Jok U Lair

Cloning the Devil Jok U Lair

Jok U. Lair's topic is fascism, its hotbeds, and its implications, including criminality and moral hazard. In his family saga, the author identifies the German Gemütlichkeit (coziness) as one of the cauldrons of Hitlerism and modern times' emergence of neo-fascism. He acquaints us with protagonists of three generations of German families from the Roaring Twenties in Berlin until today. Numerous bourgeois philistines, regular citizens, and self-proclaimed artists of questionable caliber populate the author's ninety-one anecdotal episodes. The occurrences the author describes unmask fascism not only as the subtle sublimation of psychic derailments but also as the externalization of incestuous narcissism. His thesis is: Wherever xenophobic ideas emerge from the shit of the bulwark mentality of the harmful mediocrity of feel-thinking, hypertrophic inclusions paired with extreme tendencies of exclusion are prone to discarding into violence. Jok U. Lair drags the skeletons out of the closets of the cozy homes of a handful of German families. The revelations are as shocking as they are typical for the hidden fascism among German people from all walks of life. Suicide as a gratuitous act is by far the least immoral escape from taking responsibility for one's life. The moral balances of the characters with whom the author acquaints us are a shame, to say the least. The allusiveness of the pen name paired with the book's title and subtitle laced with innuendo, mirror the sarcastic and cynical attitude with which the author distances himself from the mostly weird content of this challenging book. The ninety-one anecdotal episodes complemented by a handful of poems and an appendix of high political topicality do not let the reader breathe calmly. They do not allow him or her to enjoy the flow of the language. Worse than that, they forbid them to evade being fascinated or, at least, captured by the unfolding of perverse sexual, political, and artistic preferences. The obscene biases of the petty bourgeois, the stereotypical members of fascist societies, are ubiquitous. The staccato of ninety-one pieces of literature will exhaust the reader, will challenge her or him to oppose. The chain of episodes, covering almost one hundred years of German history, held together by the red thread of incest and narcissism, the igniter and combustion agents of fascism and violence, keep the reader busy to follow the questionable characters through the decades of disasters of horrible dimensions. The reader will have to endure Jok U. Lair's defying attitude and his self-torturing, masochistic lust, and intellectual desire for witnessing the decline and fall of societies and the morbidity of the decay and decomposition of his anti-heroes.