Planet Literature

Excerpts from Nadja Dietrich’s Novel Murder in the German Parliament! Investigations of a Cleaning Lady

The god that the protagonist in Nadja Dietrich’s crime novel  dreams up plays an instrument with an infinite number of strings. Each string corresponds to a different universe, and together they make up the divine harmony.

Lidia Afanasyevna belonged to those people who are convinced that no one can know whether God exists or not. As a force that not only transcends everything earthly, but is also situated beyond space and time, God would inevitably have to go beyond human imagination. Consequently, Lidia Afanasyevna thought, it was basically irrelevant for man whether he declared himself a believer or a non-believer – he would not be able to grasp the object of his belief or non-belief with his mind either way.
This conviction, however, could not prevent Lidia Afanasyevna from dreaming of her own God. Basically, it was even the prerequisite for this dream. For if every idea of God was a pure chimera, this also gave everyone the freedom to make up a God of their own – a God who was no more real or unreal than all the other Gods that people had ever imagined.
Lidia Afanasyevna’s God would definitely be a musician. Most likely, she thought, he would play a stringed instrument, one that had as many strings as there were stars in the universe, that is, an infinite number. Each string would represent its own universe. And whenever God made the corresponding string vibrate, a new chapter would be opened in the history of this universe. Together, however, the strings would create the music of God, the divine harmony, which would be synonymous with the interplay of the universes in God’s hand.
Although God would of course also have divine abilities in making music, even he could not prevent the strings of his instrument from being subject to natural deterioration and breaking from time to time. Then the universe that hung on this string would collapse and dissolve into the other universes. Thus even God could never know exactly what new forms the harmonies of his playing would take.
In this way, his universes would be like untidy playrooms in which an order known only to the inhabitants would prevail; an order that could always be washed away by a neighbouring disorder and transformed into a new order.
In the realm of Lidia Afanasyevna’s God, science and art would be there to approach the structures of the divine order in an infinite process. Art would have the task of conveying a sense of the harmonies that hold God’s creation together. Science, on the other hand, would be there to explore the components of these harmonies in detail. Like two lines that must cross in a time after all time, art and science would thereby coincide with the divine harmony in a final point that could never be reached.
However, since Lidia Afanasyevna’s life time was limited, she had no desire to content herself with what science had already found out today about the structures of divine harmony. Instead, she took the liberty of dreamingly supplementing the existing rudimentary catalogue of knowledge, like a child colouring a picture book.
Thus she imagined that every dark place in the universe was in fact a gateway to another universe. In a future so distant that it coincided with the deepest past, beings who no longer saw any prospects for themselves in their home universe would be able to emigrate through such a gateway to a neighbouring universe. There they would not only dive into another life, but into a completely different order of things, in which they themselves would also assume a completely new form of existence, unimaginable from the perspective of their home universe.

Picture: Leo (Kyraxys): Woman in the Cosmos