I studied physics not literature, of course, so I’m self-taught as a reader and, as it happens, as a writer, too. Ad (a): Among German writers, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Freud and Nietzsche come to mind immediately. Kafka for his preference and mastery of the absurd and (as a stylist) the minimalist scene even in his novels. Thomas Mann and Freud live on the same mental page for me—Mann being the literary executor of Freud’s ideas. Freud himself was a master essayist: his German prose leaves little to be desired, especially his later anthropological works on religion and culture. I still love to read it though I may not agree with him. In all of these, but perhaps most in Nietzsche’s often overheated writing, there’s a wonderful depth and passion. Warms the heart.

Among the more recent authors, I have recently discovered (and enjoy) Arno Schmidt (his work is now out at The Dalkey Archive in English), and I’ve always liked Heinrich Böll and the Swiss authors Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt. But Schmidt is rather too experimental and cares too little about narrative and the fictional dream to be an example, and the others do seem a little dated to me now. Though, when I was younger, I fed on Frisch to find my place as a man in this world, and on Dürrenmatt because he was so refreshingly unromantic and dark (while much of German literature since Goethe has a tendency to cloying sentimentality). In fact, to me Kafka is the only German author who’s aged well—and his work has merged with our culture to such a degree that I cannot read him now, I think, because it’s just too much like stepping into the same river again and again. I believe E.M. Forster’s estimation of English writers (in “Aspects of the Novel”) is true for German writers as well: they don’t quite make the cut when it comes to lasting literary philosophy of humanity, which is what I most care about and aspire to. This may come as an odd statement from a flash writer but when I look at my flash I see novels behind it—the flash fictions are the parts of a large stained-glass window that have already revealed themselves to me, the rest is still in the dark. And in this dark, pre-modern Russian and modern Irish (the "holy comic spirit" J.O.B.) and French writers carry the light ahead, but not my own countrymen, alas—Robert Musil (his wonderful “Man without properties”) excepted. (Though why do I say “alas”: in our time, for great writing, mother tongue may matter less compared to being plugged into the global collective unconscious). As a flash writer, Swiss writer Robert Walser influenced me long before I wrote my own flash. I'm aware of other modern German writers of course, but they just don't get to me though I'll keep trying, yes I will...

Ad (b): I don’t dream in any particular language as far as I’m aware...but when I wake up with material that I later use for writing, it's in English; so if there's any German on my unconscious mind that I might mine for fiction, it's more deeply hidden…In my daily writing routine, German and English do intersect explicitly when I (as described in the interview with Lucien Senna) translate from the English original to German and back during editing. Also, I usually write in my journal early in the morning before I begin to draft, and the journal entries start in German and eventually turn to English, which is the sign that I’m ready to roll…on a more mundane sub-editing level, I do have to have a dictionary and a thesaurus at the ready & when I write fast I sometimes will put down the German word and look up the English equivalent later: you simply can’t beat the hard-wiring of your mother tongue...