About the work
“Man kann auch in die Höhe fallen” (One Can Also Fall Upwards) is the sixth and so far final volume of Joachim Meyerhoff's autobiographical novel cycle “Alle Toten fliegen hoch”; it was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch on 7 November 2024. The title goes back to a quotation from Friedrich Hölderlin. For the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, Jan Bosse turned the novel into a solo for the actress Anne Müller, which premiered in the Kleines Haus in May 2026; Matthias Flake accompanies the evening at the grand piano.
Plot
The narrator, an actor and writer in his mid-fifties, had hoped to make a fresh start in Berlin after suffering a stroke in Vienna, but the city wears him down and his work barely succeeds any more. After an incident at his young son's birthday party he leaves Berlin and moves for a few weeks to his mother, who is over eighty and leads an idiosyncratic, self-determined life in the countryside not far from the sea. There he intends to write a novel about the theatre entitled “Scham und Bühne” (Shame and Stage). Falling into the rhythm of her days between the garden, swimming in the sea and an evening whiskey, he gradually finds his way out of anger and nervousness and recalls grotesque episodes from his early years on stage.
Cultural significance
The novel became a bestseller and was widely praised: in Die Zeit, Adam Soboczynski called it Meyerhoff's most literary and demanding book, and Eva Menasse described it on ZDF's “Das literarische Quartett” as a joyful read. The Karlsruhe stage version was reviewed by nachtkritik.de and Die Deutsche Bühne.