The Profane
Lance

The Profane Lance is a satirical political novel about an administrative error that becomes geopolitical reality, while the Holy Roman Empire begins, quite inadvertently, to re-emerge.

In a Vienna government ministry, Section Chief Franz Xaver Hohenegg, attending a creative-writing seminar, drafts a fictitious administrative document: Austria is to present Donald Trump with a gilded replica of the Holy Lance as a symbolic gesture in support of transatlantic relations. The text is intended as an exercise in imaginative thinking for civil servants. But it sounds too real to remain without consequences.

Through misunderstanding, caution and institutional momentum, the document begins to circulate. Some departments treat it as a preliminary proposal, others as a diplomatic signal; a journalist picks up traces of it. Before long, governments, media organisations, diplomats and intelligence services begin to respond — not because they believe the project is real, but because no one is willing to risk ignoring a development that might be.

The Profane Lance is about bureaucracy as a machine for producing narratives, symbols as political currency, and a present in which things become true not because people believe in them, but because they begin to behave as though they were true already.