Nach Köln

How does a person who has spent his entire life questioning every authority tell the story of his life?

Konrad Boehmer was one of the most uncompromising composers and musical thinkers of the postwar European avant-garde—and a storyteller of extraordinary literary power. In *Nach Köln*, he looks back with biting wit, disarming honesty, and often pitch-black humor on his childhood amid nights of bombing, flight, and postwar Germany.

His memories take us from the turmoil of the immediate postwar period to the Cologne music scene of the 1950s and 1960s, to the Darmstadt Summer Courses, and to the legendary WDR Electronic Studio. Boehmer encounters Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Theodor W. Adorno, and many other influential figures of New Music—but rather than erecting monuments, he tells of people, vanities, power struggles, and the contradictions of an era that claimed to reinvent music.

At the same time, *Nach Köln* is the story of a child of war whose sarcasm often serves only as a mask for a deep vulnerability. This personal side is revealed through the moving conversation between his sister Ursula and Wolfgang Hamm, which complements the autobiographical text and lends an unexpectedly intimate dimension to the image of the combative intellectual.

The result is far more than just a composer’s autobiography. *After Cologne* is a literary chronicle of the war and the postwar era, of art and politics, of family, memory, and the life of a man who was never satisfied with simple answers—provocative, intelligent, funny, and moving all at once.

The book will be released on October 31 and is available for pre-order now!