Of Boiled Eggs and Rocket Science: Textual Experiments in Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin

Told from the perspective of a soft-boiled egg, Sharon Dodua Otoo’s German-language story Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin serves up a portrait of a retired Nazi rocket scientist at his breakfast table. The text came to public attention in 2016 when Otoo was awarded the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for the story’s experimental pastiche of German culture. This article draws on a posthuman framework to consider the story’s central challenge to a society in which whiteness is presented as the norm. By exploring the story's anthropomorphizing play with narrative perspective, I demonstrate how Otoo moves beyond bourgeois satire to unmask racist categories which ensure that privilege goes unnoticed. Decolonial perspectives, as well as concepts from the materialist thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, will be employed to illuminate the materialist politics of Otoo’s decentring of the white masculine subject, revealing how instead the text foregrounds material forces that act on bodies, both human and nonhuman.