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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/hawkshaw1024 on 2025-08-02 18:59:13+00:00.
This post is about a series of events that rocked the German literary world in 2010. It’s about becoming too famous too quickly, and about the fickle love of the critics. In a way it’s a follow-up to my post about Wetlands, because the book in question could be understood as a Wetlands-like. (That thread also suggested Axolotl Roadkill as a topic. Shout out to the commenters!) It’s much less gross, though, and you don’t really need to know about Wetlands.
CONTENT NOTE: The author of Axolotl Roadkill had a traumatic childhood, including parental neglect, alcoholism, and the loss of a loved one. The book itself includes fictional depictions of drug use, and (consensual) sexual encounters between a 16-year-old and adults.
Sources are easy to find, but in German. Fancy German at that, with convoluted sentences that span twelve lines. I’ve taken some liberties in translation, trying to preserve the overall tone and meaning over the literal phrasing.
(0) Background information
Germany is a medium-sized country in central Europe, and Berlin is its capital. In the words of former mayor Klaus Wowereit, Berlin is “poor but sexy” - cosmopolitan, artistic, and counter-cultural. Gentrification has erased some of that, but if you’re a creative type, then you could certainly do worse than Berlin.
A famous location is the Berghain, which markets itself as “the world’s most exclusive club.” There’s a whole cottage industry of people who sell you One Weird Trick to get you in. The Berghain looms large in Berlin-based fiction, and stories will pivot on the protagonist getting into (or failing to get into) the club.
Axolotls are neotenic salamanders native to the Mexican Central Valley. They’re famous for maturing without undergoing metamorphosis, keeping their gills and living in water all their lives. They’re cute little critters, and you can even keep one as a pet if you know what you’re doing.
Various different news outlets will come up in this post. I’ll bring up partisan lean and perceived quality when quoting from them, but this doesn’t end up being a “left vs. right” story.
Alright. Let’s learn about how Millenials ruined literature, shall we?
(1) Introduction (2007-2009)
Helene Hegemann is a German author. She was born in 1992, to mother Brigitte Isemeyer (a graphic artist) and father Carl-Georg Hegemann (a famous playwright.) They divorced when Helene was three years old, and her father moved across the country, to Berlin. Helene had a pretty hard childhood. Brigitte Isemeyer struggled with mental health issues and alcoholism her whole life. Per this interview, Helene felt obligated to lie and to cover for her mother. When she was 13, her mother died of an aneurysm. Still a young teenager, Helene moved to Berlin to stay with her father, who had since become a professor of dramaturgy.
She more or less stopped going to school, but took well to the creative scene at the Volksbühne, reinventing herself as a theatre kid. Helene set about writing her own play, resulting in Ariel 15 - a coming-of-age story about a lost teenager who drifts aimlessly through Berlin. It deals with being lost in between the world of childhood and the world of adults. (Like a mermaid on the beach, you see.) Her friends and colleagues at the Volksbühne first performed it in 2007, and it was met with critical praise. The Deutschlandfunk turned it into an award-winning audio drama a year later.
Hegemann, still a teenager, built on this early success. She obtained a grant from the German Federal Cultural Foundation and used it to make a short arthouse movie, Torpedo. This was another coming-of-age drama, again about a traumatised teenager, who has an absentee father and feels lost after washing up in Berlin. It premiered in 2008 and won several awards, once again delighting critics. Hegemann obtained a GED-like thing, completing her mandatory schooling.
She wanted to write something long-form next. These efforts yielded a novel - Axolotl Roadkill.
(2) Helene Hegemann, saviour of literature (January 2010)
Axolotl Roadkill is really more of a mood piece, but here’s an attempt at a summary of the plot content it has.
Mifti is a 16-year-old girl who lives in Berlin and rarely goes to school. She’s smart but lost, and keeps a diary, writing about her life with a deep sense of cynicism and alienation. Mitzi shares an apartment with her half-sister and her half-brother. Mifti’s mother is dead, and their shared father is absent from their lives. He does pay the bills, being a successful artist, providing the family with a middle-class lifestyle. Their social environment is described as - well, doomers basically. Left-wing radicals who never do anything. (Except the father, a “nauseatingly effective” activist.)
The book is mostly about a drug-fueled tour through Berlin’s nightclubs. Mifti has unwise and meaningless sex with a lot of people, including a random taxi driver, but also her best friend Ophelia (who is 36.) Mifti has an ongoing affair with a photographer, Alice, who is 43. At one point, Mifti acquires an axolotl, and carries it around in a water-filled plastic bag.
She hangs out with a lot of sketchy people and tries all the party drugs she can. This just deepens Mifti’s sense of alienation, leading to a terrible crash-out in the Berghain’s bathroom.
Mifti attends a wedding and sleeps for a full day. By the time she gets home, her father has discovered her diary. He is so shocked by the contents that he actually decides to take parenting seriously for a minute. He tries to talk to Mifti, but she refuses any help and runs away from home. She moves in with Alice, the 43-year-old photographer.
This book dropped at just the right time. This was 2010, and the German literary world had just about recovered from the aftershocks of Wetlands. Publishers were ready for a new controversial hit, and Axolotl Roadkill seemed promising. A fucked-up coming-of-age novel, by a young female writer with some critical endorsements? Yes, please. Ullstein Publishing snapped up the rights, based on the exposé alone, and sent the manuscript to the printers the second it was done.
A gamble, certainly, but it seemed to pay off. The first wave of reviews was overwhelmingly positive, citing the book’s sharp language and its gritty authenticity. Maxim Biller, writing for the “high-brow conservative” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), was enchanted by the sheer bleakness:
Here’s another novel that everyone over 30 should avoid. It’s mean, sad, perverted, saccharine and bloodthirsty, full of desperately unsympathetic people, whoare all far more beautiful than the average reader who was recommended the book as a sort of “Baby’s First Wetlands.” (…) We’re still children, says Helene Hegemann, but you want us to know all about anal sex and the nouvelle vague and cancer. (…) You close the book and you think, poor Mifti, poor axolotl, you have perhaps a year or two left.
Peter Michalzik, in his column for the liberal Frankfurter Rundschau, found it darkly romantic:
The exciting thing about great new novels is that they change your perception of the world. (…) It’s been a long time since we’ve had a debut novel quite as intense as Helene Hegemann’s “Axolotl Roadkill.” She throws a full wagon load of burning energy at our feet. (…) We knew that it’s hard to grow up, but despite all the novels about this, we didn’t know how intense the struggle for the authentic self can be. And we didn’t know how dark and hopeless this struggle can feel. (…) “Axolotl Roadkill” is more hallucination than story, more vision than writing.
You might expect that the right-wing boulevard press would complain about the sexual content in the book. But… surprisingly, no. Die BILD, a right-wing nationalist rag, struck a fairly neutral tone, neither praising nor condemning the book.
17-year-old wonder-ch…
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