Indirect Contact allows historic figures and contemporaries of Gufler to meet outside the boundaries of chronological order. Gufler gives them an indirect voice in the form of appropriated fragments (which cannot be identified as citations in all cases). However, he does not merely cite or reproduce these characters but rather condenses the attitudes associated with or expressed by them. In the process of indirect writing, Gufler repeatedly seems to merge with his characters. The persona that links all 21 chapters is Jäcki, based on the gay flaneur and writer-protagonist from Hubert Fichte’s novel Palette (1968). Like Fichte, Gufler makes use of the character Jäcki as screen as well as ambivalent Doppelgänger (who never fully becomes the alter ego). The character Jäcki becomes a medium for repeated autobiographical passages that may be subtly woven into the text but may also dominate whole chapters