An administrative error becomes geopolitical reality, and the Holy Roman Empire begins, quite inadvertently, to re-emerge.
The Profane Lance is a satirical political novel set in a world where bureaucratic misunderstandings acquire a life of their own. In a Vienna government ministry, Section Chief Franz Xaver Hohenegg attends a creative-writing seminar and drafts a fictitious administrative document proposing that Austria present Donald Trump with a gilded replica of the Holy Lance as a symbolic gesture in support of transatlantic relations. Intended merely as an exercise in imaginative thinking for civil servants, the document sounds too plausible to remain without consequences.
Through misunderstanding, caution and institutional momentum, the draft begins to circulate. Government departments, journalists, diplomats and intelligence services gradually become involved — not because they necessarily believe the proposal is genuine, but because no one is willing to risk ignoring something that might be.
The Profane Lance explores bureaucracy as a machine for producing narratives, symbols as political currency, and a world in which things become real not because people believe in them, but because they begin to act as though they were already true.
Published online in weekly instalments, in the tradition of the nineteenth-century feuilleton.
Read The Profane Lance — a new chapter each week.