I first meet Jan Zelter as he opens the front door to his sizeable town house on a leafy Islington street. He looks exactly as you would expect an east-European intellectual to look - crumpled sports jacket and comfortable shoes; horn-rimmed spectacles, thick grey eyebrows and a charred hay bale of a beard. Jan leads me upstairs to his study. The antique oak bookshelves are refreshingly void of books, instead containing only several piles of loose change, a half-full bottle of peach schnapps and a no doubt ironic, but nevertheless somewhat sticky, copy of Juggs.
Zelter’s first book was the polemical ‘When Philosophers go at it!’. He says of the work “I wanted to challenge the Anglophone hegemony that presupposes that Hegel and Kant never met in person. I argued not only that they did meet, but that they became embroiled in a passionate affair. It is clear to me that The Critque of Pure Reason is a thinly veiled love letter to Hegel’s prong.” The book became a best- seller by titillating the public with its lurid claims and lack of historical basis and in doing so made Zelter a wealthy man.
Undeterred by academics voting him “the most vapid man in intellectual inquiry”, Zelter began to publish often and widely, including such luminary texts as ‘Fasten your Seat Belts: From Here to Modernity’, ‘Origami for One’ and ‘How to Convince a Woman you are Reliable by Telling Them Over and Over Again that you are Reliable’. His latest, “I’m Okay, if Euro que?” is about the relationship between the current Eurozone crisis and the national dishes of those countries in trouble.
Fittingly, he speaks of the book while reclining in his huge, recently refurbished stainless steel and marble- top kitchen. “My methodological approach was to adopt the post- Lacanian hermeneutic relationship between subject and object – that is, between food and country” says Zelter, unwrapping a Babybel. “In Greece’s case we can observe that if you remove all the consonants from the word ‘taramasalata’ you are left with the scream of a collapsing civilization. In Spain’s case we see that anagram of ‘paella’ is pain.” When I point out that pain has an ‘n’ in it Zelter bangs his hip on the breakfast bar and has to lie down.
In fact Zelter, like so many great minds before him, has his fair share of eccentricities. For example, when asked a factual question he will excuse himself to the bathroom with his laptop tucked under his arm, muffled clicking and curiously English swearing can be heard. Periodically his beard or eyebrows would fall off and he would attempt to distract me before hastily re- affixing them.
We move into Zelter’s palatial drawing room, adorned in faux leather and expensive contemporary art. I ask him about his ex-wife, whose picture is still on the mantle- piece above the ten foot wide fire. “Freud says that when a woman leaves you, she is really just leaving herself. However, my wife left in my BMW with the handsome gardener I had just paid ten grand to rotate my rockery”. He picks up her photo and looks at it with a great sadness. Suddenly, I see the human being behind the intimidating intellect. As a single tear rolls down his cheek he tells me “I loved that woman with all my heart”. And then his beard and eyebrows fall off.