English-speakers are asking: 'Who is Max Goldt?'
He is a respectable-looking young man in his early 40s. Judging from the readings I've been to, he's partial to cordury jackets. You could call him the poet laureate of young, hip, well-educated, marginally-employed Germans, but he'd probably find that descrition pompous and trite. He writes essays and, in cooperation with comic-strip designer Katz, forms the 'comic-duo' Katz und Goldt (G). Here are a few of their T-shirts (G), which bear slogans like "Wasps - Your Reliable Partner When It Comes to Wasp-Stings"; "Hay Fever is like Rock 'n Roll for the Nose", and "At a certain age, the only option left for meeting new people is to give birth to some."
There's no real way to convey Goldt's peculiar genius; but you might say he lives in a German-speaking neighborhood a few exits down from S.J. Perelman and Glenn O'Brien, where there are strange murals on the walls and bohemian-looking beggars. Better to just read a bit of Goldt and craft your own analogies. That's hard for non-German speakers to do, because I don't believe anything of his has been translated into English, more's the pity. [...]
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