[citation needed] After marrying Dutch artist Gerda Bakker, he moved to Amsterdam in 1992 and re-joined Young & Rubicam as creative director, quitting in 1996 to take up directing and writing.
'The Black Light Terrarium') - awarded with the Ernst Willner Prize in 1999 - layers a variety of tragic-comical stories around synthetic drugs, disco and the American dream imported by G.I.s on the historical reality of the 1970s.
Referring to Kunkels first novel, Martin Walser wrote appreciatively: "The author seems to be a naming obsessive, a virtuoso of disgust, a master show-off, a sexual fundamentalist.
[citation needed] Kunkel's third novel Final Stage (original title: Endstufe), funded by a grant from the Stiftung Preußische Seehandlung, was controversially discussed in the international press even before its official publication date.
"[6] The FAZ journalist Dirk Schümer, on the other hand, found on May 12, 2004, in SWR'S program Büchertalk: "Kunkel's provocation consists in the fact that the Third Reich is portrayed from an internal perspective.
"[citation needed] Kuhl's Cosm as sequel of his first novel describes the dark side of disco culture and locates its beginnings in the criminal red-light milieu.
[11] Kunkel spent the spring of 2015 as writer in residence at Monte Verità in Ticino, where his philosophical treatise Mir blüht ein stiller Garten was written.
[citation needed] The central thread of the fictional plot is built around the production and trade of blue flicks (pornographic films) conducted by employees of the "SS-Hygiene Institute Berlin" in North Africa.
Although the so-called Sachsenwald movies are part of the collection of the renowned media expert Werner Nekes (*1944 - †2017), the authenticity of these films has been questioned, but later clearly confirmed.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, on the other hand, called the novel a "brilliantly written, tremendously interesting manuscript by one of the best German authors of the younger generation.
"[14] A "profoundly cynical attempt" to exorcise the horrors of German history "with a wild round of disgust and at the same time to whitewash them by painting a broad picture of Allied crimes," was of another critic's verdict of the same the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
[15] In August 2020, Kunkel published an unabridged version of his scandalized novel Final Stage, which contains the so-called discarded passages cited by Der Spiegel in their entirety.
Thor Kunkel, 2021[citation needed] Novels Foreign licenses were sold to the following countries: Italy, Czech Republic and Turkey.