story". The Süddeutsche Zeitung praised the writing as not only deeply reminiscent of Ernst Jünger, but also as the "most beautiful German prose currently on offer". But the Frankfurter Rundschau reviewer discounted Ich werde hier sein as "simply moronic" and Die Tageszeitung found the text to be too diffuse and incoherent, amounting to just a "drug-clouded scenery" The novel Imperium and its reception Kracht's 2012 novel Imperium follows on from Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten both in its very favourable reception by critics and in the way that it presents a reimagining of history that incorporates actual persons and historical reality while playing fast and loose with dates and details. In this sense the novel bears some similarity to Die Vermessung der Welt (Measuring the World) by Daniel Kehlmann, an author with whom Kracht corresponded while composing the distinctive narrative style of Imperium. The novel follows the travails of the historical figure August Engelhardt in the Bismarck Archipelago (now Papua New Guinea) at the beginning of the twentieth century. Engelhardt is an idealistic German emigrant who establishes a plantation on an island and founds a colony of cocoivores – radical vegetarians nourished exclusively on coconuts. Engelhardt's history is interspersed with cameo appearances by other figures from German cultural history, such as Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. The first of Kracht's novels not to be narrated in the first-person, the omniscient narrator informs us of the protagonist's thoughts and contextualises Engelhardt's life within the broader scope of twentieth-century history. Imperium created a stir in Germany even before its publication. Writing in Der Spiegel, critic Georg Diez suggested that the novel "above all shows the author's proximity to extreme right-wing ideas". The accusation of racism levelled at Kracht was widely repudiated by other figures in the literary industry, including publisher Helge Malchow and fellow authors, such as Daniel Kehlmann, Feridun Zaimoğlu, Necla Kelek and nobel prize winner Elfriede Jelinek.<ref>See 'Offener Brief an die Spiegel-Chefredaktion zu Kracht] , 17. February 2012.</ref> Reviews of Imperium in the German-language press praised the novel's language, and it has been favourably compared to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in terms of both theme and style. In 2012, Kracht was awarded the literature prize for the Swiss canton of Bern and also the Wilhelm Raabe literature prize. In the words of the awarding jury, Imperium "balances on the border between humour and