ABSTRACT
Vesper, son of the National Socialist author Will Vesper, studied in Tübingen and worked with Gudrun Ensslin (later a member of the Baader-Meinhof-Gruppe) for the German CND and other causes associated with the student movement. From 1969 onwards he worked on the ‘novel essay’ Die Reise. Left incomplete when he committed suicide in a mental clinic, it sold over a hundred thousand copies during the four years after its publication in 1977. This cult book by the poète maudit of 1960s student radicalism is divided into three narrative strands which are fragmented and shuffled together: the ‘Einfacher Bericht’ is an autobiography from childhood to the death of his father, which marked a turning-point in his life; the second strand is taken up with an account of the period of writing (1969-71) and covers his relationships with Gudrun Ensslin, their son Felix, other women and the disintegration of the extra-parliamentary opposition (APO); the third is largely an evocation of the stream of thoughts, images and associations induced by drugs taken in the company of an American artist whom he conveys from Yugoslavia to Munich, in which extreme states of mind find expression in a style of startling originality.
