There are certainly worse locations for a thriller than the Wiesn. A bit of imagination is enough and you can already see the perpetrator disappearing into the beer-drenched crowds. Katharina Lukas will probably go one step further when she will perform her hot off the press regional thriller “Herrschaftszeiten no amoi!” on September 29 at 7 p.m. in the Small Theater Haar. will read (with music). While the research led her protagonist Gundi Starck, a hard-drinking journalist, back to her homeland in Lower Bavaria in “Sacklzement!”, the first part of the crime series, the new book has to solve two cases in the tension between gastronomy and politics.
Lukas’ protagonist, who specializes in cold cases after being thrown out of a gossip newspaper, is initially concerned with an unsolved murder from 1985: because he wants to tackle the scam at the Oktoberfest, a politician who has become known through his restricted area ordinance is stabbed to death with a chicken skewer. But that’s not all, on a second level of action, in the present shortly before the tapping, “the sausage king of the Wiesn” is drowned in a trough with pig’s blood. Please? sow blood? chicken skewer? Does the regional thriller demand this grotesque? “I don’t think it’s necessary,” says Lukas. But in Bavaria everything is a bit rougher, a bit more rebellious. And “this cracking sense of humor”, which she personally likes very much. “That’s why it belongs to a Bavarian crime thriller for me.”
Lukas had had the idea for a Oktoberfest thriller for a long time. Her best friend, owner of a celebrity hotel, encouraged her to do so with her stories “about all the madness”. And apparently the Oktoberfest was even crazier in the 80s. As a philosophy student, Lukas, who grew up in a small village near Landshut, not only partied until he was dead on the Theresienwiese, but also remembers the themes of that decade: Franz Josef Strauss, the Black Sheriffs, restricted area regulations, the stigmatization of AIDS sick and the demonstrations against Wackersdorf. “It was a tough time,” says Lukas.
For several years she reported on fashion and music for German magazines from London before becoming editor-in-chief of a television magazine. Today she writes biographies, company histories – and thrillers. “I like to describe the little mean things that make life difficult and then pillory them,” explains the author. She cares less about the action and more about how people interacted. That’s probably why Gundi Starck learns in “Herrschaftszeiten no amoi!” a leftist with a squatter past and a former skinhead – and ends up in danger herself during her research.
The blues musicians Dr. Will & Saschmo, who accompany the text passages with drums and singing. You can imagine the whole thing like a radio play. Because, as Luke says: “It’s no fun just reading it.”