Martin Hentschel
State on Wave by Elmar Hess describes the fictive bio-graphy of the son of a diplomat, Nicolaus Maron. Maron, who in a key dream discovered the depths of a hypnotised mass society as its spiritual leadership , was traumatised even as a child and became increasingly involved in the phantasms of a radical social model dominated exclusively by individual forms of perception, speech and expression. The utopia, actually born from criticism of bureaucratic political and cultural management, in its finals version increasingly tips over into dictatorship that immediately destroys the desired emancipation of personal perception.
Hess’s absurd humour precipitates a multi-faced scenario of social criticism and absurdity of higher order. (…)
Nikolaus v. Wolff
In State on Wave, the individual changes from unsuccessfully defending his individual sphere to successfully attacking prevailing reality. Thrown back on himself, between a fascist class society in heaven (during a dream sequence) an ignorant, stupid culture on earth, Maron takes up the fight against the prevailing social order after his return from heaven. Abstrusely identifying himself as a ship, Maron mows down all resistance as he passes through the institutions, until he finally arrives at the empty space where his own paradox power is based. Only the pop singer Lesha offers Maron a way out of his closed world, which, precisely because it is so closed, is no eager to expand. In the course of the story, however, her success becomes a threat to his ideology: after her last triumphant concert, at which she arrives in a helicopter, Maron has her arrested. Idols are damaging to the development of the ego. The protagonist thus finally closes himself off from the world. The dilemma between implementing political ideals and personal objectives which tend to be taken ad absurdum when they are realised, as they become repressive, is a way for the individual to get his own back on a constructive system. obsession taken to extremes becomes repression. (…)
Elmar Hess reflects the interaction between the world of the individual and collective demands, without being ideological. In his work, opposition to the principle of reality is always playful, and unmasks extremist ideologies as totalitarian.