Happy birthday and where's your book?

Today is my birthday, I will be 35 years old and since some have asked me lately again and again, where my book now remains - here the state of affairs! Admittedly, with my many projects it is not easy to keep the central idea in view, so I provide comprehensive chronological clarification here:

2019 all started with Fridays For Future, this is where I stumbled upon the future and committed to writing, and I'm still writing. This manifest contrast between us melancholy Millennials and Greta's rebellious Globals ("Generation Z") captivates me to this day and has opened a gateway in an unexpected direction.

In 2020, in fact, my book research led me to a deeper systematics of orders that revolutionized my historical understanding: The history of humanity as a sequence of upheaval and decay, always oscillating between security and freedom, between progress and preservation. Since then, I have been analyzing these patterns with critical fascination, and as if by magic, this has led to the development of a rich theory that will take several more years to elaborate.

In 2021, everything suddenly makes sense: the curved, broken architecture of our time as well as the ruinlust and melancholy of the "lost places" - when I walk through the streets, I am immersed in the dynamics of history. I read about the upheavals of past eras in facades and street courses and learn from the search for forgotten places something for our "collapse of the old order". It is no coincidence that this has been the new title of the book since then; thanks to order theory, the location of our present at the end of a cycle emerges and thus explains the cascading crises as well as decay as the feeling of our time. We Millennials in particular are caught between the orders - the old one no longer works and a new one is not yet in sight - and are coming under increasing pressure while everything around us is coming to a head.

In 2022, I received the first constructive feedback on my manuscript from a renowned literature agency, but at the same time with the indication that at present only very rarely new, unknown authors are accepted. So I decided to expand my publishing presence, which led me deeper and deeper into the "lost places" of my hometown Bayreuth. Behind places I have known for ages, I have discovered new meanings - a whole new way of experiencing history has developed from this: settlements and cities as dynamic processes, spreading out in spurts and cycles, along rivers and valleys.

From this cultural-geographical perspective, a whole new kind of museum - digital, connected, immersive - is currently being developed to tell the story of industrialization using Bayreuth as an example. An initiative that has gained an incredible momentum this summer - and thus unexpectedly shifts a considerable part of my time back to my hometown. Perhaps the Bayreuth network is a modest hill to climb, but one from which it is easier to take off!

So, to sum up: The "Sp(ü)ren" of upheaval is at the center of all my projects - the intellectual analysis through theory, the personal experience through book and article, and now also the practical-sensual perception through the future industrial museum. By the end of the year, I would like to revise the manuscript and start the second agency round, and who knows what the new year of life will bring?