About the work
Sauhund is the first novel by Lion Christ, a writer born in Bad Tölz in 1994. It was published by Carl Hanser Verlag in August 2023; Christ had received Munich's literary fellowship for the project in 2021 and researched it in part at the Forum Queeres Archiv München. The stage version was developed by director Florian Fischer with Tobias Schuster and the ensemble and premiered at the Münchner Kammerspiele on 5 June 2025, with three performers sharing all the roles.
Plot
In 1983, 21-year-old Flori has finished his civilian service and turns his back on rural Upper Bavaria, where he had to keep his relationship with the carpenter Gregor secret. In Munich he throws himself into the gay scene of bars, discos and drag venues, looking for glamour, adventure and true love, and at times ends up homeless on the street until older friends take him in. In the background AIDS is spreading, and the Bavarian state responds with particularly harsh measures under state secretary Peter Gauweiler; later Flori falls in love with an HIV-positive man.
Cultural significance
Christ sees the novel as a memorial to queer Munich in the first years of AIDS, which he also portrays as a joyful counter-world. The story is told from Flori's point of view, in a language that mixes Bavarian dialect with vivid imagery. Critics of the book were divided: the NZZ praised its empathetic precision, while the Süddeutsche Zeitung found the dialect and ironic distance unconvincing; the premiere of the stage version, by contrast, was received largely favourably by the Munich press.