“A son of two mothers”: Franz Dobler: An existence that is not fate

The writer Franz Dobler is adopted. He actually never wanted to write a book about it. Now, in his mid-60s, he did it, even if he pretended it was a novel. The unnamed protagonist (let’s call him FD) is in his mid-50s when he flies to New York to meet his birth mother. His father comes from Persia and all his son knows about him is that he looks like him “as if torn down.” It was the result of a single encounter, that’s all the son knows. He doesn’t want to know more. The mother, young and without solid ground under her feet, gave the child up for adoption. The son was adopted by a couple from Upper Bavaria who, as he later learned, had experienced a miscarriage a year earlier. His sister, 14 years older than him, then insisted on having a child and sometimes became a third mother to him.

FD grows up protected and cared for in a tough, down-to-earth village family. His mother, who loves and cares for him, will later clean the windows of his shack when she comes to visit him in faraway Munich; He would later have serious arguments with his father, the “sergeant of the family,” partly because of his long hair. But the father will never let him feel that he doesn’t belong, that he isn’t the son. And if he doesn’t represent the desired parent, then it’s his fault and not the so-called foreign blood that circulates in him.

However, his adoption is always a topic among the village youth: he just looks a little different. But this doesn’t degenerate into bullying either; it’s accepted quite quickly: it’s something to wonder about for a moment, but it’s not a stigma.

Beyond the nuclear family, FD expands the circle of his caregivers who determine the phases of his life in a way that parents cannot. First there is the older friend Hans, “criminally gifted,” as they say, who is the leader of a gang but is not accepted into the FD. Hans comes from a difficult background and is a tough dog, but in a rough way tender towards FD, perhaps he sees him as a little too little brother. At 21, while escaping from the police, he will drive into a gas station and burn to death.

From him, FD seems to get the admiration for rebelliousness that also characterizes Dobler’s crime novels, and also the sense of the tragedy that male toughness always contains. It is one of the great strengths of this book that Dobler describes a manhood that is not archetypical. This is not spelled out, but the delicate, fragile nature of the construction of this book, which is called a novel but in fact keeps falling apart in fragments and spotlights, makes this clear.

On the one hand, there is the older friend and mentor who introduces him to the world of jazz and also tries to convince his father that FD is taking a great path with his enthusiasm for art. And there is also the deputy editor-in-chief of the local newspaper, for which FD wrote his first texts as a student – about jazz, for example – who always takes him to the tavern, where FD follows discussions about the Bavarian Soviet Revolution, about Ernst Toller, Erich Mühsam and Oskar Maria Graf follows. Impressing these people will be a task for FD, also because his father cannot come to terms with his stubbornness and stubbornness. The fact that FD ends up studying Protestant theology in faraway Munich is the height of derision. Someone from Upper Bavaria who becomes a Protestant even though he doesn’t even believe in a God! What kind of devilry may be responsible for this.

But Dobler’s conclusion about this father is not an apodictic judgment, but rather one of understanding and forbearance. He was lucky and knows it too; It’s not a book of lament that Dobler wrote. But one that continually turns its fingers around the miracle of its own existence and asks many questions: Why have so many adopted children actually become serial killers? Why does his mother only talk about her childhood on her deathbed? How did it all come together in such an unlikely way?

The fact that FD was an unruly and individual child also shines through in Dobler’s style, who stubbornly sticks to his own view, even when questions about the motivations and motives of others are obvious. There is also a certain Upper Bavarian stubbornness, which is always undermined by a quiet irony and a fundamental doubt about oneself. Perhaps it also plays a role here that the niche that the market had in store for Dobler wasn’t necessarily what he wanted, but at some point he accepted it with a kind of anger. Maybe he would have liked to continue writing in the direction he set out in his 2008 novel “Tidying Up,” but that just didn’t sell. And you have to eat too.

Perhaps Franz Dobler has so far refused to write a book about this story of his two mothers because there were perhaps too many gaps in the material for him, who is such an outstanding plotter? Even as he writes, he repeatedly lets FD say that literature is primarily about the quick dollar. This fixation on the financial is also a revenge on the literary: Dobler does not claim to have found an ideal form for this type of narrative, as great writers would do. And that’s what’s fantastic about Dobler: He wants to tell this story and at the same time doesn’t want to tell it that way, but there are reasons to tell it that way, biographical, structural, economic, but also if you have to bend for pragmatic reasons , resistance to these conditions appears again and again in the text.

This pleasantly incorruptible down-to-earthness, which very subtly carries the contempt for everything that claims to be bourgeois high culture, is probably also a legacy of his parents’ home; an echo of the father’s voice, to whom trimming hedges seemed more important than reading Hemingway. And who still read Hemingway, even though he only had a rudimentary education.

Dobler writes laconic, elegant, confident and funny about an existence that is not fate. Ultimately, it is a book about adoption, but above all one about the search for one’s own in life.

Franz Dobler: A son of two mothers. Tropics, 224 pages, br., €21.80.

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