Quelle Arteeste!

I’ll be happy when she’s dumpster diving like most Berliners her age.

The daughter of a celebrated literary über-dude, who was fawned over for being about the 9 782nd person to rip off the childhood passive self-pitying anguish theme from the 1980’s move “Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo” has been nailed for sourcing her Tsunami of the literary season from a blogger.

She is the daughter of a famous German professor and at 17, her best-selling debut novel about sex, drugs and teenage self-discovery is already in its third edition, only weeks after being published. With her book also just nominated for a major literary prize, some have begun to label Helene Hegemann insufferably precocious.

Or rather just an insufferable spud made whole flesh out of the public’s desire for just such a public character, a la Barack Obama. But I digress.

Strangely enough, she’ll probably still get to be a talk-show spittoon for the next 5 decades if the state of European public intellectualism is anything to go by. It might be the strangest kind of meal-ticket you can imagine – sort of like a Truman Capote thing without really having to accomplish anything for 30 years at a time.

Yet Ms Hegemann now faces embarrassing allegations that she stole whole chunks of material for her book from someone else's novel and other sources.

It has emerged that a key inspiration for Ms Hegemann's book was a far less well known novel called Strobo, which has sold only about 100 copies. It is by a 28-year-old Bavarian blogger who writes under the nom de plume of Airen.

Hey, dat bitch owes me money!

Interviewed last week about the charges, Ms Hegemann's defence was simply "I cannot understand what all the fuss is about."

When putting a noble face on plagiarism in the most predictable way possible by calling theft a minor philosophical burden, and airing the Joe Biden defense.

"This novel follows the aesthetic principle of intertextuality and may contain further excerpts,"

Hm. I was just about to sat that, the very moment before I was going to ask: “WHY THE HELL SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT HER FEELINGS!”

But if the young writer's ego had swollen at the praise for her work, it has now been dramatically punctured. For the charges of precocity pale in comparison to the torrent of criticism

As to what she should do at this point to ‘transtexualize’ her generation, and possibly understand them, she could join them for a while:

"Young people put on their Che Guevara hoodies and go containering for a couple of years," Bergstedt said.

And be more honest about how she roams around the trashcans of other peoples’ minds.