Punk in Germany is pre-irony, pre-postmodern. It is what it appears to be: a sincere work of extreme candor.

It’s a Bildungsroman in the modern tradition of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Catcher in the Rye, autobiographical fiction set in a German beat hotel in 1977. British punks are on the cover of Der Spiegel, safety pins through their lips and noses, and the cadres of the Red Army Faction stare from wanted posters and newsstands.

Its central drama concerns a group of male philosophy students who mock and bait each other and say crude things about women. They are dominated by an older alpha male, Lamont, a perennial student and charismatic hipster who bullies his “friends” by boasting about the number of times he had sex the night before.

“The body has to ball!” he brays.

Lonesome and humiliated, the narrator decides that the only honest way to resist Lamont is through the yogic practice of keeping the faith, brahmacharya, which, in the face of solitude, recommends the retention of semen.

Doing black market and factory work to support himself, he begins to experience the giddy state of mind described in yogic texts as “astral travel” while, outside, “Germany” murders its Baader-Meinhof prisoners and plunges society into “the leaden time.”

An exemplary instance of Ginsbergian candor and precursor of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s introspective novels, this memoir is the first volume of a projected trilogy, to be followed by Punk in Brooklyn and Punk in Wisconsin.