Peter Krüger is a writer living in Cambridge UK. He has a degree from Imperial College in London and was founder and CEO of a pioneering high-tech company which developed AI and image processing technology, including the first hardware and software which displayed live video in Microsoft Windows. In the 1990s he wrote extensively about the impact of networking technology on our perception of virtual and physical space; something which, come the Dot Com crash, appeared less pressing. However, the idea a landgrab of cyberspace had failed because it was impossible to anchor references to the physical world in the virtual one was soon turned on its head. Increasingly our perception of the physical world has been shaped by references to it in a rapidly expanding virtual one. The implications of this change in our worldview, one for the most part forced on us by a handful of high-technology companies, was the starting point for Krüger’s latest novel ‘Lotte.’
Lotte is a psychologist working as a therapist in the former East Germany. Increasingly she encounters patients exhibiting the same symptoms as victims of the Stasi’s Zersetzung – a form of psychological warfare used to isolate and mentally injure dissidents. After an encounter with someone from her student days Lotte suspects she too has become the victim of a high-tech version of Zersetzung.
The novel was inspired by a chance encounter in East Germany during the 1970s and based on the short story ‘The Ghost and The Refugee.’