Instead, Lenin's revolution took place in Switzerland, transforming it into the Swiss Socialist Republic, a Communist state engaged in the colonisation of Africa and in perpetual war with other totalitarian empires, notably with a federation of British and German fascists.

The plot of the novel, set in around 2010, traces a Swiss political commissar born in Nyasaland on a journey to the heart of the empire, the gigantic alpine Réduit, where he is to arrest Brazhinsky, an enemy of the state.

Ich werde hier sein's surreal setting and precise prose has garnered acclaim in the German-speaking literary world.

[3] But the Frankfurter Rundschau 's reviewer discounted Ich werde hier sein as "simply moronic" and Die Tageszeitung found the text to be too diffuse and incoherent, amounting to just a "drug-clouded scenery".

[4] The novel has been translated into Russian, Croatian, Swedish, Polish, Bulgarian, Korean, French, Norwegian, and Dutch.