QAnon – the movement according to which Donald Trump wages a secret war against satanic and pedophilic elites – is not just a run-of-the-mill conspiracy belief, but functions as a collective text interpretation game. This is also the reason for his ridiculous success, which now includes the German Reichsbürger [people who believe that the German Reich still exists and that the Federal Republic of Germany is a company with no legal basis registered in Frankfurt] and the Corona denier scene. The fact that QAnon’s origin story was collaged from literary and popular cultural sources – among them a collective novel published in 1999 also by the co-author of this article – does not throw off its followers.
