Herbert Kapfer: The Planet of Discreet Love

Munich 1975: Bea and Kai follow the radical call of ecofeminism to end men’s domination over the planet. Their love relationship becomes a testing ground for an upheaval of patriarchal structures. In his novel The Planet of Discreet Love, Herbert Kapfer tells the story of two young people who hope that their intimate shift of power might trigger a planetary revolution. The ZKM invites you to a reading and conversation with the author.

The novel takes us into Munich of the 1970s: Bea and Kai, in their early twenties and part of the commune kollektiv 7, dare to attempt a radical experiment. They overturn power structures. Bea and Kai begin a sado-masochistic relationship in which he is the servant and bringer of joy, and she the mistress and queen. For the German studies student and the high-school dropout, their passionate play of submission and exaltation becomes a lived model—a first act toward realizing the feminist “mutation” in the world.

“Action and theory—I don’t know this kind of interweaving.” (Elfriede Jelinek)

Kapfer shapes this scenario as a chamber play in seven acts, uniquely intertwining narrative and theory: voices of ecofeminism—above all Françoise d’Eaubonne, author of the classic Feminism or Death (1974)—appear alongside the artistic provocations of VALIE EXPORT and Peter Weibel, the utopian social visions of Charles Fourier, and the linguistic experiments of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann. The result is a text that brings to life the intellectual atmosphere and hopes of the 1970s. Herbert Kapfer, who proves himself a “masterful orchestrator of ideas” (Süddeutsche Zeitung), tells with The Planet of Discreet Love the story of a fraught relationship at the dawn of a new era and the hope of sparking a “planetary movement against phallocracy.”

The conversation with Herbert Kapfer will be moderated by Margit Rosen (ZKM).

Herbert Kapfer, born in Ingolstadt in 1954, is an author and publicist. From 1996 to 2017, he headed the Department of Radio Drama and Media Art at Bavarian Broadcasting (BR). For 1919. Fiktion (2019), he was awarded the Tukan Prize.