He pursued the literarization of the world, simply because he wanted it that way: for the young genius Wolf Wondratschek on his 80th birthday.
At 26, Wondratschek was already so famous that Lars Gustafsson wanted to kill him. “I could have killed, wiped out, destroyed this wolf Wondratschek and scattered his letters into the sea,” Gustafsson curses in his otherwise wonderful book “Herr Gustafsson personally”: It’s classic colleague envy, because Wondratschek has the Swedish author, who is just starting out known on the German market, outperformed the person sitting next to you on the plane. Gustafsson has to watch as the young woman, identified as a political street fighter with a scar on her forehead and also red-haired, pulls two books out of her pocket, one by Gustafsson and one by Wondratschek, and decides in favor of the competition. “What,” groans poor Gustafsson, “what does Wolf Wondratschek have over me?”