100 copies. Six volumes in a slipcase (I–VI) plus a multiple, signed & numbered. English/German. A singular act of archival reconstruction, mounted in faithful keeping with the wayward spirit of its subject. Edited by An Paenhuysen, Die Tödliche Doris - Dossier gathers six independently bound volumes inside a slipcase to assemble one of the most thoughtful and idiosyncratic portraits yet attempted of the legendary West Berlin group and conceptual constellation.
Among the most enigmatic figures to emerge from the early 1980s explosion of the so-called Geniale Dilettanten - the loose movement of bands, artists, and writers whose 1981 festival became a defining moment of West Berlin underground culture - Die Tödliche Doris was never quite a band, never quite an art project, and never available to easy classification. Founded in 1980 by Wolfgang Müller and Nikolaus Utermöhlen, joined in 1981 by Dagmar Dimitroff, they operated as an expanded entity in which records, performances, sculptures, costumes, fictional press agents, and an "invisible third album" carried equal conceptual weight. They occupied a position close to Einstürzende Neubauten and Malaria! without ever resembling them, drawing instead on Fluxus, mail art, sound poetry, and a particular cold-war Berlin sensibility shaped by isolation and an unspoken permission to do anything at all.
The dossier reflects this refusal of fixed form. Volume I, The Deadly Doris Manual, recounts Paenhuysen's directorship since 2019 of the House of The Deadly Doris, a small garden building at Lützowstraße 23 in Tiergarten where the group's archive - 33 folders of documentation, photos, scores, and sketches assembled by Müller and Utermöhlen since 1980 - has been opened to gradual public study. Volume II investigates Monika Reich, the band's press agent whom no one ever met, and whose afterlife may lead to a self-help book on financial freedom and a quiet life of geo-arbitrage in Portugal. Volume III revisits the Galerie Eisenbahnstraße, the underground space Müller ran with Ueli Etter through 1985-86, captured here through Ursula Frohne's wonderfully astringent contemporary review. Volume IV gathers fragments of Wolfgang Müller Talks, including a memorable 1986 Unsound interview from San Francisco. Volume V, Dagmar Dimitroff's Personal Transcript, is the most quietly devastating of the set: a reconstruction, drawn from the Stasi Records Archive, of the ten months Dimitroff spent imprisoned in the GDR before her release, statelessness, and arrival in West Berlin in 1978. Volume VI, Niki, Nicky, Niccy, Nik, returns to Utermöhlen, the quieter of the founders, who multiplied his own name across countless misspellings and who died in 1996 at the age of thirty-eight.
Bilingual throughout (German / English), the publication carries cover drawings by Paenhuysen and totals 248 pages with numerous color illustrations. Each copy is accompanied by an ephemera multiple - an original ticket from the Delphi-Filmpalast dated 14 July 1985 - signed and numbered by Wolfgang Müller. The edition is strictly limited to 100 numbered and signed copies.
A book that behaves the way Die Tödliche Doris always behaved: archival and fictional at once, attentive to the gaps in the record, faithful to its subjects through its very willingness to leave them mysterious.
