Larger than life rats everywhere you look. On Rosenheimer Platz, on Dachauer Strasse, on the Nymphenburg Canal. One stands on her hind legs, front paws stretched out wide, dripping with blood. Others ignite the fuse of a bomb with a storm lighter or have red eyes from crying.
“Banksy in Munich?” is the big headline in a Munich newspaper, setting off a hype that is electrifying the entire city. Private individuals, whose property was honored overnight with a supposed graffiti by the legendary street artist, secure it behind Plexiglas. Sometimes more, sometimes less windy art dealers sense big business, since Banksy’s stencil works are traded for millions on the overheated art market. In between are Rupert von Schleewitz, Klara Ivanovic and Max Müller from Schleewitz’s art detective agency, who are supposed to find out whether the works are real Banksys or just clever imitations of a copycat.
“Banksy and the Blind Spot” (Galiani Verlag) is the third case after “The Tower of the Blue Horses” and “Caravaggio’s Shadow” in which Bernhard Jaumann has the Munich art detective agency investigate; he is now presenting it at the Crime Festival. The most recent novel by the author, who has been awarded the Friedrich Glauser Prize and the German Crime Fiction Prize, is an artfully knitted game of confusion in which each of the trio follows their own trail, including loose ends.
Rupert, the type of bold rascal with a difficult childhood and considerable ability to take things, always chooses the direct path to reach his goal. Klara, who studied art history, is responsible for all questions of style. She maintains her composure even when she is at odds with herself or her rebellious artist father, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease and who has temporarily moved in with her. Finally, Max is the only one among them with a family, solid as a rock and stubbornly thorough. The ideal fact checker.
That’s why he’s less interested in the question of whether the graffiti that appeared in Munich really came from Banksy than in who is actually behind the Briton, who has remained anonymous to this day. Robert Del Naja, the band’s frontman Massive Attack, as some suspect? Or rather the artist Robin Gunningham from Banksy’s presumed hometown of Bristol? Or does his name not stand for an individual at all, but for an artist collective?
Bernhard Jaumann unfolds the art-historical background of Banksy and his internationally acclaimed work in a relaxed and confident manner. This also offers many an opportunity for a rich dig at the sensational media and art business. Above all, however, he links them more and more closely with an action that in the further course takes a completely new direction, which was initially only hinted at, and which becomes increasingly darker.
There are no murders in the classic sense in “Banksy and the Blind Spot”, but there are a lot of deaths. They are socially neglected, lonely and unfit people who nobody in the rich state capital really notices, except for a person who despairs of the misery. Banksy’s works are eminently political. Bernhard Jaumann has written just such a crime novel about social indifference, which is appropriately set in Munich in the nasty winter.
Bernhard Jaumann, reading, Tuesday, April 25, 7:30 p.m., bookstore “Buch & Bohne”, Kapuzinerplatz 4, buchbohne.de