Michael Köhlmeier's "Die Verdorbenen" - A dance with evil
There are books that are not only read, but inhaled. They can't simply be put down, but nestle in your mind like an uninvited guest. The spoilt by Michael Köhlmeier is one such work - a dark foray through a world in which morality is no longer a fixed coordinate system, but something that flickers in the fog, sometimes visible, sometimes swallowed up. A book that does not fit into the mechanisms of classic suspense literature because it does not provide a clear direction, no comforting answers or even a clear culprit.
Welcome to Marburg in the 1970s. No romanticism, no nostalgia, no warm light on the facades of the academic elite. Köhlmeier's city is not a backdrop of upheaval, but a stage of inner entropy. Those who live here are not revolting, but simulating - a spectacle in which left-wing poses have long since degenerated into ritualised empty formulas. Between the piles of books and theoretical debates, there is no resistance lurking, but tiredness. And in the middle of it all: Johann. A provincial with literary ambitions, stranded in the shadow of big ideas. A main character who is not one - an observer, an anti-hero, an anthropologist among people who have long since squandered their revolution. A toxic triangulation develops between him, the mysterious Christiane and the instinct-driven Tommi, whose inevitable catastrophe is in the air from the very beginning.
Köhlmeier's language cuts cold and clear, almost dissecting. Each sentence is a precision knife that cuts deeper into the psyche until only raw thinking remains. "Kill a man once in your life" - Johann expresses this thought casually, almost like a note in the margin of a seminar booklet. But this banality is the true weapon of the novel: evil is not spectacular, it is casual, almost bored with itself. It does not take place as an eruptive catastrophe, but seeps insidiously into the souls of those involved, remaining there like a dormant virus that unfolds at no particular time, but inevitably.
While Patrick Süskind's Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in The perfume While the author commits his murders with cold calculation and obsessive logic, here the monstrous happens with unshakeable randomness. No great tragedy, no dramatic realisation - just a plot so simple and meaningless that it becomes disturbing precisely because of this. Köhlmeier creates a moral experiment that sends his characters tumbling through a universe in which causality and ethics are no longer fixed parameters.
What remains is a story that refuses to offer explanations. Old Johann looks back, reconstructs, tries to understand - but the answers elude him. And us. Because Köhlmeier's greatest trick is to confront us with an uncomfortable possibility: Perhaps there are no deeper reasons for evil. Perhaps it is simply there. Unspectacular. More banal than we would wish.
The spoilt is not a crime novel, not a classic tragedy, not a socially critical treatise - it is an intellectual scalpel that cuts into the flesh of our convictions. Köhlmeier forces us to look into the abyss, and then a little further. And anyone looking for a simple answer will only find themselves.
A novel that resonates - not because it teaches us, but because it leaves us with an unsettling question: What if evil is not exceptional? But just another, indifferent part of our world?
And this is precisely the essence of Köhlmeier's work. There is no solution, no cathartic finale. There is only the unstoppable, uncomfortable thought that settles in the reader like a dark foreboding. Perhaps the true tragedy is not evil itself, but our inability to understand it.
