Depression, crime and gore: the abysses of the 'dark web' come to the surface

There are parts of the year and a half it took him to finish Creep (AdN), his second novel, that Philipp Winkler (Neustadt am Rübenberge, 1986) is unable to remember. "I had fallen into a depression, and probably writing the book didn't help," he recalls. "The story he tells is very dark." On this day in early May it is a bright morning in Hannover, the closest city to his home in the countryside, where he lives with his partner and his rescued dog, but by that 2020, in full confinement, the sun – at least, in a metaphorical sense – did not shine enough. "At first I didn't realize it, but the confinement played an important role," he says in a reflective talk. "The derisory support given to artists made me realize that Germany sees itself as a country of thinkers and innovation, but in reality people still have as references Goethe and Schiller, figures who are long gone. Besides, why should I find myself a separate job so I can afford to write, if that's already a job? That idea blows my mind."

In contemporary Germany, his name came to the fore in 2016 with the publication of his debut, Hooligan (in Spanish also came out in AdN in 2017), a story that began while studying creative writing at university and ended up being crowned as an unexpected commercial success for which he made a theatrical adaptation and now prepares another for the cinema. If in that title he entered the sordid world of violence of football fans, in Creep he sneaks back into a hole as much or more gloomy: the one that opens in the depths of the dark web, the dark internet, that virtual underground where camels, hitmen, pornographers and all kinds of shady businesses coexist.

"I could have written about social media, about Twitter and Instagram, which I think are even more dangerous than what I describe in my book. It's a totally different monster," concedes the writer sitting on a secluded terrace, black attire, blond hair pulled back in a ponytail and blue tattoos poking out of his hands and neck. "But if I decided not to write about people who become addicted to social media, it's because I feel closer to people who consume gore videos than to Instagram influencers. Personally, I hate all that. People don't realize the damage that networks have done to society, and that's no secret either. There are a lot of Silicon Valley workers who talk about it in Ted Talks and things like that."

In Creep —which was published in Germany after a novel, Carnival, which has not been translated into Spanish—, Winkler recreates two stories with a multitude of links in common that, however, never intersect. Perhaps because its two protagonists live isolated from the world in a radical, devastating way, or perhaps because their link is the internet itself, that network that, it is supposed, ties us all with an invisible knot. Fanni, who lives in Germany, works for a surveillance company. The family he constantly spies on through security cameras is the closest thing he has to a human bond, although it is difficult to gauge the callus of his emotions after years of consuming videos dotted with summary executions, brutal accidents and dismembered bodies. All real. In Japan, Junya is a hikikomori, one of hundreds of thousands of people who—not only in that country—decide to seclude themselves indefinitely in a room, imprisoned by choice in their bubble of solitude. Cruelly harassed at school, he now spends the day wandering shadowy forums from where he draws instructions to commit crimes armed with a hammer and mask. In Creep's draft, there came to be a third character based in the United States who was eventually left out, although the book, Winkler believes, "works well" without him. Unattended by their loved ones, devoid of any warmth, Fanni and Junya have disconnected their lives from tangible reality to a point of no return.

The German writer Philipp Winlkler.Katrin Ribbe

Set in the desolate landscape of hypermodernity, Creep's background does not fail to propose a review of the immemorial litany of psychological pain: the incurable wounds of an unhappy childhood, the hunger for affection and the thirst for belonging, the wandering based on blind sticks in search of a meaning to live. Seeing the spiral of despair that is unleashed in the pages of the book, it is not surprising that his writing ended up affecting the author. "I think I've actually had depression my whole life, which happens that I didn't realize what it was. I come from a working-class family, where you don't talk about things like depression," Winkler confesses. As a writer who did not grow up between books, but with the noise of the television on at all hours, he now takes advantage of that influence that the audiovisual printed on him to write the script for the film based on Hooligan. "Working for cinema is a good distraction from literature, where there are a lot of people with huge egos, and I don't exclude myself," he says. "But you can have a huge ego and treat people well or behave like an asshole for no reason."

To recreate the stories that thrive in the most inaccessible corners of the Internet, the writer documented himself by visiting pages and forums, although he already had some references. "I grew up with rotten.com, the site where splatter gore websites come from, so I already knew that world," he says, "but to prepare the book I spent a lot of time on gore subreddits [categories within the Reddit.com web talking to people, and I also contacted hikikomori from places like Brazil. "Both hikikomori and people who participate in depersonalization subreddits are real people with real problems, so I didn't want to use their stories to benefit my book. Although, of course, they were a source of inspiration." When reading how Fanni mechanically consumes images of ultraviolence that end up being played on a loop in her head, it is inevitable to wonder about the reason for this drive. The writer threw that question on the Net, and although not everyone was able to verbalize a justification, he was met with a repeated response: "I was often told that it reminds them how precious life is, their life, and how it can end in an instant."

That Fanni is a woman in a subculture where men abound is a striking fact. Even more so considering that Winkler's previous novel, Hooligan, is also set in a testosterone-laden environment. "I wanted to try to create a female lead, because I had never done it before, and I think I was especially respectful of the fact that I am a cis man and not a woman," the author abounds. "I don't exactly bring a female perspective, because in the book there is no perspective from the self, but I think the language of the narrator is very close to who Fanni and Junya are, it is colored by how they see themselves."

Another noteworthy issue in terms of the style of the novel is the use of a multitude of terms in Japanese to represent the universe where the Tokyo character moves and others in English related to technology to recreate the German, an ambivalent decision that on the one hand is enormously relevant to reflect how it is spoken not only in the jargon of the internet, but also, increasingly, in the day to day, and that on the other poses a challenge when approaching reading. "It's funny, because there are people who tell me that they found it difficult to get into the book because of this issue, and others who say that nobody talks like that, but I asked two people who work in the sector and they assured me that people talk like that all the time."

While sipping coffee and another rolling cigarette on a terrace in a street near the center of Hanover, flanked by elegant stately homes and located at the entrance of a lush urban forest, Winkler summarizes the various projects that have occupied him today. In addition to the adaptation of Hooligan, he is working on a second script that, at first, was going to be based on Carnival, his nouvelle, but that has ended up transforming into an original story. In addition, he is going to write "seriously" a future book, which starts from the reading of the complete collection of stories by Richard Ford as a source of inspiration. "I read it because my agent thought it would be useful," he says. "But now I'm reading Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, which are 21 books about sailors and naval battles set in the Napoleonic Wars. I like it. It's totally different from what I've read. It's very authentic and fantastically documented, although it's also quite racist and sexist, because those were other times. But I truly think it's different from what you can find in literature today, even though old white men are still writing," he laughs. And he realizes: "What's more, one day I'll be an old white man too."

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