Go Forth: An Interview with Lance Olsen

Lance Olsen is as innovative as he his prolific and an irreplaceable figure in avant-garde fiction. The author of over twenty books of and about experimental fiction, My Red Heaven, a novel published by Dzanc Books, is his latest. Set on a single day in Berlin, Germany in 1927, it follows a diverse troupe of writers and artists as they move about a promising and fruitful present, look back into a troubling past, and hints toward an horrific future for Germany and the world. Told in vignettes that are formally daring, yet always musical and accessible, this is a powerful book in every respect and an important one for readers here in this country in 2020. 

—Robert Lopez

THE BELIEVER: I know you’ve spent a lot of time in Germany, what’s your relationship to Germany and how has it influenced your fiction?

LANCE OLSEN: I fell in love with German literature in high school through Kafka’s uncanny crystalline perfections. In college, I began taking German language and literature courses and saw my interest expand, myself drawn increasingly to the culture’s fraught history and extraordinary and extraordinarily deep, serious aesthetic-existential investigations. In 2013 I lived at the American Academy in Berlin for half a year on a fellowship, and again for a year bridging 2015 and 2016 on a fellowship from the Artists-in-Berlin Program. Since then, I’ve been spending a month or six weeks there every spring.

I hope my fiction has absorbed some of Berlin’s creative energy and some of Germanic art’s tradition of gravity mixed with mischievousness, where a good amount of unhinged reality and formal play goes without saying, from Handke to Herzog, Musil to Hannah Höch.

BLVR: Where does My Red Heaven come from?

LO: While at the American Academy, where I was working on two books unrelated to this one, I noticed I began reading about and taking notes on German history, although I didn’t really understand why. In 2015 I stumbled across German-Jewish artist Otto Freundlich’s Abstract Cubist painting called “My Red Heaven” (finished in 1933, the year Hitler became Chancellor) at the Pompidou in Paris. It immediately became connotative to me of the cultural energy of the Weimar Republic—those interwar years.

Freundlich’s painting also gestures toward a collage structure in its collection of apparently disparate forms on a surface that simultaneously unifies them and underscores their multiplicity. I wanted to see what happens when that form is translated into a narrative architectonics. Perhaps weirdly, my novels recently have tended to arrive, not in the form of a character, or scene, or theme, or image, but rather as opportunities inherent in a certain shape.

Each chapter of My Red Heaven manifests...