Luise Meier: Hyphen

19.05.2025

Luise Meier's novel Hyphen (2024) met with a positive response. One person told how she had read it on holiday shortly after it was published and was completely immersed in the world of the novel. Other participants were delighted with the author's humour and ingenuity. Although the theme of “work” is not exposed, the novel revolves around the different forms of community based on new forms of collective labour.

How is it possible to imagine work that does not lead to exploitation and that does not isolate people but brings them together? This is one of the central questions that the text attempts to answer. The communist dream of a classless society is realised through a global blackout. In a world in which the internet can no longer connect people, people are once again focussing on themselves. But this is not enough. A fungus is needed to eradicate people's aggressive instincts and make them sensitive to their fellow human beings.

The mushroom and its spores sparked a discussion about the role of nature in the novel. Communism without electricity, which utopian thinking longs for, celebrates the return to nature, into whose biological cycles humans are reintegrated. Some participants saw this as a vision of a new communism that abolishes the separation of man and nature. Others suspected that behind the façade of anarchist humour lay a deep despair over the setbacks and defeats of the past, which left unhealed wounds on the communist idea.

Quite a few members of the reading group also expressed reservations about the intoxicating effect of the mushrooms, which contradicted the idea of emancipation. In the end, however, everyone was positive about a novel that still had a vision to convey in a dark time. A question one might ask after reading the novel is whether mushroom communism might be better off without humanity, which perhaps doesn’t deserve it.