The Good Column | The Transformation

I would like to be accepted into a dropout program. I confess: I was a reading extremist. For decades, unnoticed by the public, I spent my life alongside books: I bought them, took them from open bookcases, and received them from like-minded people. I read them, hoarded them, stacked them, and collected them, without remorse, without inhibitions, without scruple. And I did nothing to stop myself.

Now the books must disappear from my life, once and for all. I must free myself from the mindset that extreme reading has implanted in me. I know that now. To anyone who doubts my sincerity, I say: Even heavy hitters like me have the right to rehabilitation and deserve the chance to escape the scene.

It started even before I started school, at the age of four: I would draw letters on paper and then hand the scraps to my mother, who was busy in the kitchen, with the request that she "read" the scribbles to me. "BRGOPFMF!" she would then read aloud, before, mildly amused by my buffoonery, taking off her glasses and handing me the scrap of paper again. That's when I knew: letters are my thing.

Things really started at school: learning to read. The "big Heinz Erhardt book" and Loriot's "Wum and Wendelin," the only two books standing in the wall unit in my parents' living room, were consumed with incredible speed. That's when it all began: the extreme deviance from the norm in reading, the reign of terror over everything printed. Day and night, nose in a book, spine bent, greedy fingers on the paper. More, stronger material was needed at some point. Every Tuesday and Thursday, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., I'd pick up new material from the mobile library: Blyton's "Five Famous," London's "Sea Wolf," Stevenson's "Treasure Island," including some crude material that someone had accidentally put on the wrong shelf ("novels for young people"): "The Candy-Colored Tangerine-Splattered Streamlined Baby" by Tom Wolfe. A book title like an adrenaline rush.

I slipped more and more into the reading scene. Thus began a lifelong, exhausting, extreme reading. All in front of my parents, who looked the other way, let me get away with it, or pretended to know nothing. Then, at school, I was radicalized by unscrupulous teachers who, with a cold smile, gave me access to harder drugs: Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye," Kafka's "Metamorphosis." During college, all barriers finally fell away: "The Castle," "The Sleepwalkers," "The Magic Mountain," "The Man Without Qualities." 400, 700, 900, 1,200 pages. Plus secondary literature for a special kick. It was never enough. There was no stopping me, nothing more to be done. Since my childhood and youth, I had known nothing else. Instead of hashish or heroin, I craved Hacks and Handke, Heine, Henscheid, Herrndorf, Heißenbüttel, and in extreme situations, even Heidegger. I was lost in trillions of so-called primary texts that, even in those moments when heavy, dreamless sleep overcame me late at night, whispered treacherously to me: "Read me."

Yet the real crime was committed by society: Libraries were always open, at least during the day. For the nights, I had built up a huge stash in my room next to my bed. Stacks of material I had acquired during endless afternoon forays into secondhand bookshops, where the material, even the good stuff, was cheap: from Panizza to Genazino, from Karl Kraus to Ror Wolf. Not to forget the Americans with the middle initial: Edgar A. Poe, Joe R. Lansdale, Philip K. Dick.

What followed—as mentioned at the beginning—was a martyrdom lasting many years, an existence as a freak on the fringes of society: obsessed, abnormal, isolated. On the subway and on the bus, I was the only one with a book and without a smartphone. In public parks in the summer, I would sweat, my hands shaking, and spend hours searching for a quiet place away from screaming children, where I could undisturbedly recite 30 to 40 Rolf Dieter Brinkmann poems. As soon as I recited my favorite passages from Oswald Wiener's novel "The Improvement of Central Europe," to someone at an evening party or in a disco, I quickly found myself alone. Not to mention the panic attacks that would immediately follow when I realized I had accidentally left the apartment without my book backpack.

I am not sure whether, in a better future, other lost souls like me should not also be given the opportunity to quit extreme reading.

One thing is certain: I am willing to leave. I want to turn away from the ideology and practice of radical bibliomania. The psychological assessment conducted on me highlights as a "positive factor" the fact that I have made initial progress. It is a laborious and painful process: I have dismantled my Billy bookshelves and had my 14,000-title private library destroyed. I can use my stove again, which for a long time housed the works of Eugen Egner. I can now walk past secondhand bookshops without entering them. This is a first step back to a middle-class existence. A lot is at stake for me. I want to finally become normal: I want to begin a new life as a non-reader.