Achim Stegmüller - Der Prozess der Modernisierung

In his new novel Der Prozess der Modernisierung, Achim Stegmüller weaves together the peasant uprisings of 500 years ago with power struggles at a university in Kyoto - told in the manner of a Bruegel painting teeming with figures and incident. At the centre are art history professor Kobayashi and a young, melancholic German teacher tasked with organising an academic symposium on the Peasants' War. The assignment captivates him, but he is gradually drawn into a whirlpool of revelations, historical echoes, personal conflicts and academic intrigue. A panoramic novel about loyalty, unfulfilled longing and a man who slowly comes to realise he is being suppressed.

Achim Stegmüller lives in Kyoto, where he works as a German-language lecturer at a university. Around the turn of the millennium he studied at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig, then Japanese studies in Tübingen. He publishes fiction and poetry and has received numerous grants and awards, including the Else Lasker-Schüler Drama Prize for Als wir uns in Shanghai begegneten (2010) and the Kyoto Literature Award in the Overseas category (2024 and 2026).

Part of the Local Monday series.