Where the law becomes visible
Daniel Damler seeks the normative where it does not present itself as law, where it becomes spatial and visual. For his research projects, he looks beyond the executive and supervisory boardrooms to examine law in relation to architecture, and interprets the fictional world of Gotham City – including the Batcave and Wayne Manor – as a visual symbol of a state of emergency.
His latest project focuses on Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478–1557), chronicler of the Conquista, courtier and notary, whom Alexander von Humboldt revered as the Pliny of the New World. Damler examines his life and work, in addition to his programmatic struggle for truth and reality. This has resulted in two books: the novel ‘Masaya’, published in July 2026 by Rowohlt Berlin, and the illustrated volume ‘Mundus Novus’, published in the same year by Klostermann.
Why not a monograph waiting on the shelf for its specialist readership? Damler is an associate researcher in the mpilhlt research field ‘Transmedia HistoryTelling’, which focuses on narrative and visual approaches to explore new ways of communicating legal-historical content.
We asked him what determines whether an unconventional subject is suitable for legal history, and what does a research project gain by publishing its findings as a novel.
Executive and supervisory boardrooms, Gotham’s cinematic architecture as a hallmark of a state of emergency, a chronicler of the Conquista who experimented with text-and-image arrangements: in all these cases, the normative lies where it is not codified but is nonetheless spatially recognisable. Do you seek out such objects deliberately, or do you simply stumble across them? And how do you recognise which of them are viable for legal-historical research and not just apparently novel?
Both are the case: I am always on the lookout for topics that meet certain criteria, but a systematic search is impossible given the breadth of conceivable subjects. Most discoveries are therefore serendipitous. Once one has ‘discovered’ historical material that, at first glance, appears to be suitable, then the real work begins. It now remains to be seen whether the hypotheses can be reconciled with reality – as it is presented in the sources. As a rule, if no evidence can be found for the project, it cannot clear this hurdle. But this is simply how it has to be – and mustn’t be otherwise. Without the willingness to leave behind a graveyard of original yet, unfortunately, unverifiable ideas, one won’t convince others. This certainly does not mean, however, that speculation is inadmissible in historical research per se; it simply must be recognisable as such and be based, at the very least, on plausible assumptions.
Oviedo is a well-documented source; an essay or a monograph would have been the obvious approach. What aspect of this material was inaccessible to a scholarly treatment and had to be narrated?
There is research literature on Oviedo, that is true. However, I would not describe his life and work as ‘well-documented’. There aren’t even any usable critical editions of his texts yet. A research project that clarifies the many unresolved questions would be desirable. Scholarly monographs are irreplaceable. I do not find much merit in the thesis that the novelist is the better historian. But historical novels can, in specific cases, provide important insights and pave the way towards a ‘histoire totale’. The writer is compelled to immerse themselves in the protagonists’ everyday lives, with all their polyphony and absurdity, and in doing so may uncover connections that the author of a scholarly monograph overlooks, as the latter generally does not describe daily routines and concentrates on intellectual interactions.
As far as my story ‘Masaya’ is concerned, things are more complicated. In a sense, it is an anti-historical novel, because it contains many fantastical elements and thereby systematically subverts the expectations of the ‘historical novel’ genre. On the other hand, it is precisely this inability to distinguish between fantasy and truth that is a hallmark of early European expansion, so that, in a broader sense, ‘Masaya’ will hopefully still contribute to an appreciation of a historical way of life.
‘Masaya’ and ‘Mundus Novus’ were published in the same year by different publishers. How is the work divided; in other words, what insights into Oviedo does the illustrated book offer that the novel was unable to convey, and vice versa?
‘Masaya’ relies on the power of the word and deliberately contains no illustrations. Furthermore, from the outset – as just explained – the narrative is not committed to depicting an ‘authentic’ historical reality, at least not in a superficial sense. ‘Mundus Novus’ takes account of the fact that Oviedo’s life and work are permeated by a need for images, by a desire not merely to capture in words the outrageous things he saw and experienced in Italy and overseas. The volume thus traces Oviedo’s strategies of visualisation. A book like ‘Masaya’ can only do this to a limited extent.
‘Masaya’ is about a man who spent his whole life struggling to verify facts. Yet, due to the nature of the genre, the novel must at times improvise and take artistic liberty. Is this tension a side effect of the genre or the actual argument? Is there a scene that seems invented but is actually documented?
Indeed, Umberto Eco once said, if I remember correctly, that many readers of ‘The Name of the Rose’ mistook historically documented scenes for fiction and, conversely, regarded those that Eco had invented as historically accurate. This phenomenon is unlikely to recur in this form when reading ‘Masaya’, because the literary interplay between truth and untruth is all too obvious from the outset. Of course, this does not rule out the possibility that, in certain instances, what is supposedly fictional may not be so fictional after all. For example, a meeting between the young Oviedo and Leonardo da Vinci does indeed appear to have taken place, at least according to Oviedo’s own account. One is inclined to regard such an encounter as a figment of the imagination, as Leonardo’s world – the Italian High Renaissance – is not usually associated with the almost parallel events taking place overseas. In many historical accounts, these two worlds appear to be completely isolated from one another, like life on different planets, although – as the case of Oviedo shows – in reality there were countless interactions.
A novel demands things that are forbidden in an academic text: embellishing a scene, inventing a character, filling a gap rather than pointing it out. What did you find most difficult about this, and, looking back, did working on the novel teach you anything about academic writing?
Freedom is never undemanding – not even in writing. Of course, it takes effort and hard work to go into archives and spend weeks studying documents there. But once you have established the facts, a sort of structure emerges that offers orientation and support. The creator of fictional worlds does not have this certainty. They have far more options open to them, but that is precisely wherein the difficulty lies. They can get a great deal right, but unfortunately also a great deal wrong – for instance, if they ruin the book’s main message through a clumsy sequence of events and dialogue. If, on the other hand, historical reality fails to deliver a narrative arch, then that is simply the way it is and cannot be blamed on the historian. Incidentally, the challenges inherent in fictional storytelling are addressed in ‘Masaya’, as Oviedo – who is actually a notary and bound by the truth – believes he must write a chivalric romance, which he, with great difficulty, manages to do.