Memoirs of a Survivor

I always wanted to tell stories in favor of a rich life, yet I tell of death. One should set this book aside. It doesn’t fit its time. The lightness within it seems more fleeting than the sorrow. But perhaps I’m mistaken.

Yes, at this point the narrator, Hans Pleschinski, is mistaken himself. With “Portrait of an Invisible” he has produced a book about AIDS that never drowns in melancholy. Precisely for that reason, this novel from 2002, which has now been reissued, still fits—alarmingly well—“its time” in 2026 as well.

Pleschinski sketches a panorama of the 1970s and 1980s: postwar Germany, both East and West; Munich’s art and theater scenes; a life lived between excess and existential fear, between sexual freedom and luxury. But above all, he tells of a generation of gay men whose newly won confidence was shaken by HIV. “There were moments of oppression and moods in which the thought of continuing to live was more unbearable than the thought of death and redemption.” Yet this darkness never wholly overtakes the book. Instead, the novel is threaded with a stubborn, peculiar joy of living. At the same time, Pleschinski shows, with piercing clarity, how fear of contagion spreads and how homosexuality becomes progressively stigmatized—a motif that feels disquietingly current in a Europe veering to the right.

“Ghost Conversations” with the Dead Partner

The titular “Invisible” is the gallery owner Volker Kinnius, the partner of Pleschinski who died as a result of AIDS. The book is a gentle, reverent obituary for him. In the midst of these social shifts, there stands a relationship that lasts for 23 years—sometimes openly, sometimes more exclusive, but always defined by closeness, jealousy, and mutual dependence. Notably, the narrator is almost learned about him solely through his relationship with Volker. When he recounts affairs or desire, it is often in retrospect, like a confession. The terms for Volker also shift over time: friend, companion, eventually “wreck.” They respond with resentment to each other’s affairs—even though their relationship is perhaps the only stable constant in a book that is in constant flux.

Again and again, Pleschinski leads “Ghost Conversations” with the dead: “You’re becoming invisible, Volker. No, fluorescent. A glow along your silhouette.” It is precisely in these moments that the novel’s great strength becomes evident: its exact observational eye and the tangible tenderness for a man whom the narrator knew for decades. These memories are complemented by excerpts from Volker’s diaries. “I reveal deeply personal things,” one passage about the diary entries proclaims. What emerges is less a private soul portrait and more the image of a man who devoted himself entirely to art, culture, and pleasure. Especially telling: “The virus could at best affect the body. I think it had too much culture to chew through.”

Impressive Portrait of a Beloved Person

As the tale unfolds, Pleschinski continually moves back into his own past: Munich’s bohemian scene of the seventies, theater and artist circles, the dazzling milieu of the era’s gay life. His apartment becomes, at times, a “men’s den,” with new names, artists, musicians, and writers constantly appearing. “Naturally, the all-encompassing music typically triumphed over poetry and its events.” At the same time, the novel brushes against historical abysses, for example when the Nazi director Veit Harlan and his pathologizing of homosexuality surface.

But that very absence of a formal chapter structure and the collage-like montage is also a weakness of the book: it can feel abrupt and disjointed. It’s often hard to tell where you are; almost no traditional time-jumps are present because the book rarely dwells in one place or period for long. The constant dropping of names of long-deceased artist figures can be tiresome—perhaps a matter of generation, perhaps literary vanity. Additionally, the milieus Pleschinski portrays—“niece of a Reich colonial minister, son of the court marshal, electrician’s wife”—often remain startlingly uncritical.

And yet, the “Portrait of an Invisible” exerts a singular effect. The novel is a melancholic, sometimes overripe, yet often very beautiful “Bohemian Rhapsody” about art, theater, desire, and loss. Above all, it is the moving portrait of a beloved person—and of a world that is almost gone. In the end, it leaves a book that oscillates between moments of happiness, catastrophe, and life-affirming audacity—the memories of someone who survived. On May 23, 2026, Hans Pleschinski will celebrate his 70th birthday.