Recommendations of the Editorial team
The literary criticism of Marco Wanda’s debut work “That We Even Exist” was overwhelmingly positive. Zsolnay Verlag, which belongs to the renowned Hanser publishing house in Munich, describes the Viennese rock singer’s first book as a “literary self-portrait and a captivatingly honest book about life.”
Now the eloquent inner world opus, which boasts a great deal of pathos, melancholy and self-reflection, is receiving heavy barrage from the Waterkant.
Under the Instagram headline: “About collegiality. Trigger warning: depiction of violence,” the long-time concert booker from Hamburg puts the Wanda work in a far less artistic corner.
Backseat PR maker Sebastian Król is reacting to Wanda’s accusations in his quasi-novel, garnished with drastic torture fantasies, that it was the live agency that forced the band into “an overfulfilled tour schedule”. There is also talk of crude drawings made by a certain person at the company showing him being inflicted with pain.
“It is clear that this is about me, and I ask myself whether I am too biased to use these lines as unbearable. (…) My lawyer put it this way: Violation of human dignity is not covered by freedom of expression and being made the object of murder and torture fantasies is the greatest possible devaluation that a human being can experience.”
Marco Wanda doesn’t want to have anything canceled
There has already been an exchange about this with legal support. There will be no deletion of introspective torture fantasies, says the Wanda camp. The publisher, in turn, is deliberately keeping the ball low in this case and hopes that the matter ultimately comes to nothing.
The obvious “disappointment” of the booker, for whose success he “wore himself out”, is contrasted here with the big ego of Marco Wanda, who does not want to let his epoch-making grand speech be spoiled by (quite seriously) criticism from the sidelines.