Dear friends, I apologize for the fact that not every page has been translated yet… It’s just a lack of time, I guess. Nevertheless I like to encourage you to check out my site, especially vita english and some sample-translations , all provided by native speaking friends. If you like what you read, and you think you might know a publisher who’s interested, please let me know.

I still receive letters from people asking me: How comes - after all that noise – Endstufe has not been translated into English? To be honest, I have no clue. I think it is a fact that somebody up there decides what you ought to know and to read and obviously »Endstufe« is NOT on their list. But I know time is on my side… And I am fighter.

Have a pleasant stay. TK

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OUT NOW 2009:

Bela B., Frontman of Berlins legendary punk-combo “Die Ärzte” recommends my new novel. “I never felt bad that good”, he told the press. Thanks Bela, you’re cold rockin’ it! (tk)

QUOTE OF TODAY:

21.1.08.

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes. - JOHN LECARRE

You better believe it.

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It still needs a publishing House…

Artwork by J.Cartwright, 2005

If you think you know a british or american publisher who might be interested in my novel, please get in touch with my agent. (tk)

Sample-translation of »Final Level” (Endstufe)

sample-final-level.pdf

Another sample-translation of my second novel “A Letter to Hanny Porter”

sample-translation-hp.pdf

Feel free to download.
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QUOTE OF TODAY:

17.8.07.

3o.6.07.

“I more-than-half suspect that all “good” writing, or all prose and poetry that one wants to read more than once, proceeds from a kind of “alteration in consciousness,” i.e. a kind of controlled schizophrenia. [Don’t become alarmed — I think good acting comes from the same place.]”- ROBERT A. WILSON

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The great Sachsenwald outdoors, 1941: The new meat order has arrived. The creators of the 16 mm-movies where never found, but the films exist: They were lost for almost sixty years and belong now to Werner Nekes’ Film-Media-Archiv in Oberhausen.

REVIEW: A couple of facts about »ENDSTUFE« and its Author

„What Kunkel has done, often brilliantly is to put the fictional icing on a rich factual cake.“
- ABC Radio, Australia, 23.4.2004

What is „Endstufe“ really all about ?

„Man proceeds in a fog“, wrote Milan Kundera, the writer. „But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path – he sees their mistakes, but not the fog.“
I couldn’t agree more. In my novel the reader’ s mind slowly drifts back into “the fog” of the forties. We meet Dr. Karl Fußmann’s, an sex-obsessed, slightly nerdish scientist working at the SS-Hygienic–Institute Berlin. From his POV, it is impossible to forsee the consequences of Hitler’s war against the world. He is blinded by the sheer progress and the apotheosis of the flesh (as part of the racial ideology, which evaluated white flesh higher than money.)
Heathen cults were woreshiped secretely by high ranking Nazis, take the correspondence between Alister Crowley and Rudolf Hess as example.
Most privileged people enjoyed a pretty cool life far away from frontlines or - as british Historican Michael Burleigh once stated: „Ironically,the more kitschy you make it, the more you are approaching reality.”
These „Dandys“ were also part of the Third Reich, a side of bribe, vice and ignorance. In Endstufe a group of cynical technocrats shoot Blue-movies in order to trade them for valuable commodities in North-Africa. The novel is based on a series of true events. My fiction - all I ever wrote - has its starting point in reality. Endstufe or FINAL STAGE as the Guardian translated it, is full of facts: You might not believe it, but Hugo Boss himself designed the infamous SS-Uniform . He stopped doing it in 1943, not because he condemned Nazi-politics, he simply refused to use cheaper materials (“Spinnweb-Ersatzstoffe”) for his wonderful creations.
Perhaps true evil is alwasy trivial and as they say over here: “The devil hides in details.”

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Mind if I throw in another teaser?

Grafix by Gerda Bakker ©2000

THE BLACKLIGHT-TERRARIUM

Kunkels highly praised debut about »Disco & Death« in West-Germany of the Seventies, „Germany’s answer to Pulp Fiction“.

The story: Frankfurt /Main, 1979: After the inglorious conclusion of his training as a TV technician,
Anton „Kuhl“ Kuhlmann scraps a living as night-watchman in an underground car-park near the city’s redlight district. He considers himself being the “winner of all medals in self-desillusion“and regards his life as „a third-class biological film“ where his part is the role of a scene-shifter. His credo „Born to be a life“ captures exactely what he’s not.

Rio, his best friend, is an outsider just like Kuhl, but his ambitions to be an astronaut
have so far led him only to the heights of LSD. He volunteers as a guinea-pig for young
Karl Fußmann II., a weird and enigmatic character who secretely experiments with
a dangerous new drug in his laboratory. His concotions induce a form of paranoia,
which materializes as an eight-foot-high insect-human (called Gestalt-Werther) and has
cost already the lives of several people. Experiments with drugs and illegal trade of
stolen M-16-rifels by G.I.s (based in Frankfurt) create two areas of tension which are
finally resolved in unison during an apocalyptic New Year’s Eve.

Furnished with scientific theory, philosophical excursions, provoking mixtures of sex & crime, drugs & quirky dialogues, this novel urges the question of all questions: What are we living for?

© 2000 D. Bender