Wolfgang Müller

In 1980, Müller founded the post-punk group Die Tödliche Doris in West Berlin. Two years later, he published the book Geniale Dilletanten [sic!], which gave its name to an artistic movement. First published in 2012, his bestseller Subkultur Westberlin 1979–1989. Freizeit is now in its 5th edition. For his radio play Séance Vocibus Avium, a reconstruction of the voices of 11 extinct species of birds, he received the Karl Sczuka Prize at the 2009 Donaueschingen Music Days.

‘What nationality do birds have?’, Müller asked himself when he conducted research in Iceland with the Walther von Goethe Foundation in September 2022. His topic of investigation was the male red-necked phalarope (phalaropus lobatus), who is tasked with incubating and rearing its young before reuniting with the female in their winter quarters on the coasts of Saudi Arabia and West Africa.

In 2003, pop theorist Diedrich Diederichsen described Müller as a ‘reverse conceptualist’, while Marcel Beyer, in his prize-giving speech in 2009, called him a ‘misunderstanding scientist’.