In Imperium, Kracht tells the true story of radical Nuremberg vegetarian and nudist August Engelhardt (1877-1919), who embarked on a voyage in 1902 to run a coconut plantation and found an Order of the Sun on Kabakon Island in the Bismarck Archipelago. Misunderstood in his home country, he turned his back on the Western world, which he saw as being inevitably doomed to destruction on account of its meat consumption and clothing to find a new Germany in the remote island paradise. It was intended to be a step back to the most exquisite barbarianism . For a time, he was followed by a number of disciples who were also looking for a place in the sun. They were converted to his doctrine that human salvation was dormant in the coconut, since anyone who only ate coconuts would become like God, would become immortal . (..) Krachts novel is a highly artistic and also a mannered narrative experiment that introduces a murmuring evocator of the imperfect whose ironic half-distance is what makes it possible for him to break down into its elements the ideological concoction of the epoch presented. After all, it was the Wilhelminian Empire that saw the emergence of all the crude ideas between esotericism and life reform, nudism and conservative revolution that unfurled in the twentieth century. (&) The scandal of this novel, Krachts fourth and best, is that historical coincidence decides how seeds grow whether someone becomes a slightly wacky palm grove autocrat or a perpetrator of genocide.
