Author

Why I Wrote NEUROPA 77 — and Why I Could Not Stop

I was 76 years old when I began writing this book. My protagonist, Jonathan Goldt, is also 76. That is not a coincidence.

For several years, I had been fighting cancer — leukemia, a lung tumor, a cerebral sinus thrombosis. Chemotherapy. A stem cell transplant. Immunotherapy. At the university hospital in Cologne, where I was treated with exceptional care, a nurse once said to me with a dry smile: „You really ticked every damn box.“

It was during this time that the idea for NEUROPA 77 took shape — not as an abstract dystopia set in the distant future, but as something immediate, something I felt pressing against the walls of the present. War had returned to European soil. Democratic institutions were eroding. And I found myself lying in a hospital bed, wondering: what kind of world is being built while we are busy surviving?

I began to write.

Jonathan Goldt is a history teacher who knows exactly what the patterns mean — the slogans on the walls, the children in uniform, the neighbor who watches from the window — because he has read about them, taught about them, and now must live through them. He carries Kafka to the resistance meeting. He quotes Schiller from memory. He understands history, and that understanding is both his greatest gift and his heaviest burden.

He is, in many ways, the person I was afraid of becoming: a man who sees clearly, but acts too late.

NEUROPA 77 was originally conceived as a classic dystopia, set perhaps in 2077. But as I wrote, it became something else — a direct reflection of our time. The book is set after a third world war, but the regime it describes did not require a war to feel familiar. The language of scapegoating, the bureaucratic erasure of rights, the decision that certain people — in this case, the old — no longer deserve to exist as citizens: these are not inventions. They are patterns.

I finished the book. I survived my 77th birthday. And I hope this novel finds the readers it was written for — those who recognize the patterns, and those who are only beginning to.

Edgar E. Franzmann, Cologne