The Autobiographical Literary Sausage
Ada Blitzkrieg—real name Clara Carerra, renamed by a younger brother who couldn’t get his mouth around the syllables and settled on "Ada"—is a 27-year-old Berlin writer who claims she hasn’t been outside since September. She doesn’t need to be. Delivery services send her free food in exchange for a mention online, which she’ll provide, because she eats constantly and doesn’t gain weight, which she calls a win-win without any detectable irony. She has a standing policy against smiling in photos. Her online presence is a catalogue of fried things, racing games, and blunt observations about sex. She has the particular self-awareness of someone who decided the only way to survive being herself was to announce it first and loudly.
In December 2012 she published her first book: Dackelkrieg—Rouladen und Rap, self-released, every cent going directly to her. She’d had offers from publishers and turned them all down. It’s my fucking autobiography,
she said. I didn’t want anyone telling me ’cut this’ or ’write more about your first time.’ No. That’s mine.
She calls the book an autobiographical literary sausage
—something built to give the internal chaos a pressure valve. The self-irony is load-bearing. Without it, she says, she’d go to pieces. She hopes her mother still speaks to her after reading it.
She came to Twitter because of her boyfriend. They were living in different cities and he thought it would be fun to see how witty they could be at each other. For a while nobody noticed. The audience arrived after Casper and Prinz Pi—two prominent German rappers—mentioned her account approvingly, and after that it became self-sustaining. By late 2012 she had fifteen thousand followers and was being recognized on the street in Kreuzberg, which still seemed to surprise her each time it happened. I am actually shit as a person,
she said, and people find that likeable.
The best story she told me had nothing to do with the book. Late at night, she and a friend were stoned and resigned to ordering from a mediocre Chinese place because nothing good was still open. Then a new service appeared—launch night, Berlin only, nothing but chicken, full birds and half birds, prices already low and fifty percent off for the opening. They ordered an absurd quantity of fried chicken and ate it watching Blaxploitation films. I still get goosebumps,
she said. That was the internet’s fault in the best possible way.
She’s had stalkers—a few per year, apparently, mentioned in the tone of someone giving a weather report. She stopped fighting back at some point, not as a decision but as an erosion. The volume of meaningless hostile feedback online is so constant that the genuinely threatening stuff stops registering. I’ve just become numb to it,
she said. Which is actually great.
Ask her what she’d do if the internet had never been invented and she doesn’t hesitate: a small farm somewhere remote, a butcher shop, every customer known by first name. She likes animals. She can picture the counter, the regulars, the knife. It’s the inverse of everything she actually does, and she describes it with exactly the same affection.
Her advice for anyone who wants to write a book: no fear. Her advice for anyone who wants to start on social media: the same. But that one’s a lie.