorie des Schriftstellers beim Weltuntergang" (2025). He received the Wolfgang Koeppen Prize in 2010. In 2018 he published a much-discussed polemic in Die Welt arguing that left-wing thinkers around Jürgen Habermas shared responsibility for Germany's shift to the right. "Endlich Kokain" became the first of his books to be translated into English.

After years in Berlin-Mitte, where his flat on Große Hamburger Straße became part of his legend, Lottmann came to Vienna for a reading, met the journalist Christa Zöchling and stayed. He lived with her in the Leopoldstadt district for well over a decade and called her his wife. He enjoyed Austrian politics as a kind of time travel and wrote about his acquaintance with Sebastian Kurz.

About two and a half years before his death he was diagnosed with cancer and initially given a few months to live. He refused to behave like a dying man. He kept celebrating his 60th birthday, for the eleventh time in October 2026, and from January 2026 he posted his "Langweiliges Tagebuch" in 2,200-character instalments, writing about doctors, blood transfusions, farewell visits from old friends and foes, and the newspapers he still loved to read. The diary drew comparisons with Wolfgang Herrndorf's "Arbeit und Struktur" and won him attention his novels had rarely enjoyed: a 3sat Kulturzeit feature in September 2026, interviews with Der Standard and profil, essays in the NZZ, Tagesspiegel and Deutschlandfunk, and obituaries written during his lifetime in Die Zeit and nd, which he had more or less commissioned himself. "I am dying at 97 percent," he told Der Standard, and "I am dying almost as a young man."

In his last weeks he saw the publication of "Port Stanley ist gefallen" (VTA, October 2026), a novel written in 1982 about losing and winning back a girlfriend during the Falklands War, which he called the best thing he ever wrote. He spent his final days on a palliative ward and died in Vienna on 25 October 2026. Obituaries in the Berliner Zeitung, Jungle World and the Süddeutsche Zeitung remembered him as the outsider who turned his whole life, and finally his own dying, into literature.