Nothing White

This is the story of Marleen who falls in love with the world of lettering before she has even learned to read. Born into a family of successful advertisers and illustrators, she grows up dreaming of a truly great invention: the perfect font for everybody.

This novel digs deeply into the history of modern typography, how it was practised, taught and reinvented a few times over. Marleen, a dyslexic child having abandoned her Catholic faith, flees her flashy broken home as she turns nineteen. Her journey's stops mark her education within a craft which sometimes resembles a cult. In Paris, Swiss genius type designer Titus Passeraub opens up the professional field for the ambitious but slightly melancholic German lady. He thinks of her as a perfect assistant. Marleen begins to realize that her idea of some perfect type is not far from having to reinvent the wheel again. Instead, the new digital tools must be fed with intelligent programs for the global practitioner of lettering which will be a layman - the consumer. At the end of the novel, then in New York, she asks herself: If this is the task of the future, which is the way out?

Ziegler's novel Nothing White depicts a generation for whom the introduction of the personal computer goes parallel and cannot be separated from their own coming of age. Incisive, sophisticated and brilliant.

»[...] a family novel, a social novel, a novel of development – tailor-made for the German Book Prize ...« Die Zeit

»[...] a novel full of powerful images and deep significance. This is thanks to the writer’s precise, perceptive gaze, his eye for detail as well as for the big picture that emerges from artfully piecing all the individual elements together, and not least to the precise and sensuous language, which is able to coax individual stories out of people and social constellations.« Die Welt

»Ulf Erdmann Ziegler has written a light, almost free-floating book. Its lack of grandstanding bravado is what gives it weight.« Der Tagesspiegel

»A solidly constructed book, a coming-of-age novel of great historical value and implicit social criticism, excellently researched, not precious or burdensome, clearly structured, and with a heroine who is not too exotic to identify with but to whom the book nevertheless maintains a certain distance. Readers who prefer to be both edified and entertained won’t go wrong here.« Frankfurter Rundschau

»The zeitgeist in Ziegler’s novel manifests itself in its precise description of the world of objects, which, far from being an end in itself, is constantly in dialogue with the wide-ranging world of ideas in the novel.« KulturSPIEGEL

»Ziegler is a razor-sharp provocateur.« Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»A unique, new form of realistic narrative.« Jury of the 2012 German Book Prize

»In just 250 pages, Nothing White proves that writing the great German novel is not a question of the word count.« Spiegel Online

»An architecture of thought and feeling.« taz. die tageszeitung

»Nothing White is a novel that succeeds in refracting its big themes airily, pointedly, and intelligently through the life story of a young woman.« SWR 2