Constructing Christian Kracht: From Faserland to #metoo

This article examines Swiss author Christian Kracht's visual and performative strategies of authorial self-staging. It shows how his portraits and performances consistently link the author to the narrators and protagonists of his novels. Examining photographs, television performances, and the lecture he gave in May 2018 in Frankfurt, the article traces the development of Kracht's self-positioning in the literary field, arguing that the self-staging aims to distance himself from the pop author label assigned to him in the 1990s and to transform his image into that of a culturally authoritative author.