The House and the Lamb

»Being at home and being in a strange place, taking shape and at the same time leaving its borders, that is the shady realm in which humans, in communion with all life, move. Everyone wants to go home, wherever they are – and they want to leave.«

In the midst of a life crisis, the narrator of this book retreats to an old, near-derelict farmstead in the Eastern Ore Mountains. It becomes his starting point for walks into a nature that is as man-made as it is damaged and yet he encounters something like wilderness in small details. In the spiritual momentum of this retreat, the narrator seeks out places of radical strangeness. He believes to find them in a religious experience that cuts through all orders and ideological certainties; he fasts, he meditates, accompanied by The Book of Revelation, a fundamental text of European culture that negates any sense of being at home in the world and that shaped religious expectations of the end of the world just as much as the historical and philosophical utopias of past centuries with their dangerous ideas about the destruction of the old in favour of the new.

The House and the Lamb is a work of exploratory, interrogating prose at the intersections of story, essay and poetic imagery. In narration and reflection, reality and imagination, it struggles to understand evil and suffering and confronts us with the often oppressive manifestations of eschatological thinking. It turns out that these continue to have an effect to this day – in both the real and imagined doomsday fears of our post-religious present.

»These kinds of shrewd and enchanting verbal symphonies call to mind the alchemy of the word carried out by Gottfried Benn or Georg Trakl. Generally, there is a sense that Christian Lehnert is one of the heirs of Expressionism. And yet, imitation is entirely foreign to him.« Ulf Heise, Freie Presse

»Christian Lehnert is a maverick.« Wolfgang Matz, FAZ