Dietmar Dath
Dirac (2006)
Reading and discussion with Franziska Bomski, Potsdam
as part of the conference
Von unscharfen Größen und verschränkten Teilchen. Aufbruch ins nächste Quantenjahrhundert
(5. – 6 . Februar 2026, Einstein Forum)
“How do you turn physics into literature? It’s best if you don’t; I have not attempted it here,” Dietmar Dath writes in the after-word to his novel Dirac (2006). His remark is at once an ironic reference to the paradoxes of quantum physics and a tribute to literature and physics as autonomous forms of understanding the world. In his “biographical fantasy” about the British pioneer of quantum physics Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1902–1984), Dath recounts the beginnings of modern physics in the 20th century. He finds in its protagonists ethical, epistemological, and aesthetic inspiration for a vision of the future that he unfolds in a turbulent mixture of scientific history, pop culture, and science fiction.
Dietmar Dath is an author, journalist, and translator. Since his novel Die Abschaffung der Arten (The Abolition of Species) was nominated for the German Book Prize in 2008, he has become known to a wider audience and is today one of the most prolific German-language theorists and practitioners of politically engaged science fiction. He developed his concept of science fiction as an artistic thinking machine in his monumental 2019 work Niegeschichte. Mathematicians and physicists as well as their theories repeatedly play a prominent role in his literary texts: Dath portrayed 20th-century mathematics in twenty brains in Höhenrausch (2003), and he recently placed the logician Gerhardt Gentzen at the center of the plot in his calculus novel Gentzen oder betrunken aufräumen (2022).
The German talks will be simultaneously translated into English.