Why are nine minutes of Peter Alexander enough time to be grateful to Günter Grass? Why is forgetting a strenuous exercise, repression hard work? Do ghosts arise from our fear of the past? And could it be that Daniel Kehlmann, who as a child was plagued with nightmares for nights on end by a book, became a writer precisely because of this? These and other questions are the focus of his five impressively clear and virtuosically composed lectures, which he, as holder of Germany's oldest and most renowned guest chair for poetics, held at Frankfurt's Goethe University in summer 2014. With a Shakespeare quotation as title - "Come, spirits that you listen to murderous thoughts" - they carry you off into literary shadow worlds full of twilight and echoes, trapdoors and webs. Daniel Kehlmann shows how much the echoing horrors of the German Ve.