Sherko Fatah Schwarzer September
[Black September]

Sherko Fatah’s new novel casts its eye on the Black September organization, the manipulators behind it, its supporters and enemies. The dark signet ‘Black September’ refers to a Palestinian terrorist group, which came to global attention with its 1972 attack on the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics. Sherko Fatah’s novel begins a year before, with the murder of the Jordanian prime minister Wasfi Tal.
 
The perspective changes with each chapter, guaranteeing tense cliff-hangers. The novel’s focal point, however, is Ziad, a young Arab from a poor background. Tracing his adventurous path from poverty-stricken nobody to wily terrorist, Fatah presents a career path still typical to this day. Back in the early 70s, leftist students identify with the Palestinians and are recruited to train as terrorists in the Middle East. All of them are on the radar of the American secret service, whose agents lead a life far removed from home, with all its pros and cons.
 
The novel’s main setting is Beirut, then known as the ‘Paris of the Middle East’. A covert protagonist, the city’s sea and sky with their changing colours not only provide atmospheric backdrops but also reflect the mood of the moment. The book also takes us to Paris, Marseilles, Frankfurt, Berlin, Cairo and Bagdad. The terrorist group’s waft and weft extend across several continents, as the novel’s characters are woven into a complex network of shifting loyalties and opaque frontlines. ‘No one really has an overview,’ Sherko Fatah explains, asked about the politics of the Middle East. He takes this into account in his novel by refraining from taking sides, preferring to present the complexity of the political entanglements. Along the way, Fatah tells the backstory to today’s religious warring, the perfidious cruelty of terrorist attacks seeping into the foundations of his novel as if by chance.
 
Fatah has received many awards and prestigious nominations for his work, partly due to the originality of his style. In Black September, for instance, he describes a mosque and its loudspeakers pointing in all directions like amusing ears, and compares a nightclub in the early evening to the disenchantment of a brightly lit cinema. Elsewhere, he refers to lovers who keep keenly to their bed. 
 
Sherko Fatah was born in East Berlin in 1964, the son of a German mother and a Kurdish-Iraqi father. His precisely researched political thrillers have earned him an outstanding reputation in contemporary German-language literature. For this novel, too, he viewed reams of archive material to create a historical framework as authentic as possible. Yet his research never weighs the novel down, partly because Fatah does not merely document historical events but also gives them an exciting individualized face. His book is populated by very different mentalities, cultures and characters. Their life stories are bursting with thirst for adventure and will to change the world. Fatah comes incredibly close to all of them, veritably breathing down their necks. He refers to it himself as accompanying them with a camera on his shoulder. This time around, he follows them into the 1980s and embeds their stories in a fast-paced novel as familiar with the rush of danger as it is with the hunger for revolution.