Tom Brückner

Brückner builds his novels out of one very precise collision: a fixed personal order on one side, a person who never asked for it and won't go away on the other. His characters fight back with the best arguments, and it's exactly the fighting that pulls them in — a favor turns into an obligation, the obligation into someone they're suddenly responsible for. Brückner's characters defend their own responsibility and, in doing so, accidentally become responsible for people they never wanted to be responsible for.

They're never converted in the process. You laugh with them, never at them — at their stubbornness, their loyalty to principle, their bullheadedness, but never at their expense. Brückner takes his characters too seriously to put them on display.

With him, sincerity never arrives as a confession, only as behavior: a character has insisted she won't come — and shows up at seven the next morning with a toolbox. Brückner doesn't explain what his characters feel. He has them do something they wouldn't have done before.

Brückner grew up in Cologne, in a terraced house in Sülz so beige you'd miss it on Google Street View. His father was a civil servant at the tax office, income tax division, individuals — a life of responsibilities, deadlines, and a binder for every situation. His mother taught German and ethics and still sends him WhatsApp messages today, following a system only she understands: one exclamation mark means well done, two mean call me, three mean she's annoyed about something that has nothing to do with him. He once asked her to write the system down. She found that unnecessary — after all, she knew it herself. That, in miniature, is already the whole machine: someone has a fixed idea of who they are, and someone else persistently disturbs it, without meaning any harm.

After finishing school, German Studies and Sociology in Münster. In a seminar on Goffman he learned that all of life is a performance — ever since, he's regarded every parents' evening as a stage on which everyone defends a role that has, at some point, become important to them. A side job in a bookshop, where he watched how stubbornly people cling to their own order, even once they've long been holding the wrong book.

Then Berlin. Kreuzberg, old building, fourth floor, no elevator, a shared flat with three people and a coffee machine that got more attention than all the relationships combined. He worked as a copywriter and as a columnist for a neighborhood paper (circulation: optimistic), and learned something there that still carries him: a conflict only works once both sides are right — each by their own order.

Today he lives in Bern. Why Bern? Because there's a house rule for every sensitivity, and for every house rule a neighbor who knows it by heart. The neighbor doesn't knock about the noise — she writes a letter. With return address, date, and a note that she still heard footsteps overhead at 9:47 p.m. Brückner fought back — with a reply note, perfectly polite, which has since turned into an ongoing exchange that neither of them wants to end. He framed the first letter. It hangs above his desk, next to the picture of his mother.

I write because I believe most people are stubborn for good reasons. Their order — a responsibility, a habit, a role in the family — once served them well, and they don't give it up just because someone else thinks that would be reasonable.

That's my material. The residents' registration offices. The parents' evenings where grown adults spend forty minutes arguing about the color of the curtains in the craft room and set off diplomatic crises in the process. The club committees, where every member eventually learns that the agenda item "Any Other Business" is the most dangerous one on the whole list. The IKEA shelves called KALLAX that last exactly as long as the relationship that assembled them. People defending their small patch of responsibility, because it's the one thing that still belongs entirely to them.

Sometimes, between the jokes, something happens that stops being funny. A character who has always refused a request agrees in a single sentence — and immediately changes the subject afterward. Those are exactly the moments I write for. Everything else — the punchlines, the escalations, the resistance that always goes a little too far — is the price of admission.

The reader should close my book and smile. But somewhere between page 80 and 140, they should also have noticed that they've come to like a character they were supposed to laugh at. That's exactly the point, for me.