Martina Hefter Hey guten Morgen, wie geht es dir?
[Hey, Good Morning, How Are You?]

In the first few minutes of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” we see the end and beginning of the world collapse into one. On the soundtrack: the gentle flap, flap, flap of helicopters floating by in sync with the Doors meandering hypnotic guitar from the song „The End“. The accompanying image: a bleak wall of jungle palm trees, silently mutating into a sea of flames from a napalm bomb. We see the landscape of a face resembling a Buddhist ghost superimposed over the scene. Captain Benjamin L. Willard bathed in sweat, is played by the young Martin Sheen: his gaze is blank and directed at the fan fixed to the ceiling. Flap flap flap... The captain awakens in Saigon and flies into the heart of darkness.

That may feel like a smash cut from Benjamin L. Willard to Juno Isabella Flock—the heroine‘s name (or alter ego) of Leipzig-based writer Martina Hefter. Yet how, if not as another ‚Apocalypse Now,‘ are we to read her novel? Juno “was lying on a yoga mat on the floor doing a few scattered abdominal exercises, that was all. Actually, she spent most of her time looking up at the ceiling. At the stucco relief with flowers floating inside several concentric cirlces. It had been painted over so often that they looked like planets rotating in their orbits, day and night.” On the soundtrack: Bing bing bing. That‘s the sound of the Instagram and WhatsApp messages on her cellphone‘s lock screen. When Juno looks at them, she reads or writes sentences like the one of her eponymously named novel: “Hey, good morning, how are you?” Does she even have a choice? She can chat with guys who are likely not who they say they are; she can also block these guys, who are based somewhere in Nigeria and are scheming to wrestle cash out of women from the north, who are as lonely as they are hungry for love. One tap and it’s over before it has even begun.

Meanwhile, a bluish light and the occasional noise of a nursing bed motor comes from the room next door. Here lies the man who Juno knows best and longest of all. He is gravely ill, his name is Jupiter and, as the myth goes, he is Juno’s husband; an ailing king of the gods. Juno suffers from multiple sclerosis and is unable even put on his own shoes. If his toothache, which is so painful at the moment doesn’t go away, he is in danger of a new flare up which ultimately will end in the emergency hospital. And Juno keeps forgetting to post the letter requesting the Copaxone medication that she has to constantly re-apply for. Jupiter needs an injection of this drug every day if he is to survive, and this has been going on since 2008. That makes 5,475 injections to date, if you ignore the leap years. An enormous amount of plastic, especially since it is always Juno who has to take it to the garbage. Jupiter no longer can do so himself.

How will it end? The answer is written in the stars, which point the heroine in the right direction even if they are nearly outshone by Leipzig‘s orange tinted nightlights on the street. When Orion shines in the sky there, it is straight overhead. In the southern hemisphere, however, in “Nigeria, Orion lies almost horizontally all through the night, its arc pointing upwards.” From this south, the most down-and-out half of the world, a young man named Benu shoots his Instagram and WhatsApp messages into orbit. Benu is also the name of the ancient Egyptian god of the dead.

And love scamming? Juno knows all about it, she has long since traversed the valley of tears she has viewed in the various Spiegel Magazine TV reports on YouTube.  In them are interviews with humiliated women confessing how they had suspected the truth, but were already far too deep in their addiction to escape. Their faith in the successful, white businessman with a beautiful profile picture who had contacted them out of the blue on the Internet and sent them vows of love was unshakeable. But then, what a surprise, he got into trouble (car accident, theft, etc.) and needed money. Bank transfer after bank transfer to some Western Union account; there are actually women who had become homeless because of it. And then there are the Nigerian love scammers who speak directly into the Spiegel TV camera, and explain why it is okay to hide behind a fake identity in order to prey on such women. They are the heirs of European colonial rule over Africa; finally somebody had to pay for it.

Juno quickly realizes that the man who contacts her as Owen_Wilson223 is a love scammer, yet Benu, who she exposes, doesn‘t block her as is the norm in such cases, and so a kind of long-distance relationship and an increasingly disturbing game develops with real names, faces and video calls. But is Juno, the writer and queen of the gods, really turning the tables when she tells a love scammer all kinds of lies about her life? Who is stealing time from whom, who is exploiting whom? And does she even unwittingly fall in love? Juno knows at least one thing, just as Scheherezade had known: it only continues as long as the story is being told. And for as long as a sentence doesn’t light up on the display that makes the novel’s title implode: “Hey, are you still there?”

Like all great literature, Monika Hefter's novel ultimately lives from its subject. And yet it is not l’art pour l’art —art for art‘s sake. After all, none of this is irrelevant – nor is it entirely without reason: ageing, illness, loneliness in a relationship that is slowly falling apart, the zest of an insatiable longing and its refuge in art or delusions of grandeur. The prison of monotonous everyday life. But also the irrefutable fact that the problems we experience here make a mockery of the living conditions of those who live in completely different parts of the world. We are speaking here of a huge topic: post-colonialism.

That leaves the question of a con that is not only perpetrated in the narrative. It is the con of a roman á clef novel that seduces the reader into fact-checking and an unfortunately voyeuristic curiosity as to what else might be true beyond the obviously recognizable. The facts: Martina Hefter is 59 years old, a Leipzig-based performance artist, poet and author of three novels to date. Jan Kuhlbrodt, her husband is a year younger than her, lives with Martina Hefter in Leipzig, and is a poet and novelist. He suffers from multiple sclerosis and recently addressed this in his prose volume “Krüppelpassion – oder Vom Gehen”.

Juno and Jupiter? In a postscript to her novel, Martina Hefter writes: “I thank my husband Jan Kuhlbrodt for being there. And that he not only didn’t mind being mistaken here and there for Jupiter in this book, but actually liked the idea. And I thank my beloved daughters Sofia and Maria for being on Earth.” There was no mention of these daughters in the book, for example. The extent to which fiction exploits the truth remains an open question in this roman á clef. Con artists everywhere you look. In Nigeria, they prey on women. In Leipzig, they invent stories. A feat Martina Hefter has succeeded in doing brilliantly here. “Hey, good morning, how are you?“ became a bestseller and won the German Book Prize 2024.