Juli Zeh’s Corpus Delicti: Between Dystopia/Utopia and Coronavirus crisis

Abstract

Juli Zeh’s Corpus Delicti, published in 2009 in Germany, is often cited as a significant contemporary dystopia. The author paints a health dictatorship in the midst of the 21st century, where everybody is in perfect health and ignores the feeling of pain, but as a counterpart there is no individual freedom, insofar as collective interests prevail. For the sake of eradication of any form of illness, all citizens have to respect strict sanitary rules and notify health data to the authorities. The purpose of perfect health and painless life without fear of diseases as legitimization of a totalitarian system seems to be in harmony with human’s desire to survive the longest possible. Research about what dystopia in literature is and the fit of dystopian literary definition with Corpus Delicti. Investigation about possible utopian and new dystopian features which come to complete the dystopian genre, with a glance to the present. Indeed, the idyllic, clean world without tracks of pollution seems utopian, while the current battle against the Corona virus crisis by democratic countries seems to confirm Zeh’s dystopian visions about strong restrictions or loss of individual rights, through legal misleads. France’s management of the Corona crisis as an example of the danger to compromise democratic achievements.