N/a? Could you imagine eating out of it?
Photo: Image/Redeleit
Stuttgart in the summer of 1952: Martin Walser, then editor of the Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR), has planned a radio show about the modern and still very unknown writer Arno Schmidt and invited him to read a little from his work. You also want to talk a bit about you and your books afterwards, so Walser tells him.
A few months later, Schmidt travels to Stuttgart with his wife Alice. In the evening you sit together with Walser and others in the “casino”, the canteen of the SDR, and talk about literature and the possibilities of the present authors to make money.
“Arno, who had some headache, only drank a glass and otherwise asked for beer. And now we literally. ”
Alice Schmidt
»A. And I got a nice roast plate, «Alice Schmidt wrote in her diary the following day. Sure, the Schmidt couple is very poor at that time to live from Arno’s writing is practically impossible. A beautiful roast plate is a gift from the sky. Later in the evening you go to a wine bar. “Arno, who had some headache, only drank a glass and otherwise asked for beer. And now we literally, “said Alice Schmidt.
The philosophy professor Max Bense, an enthusiastic reader of the narrow books previously published by Schmidt, is also located at the table all evening. Bense, which linked scientific and technical questions with aesthetic theory, art and literature, is a mathematician and physicist, but also writes philosophical texts. And he is only a few years older than the then 38-year-old writer admired by him.
»With Schmidt, Bense shared the socio -political attitude. Both openly represented an atheistic worldview and criticized the institution of the Church (…), in particular the politics of Konrad Adenauers, they were critical of, «the editor Michaela Nowotnick comments on the relationship between the two men in the afterword of this band.
The volume documents the corresponding correspondence between Arno Schmidt and Max Bense. The letters deal with Schmidt’s cooperation that is as an avant -garde and politically progressive literary magazine »Moment«, which Bense published at the time and which was hardly read by more than a few hundred people. The philosophy professor managed to win Arno Schmidt as an author for the small magazine. Which is no wonder: the Schmidt, which was as strongly recognized at the time, was happy about every twenty or fifty mark license, which he could earn unexpectedly.
Some organizational ones are negotiated in the letters, and it is also about issues of money, publication options; Otherwise, all kinds of courtities are replaced.
Actually unimaginable today: in the mid-1950s, in the most reactionary Adenauer Germany, two magazines were founded in Stuttgart, which made modern literature and language into their object: in addition to the “moment” that Max Bense wanted to make new young authors “and a” place of the somewhere else “, there was also the publication” texts and signs “, editorial Supervised by the writer and radio playmaker Alfred Andersch. When in 1955 in this magazine Schmidt, from today’s perspective, was printed by a completely harmless short novel “Seelandschaft with Pocahontas”, whose self-narrative is committed to atheism and speaks about sexual speech, the Catholic Church and the conservative amok were ran in reviews as “Hasper” and “half-strong”, who was “sexual” sexual Actions describe and even positive about the GDR, which reveals “the real home” of his thoughts. Karl Korn, the then head of the Feuilleton of the “Frankfurter Allgemeine”, was, Schmidt’s short novel was “a stupid, horny and therefore provincial affair”, “in which there is nothing more than ramming under flimsy preliminary walls.” Criminal charges for “blasphemy” and “pornography” followed.
One should not forget here that the milieu, who was interested in art and science, in which Schmidt and Bense moved, was a small minority in the Federal Republic. In fact, the 1950s were a time when the spirit of National Socialism still blew everywhere and in which the muff of 1000 years was still deep in all institutions and media houses. At that time Schmidt lived in the Palatinate community of Kastel, a “stink -catholic area”, and “suffered very underneath to be in this area” (Max Bense). In turn, the Stuttgart CDU politicians felt so provoked by Bense that they preferred to remove him. Self -thinkers like these two were considered ideological outsiders and were eyed as mayors. “As far as the church, priest, bourgeoisie, etc.,” said Bense in September 1953 about once in a letter at Schmidt, it was at least similar views.
In 1955 Bensse also wrote to Karl Korn to persuade him to work on his magazine: “So if you have a sharp article at some point, which is not possible in the FAZ, we print it with great pleasure in the ‘moment’, until the thing is banned.”
In this volume, the actual, hardly more than 100 -page correspondence between the aspiring writer and the Stuttgart professor follows the documentation of several diary extracts, correspondence and other texts that are intended to better understand the correspondence. Among them is a conversation with Max Bense and his wife Elisabeth Walther, who was published in 1981, two years after Schmidt’s death, which was published for the first time in the “Bargfeld messenger”, a small magazine that is dedicated to the life and work of Schmidt.
In this conversation, whose reading Schmidt-Knern will be great pleasure, BeneSe and Walther tell the most beautiful purring about the “rough and bristly” lonpler Schmidt. So he offered them a ham that he had stored in his basement for five years: “He was quite rancid, he tasted disgusting, but the Schmidts ate him very cheerfully.” In another meal invitation, they had served soup in dogs. Bense reports: »Schmidt could not buy a plate in Kastel and bought dog bobs. As a result, my wife did not bring a bit down. “
Furthermore, it can be learned about the Grumpy Young Man Schmidt: »He was exceptionally shy. But you have to say that the guy not only deserves laurels, he was arrogant, this guy, arrogant to the utmost! «In matters of the literature, Schmidt thought was the greatest genius.
The hermitage of the writer in the village of Bargfeld and his reluctance to involuntary encounters and meetings with others reports, Bensse reports: »As he said, he was also given the right to use a street alone, which he had leased, so to speak. That was probably in 1959 (…) He showed us this street, these avenue: ›This is the avenue. That is mine Allee, I go for a walk. I can only use it alone. ‘««
And once the writer answered the question of whether he had had breakfast: “I never have breakfast. I drink a grain in the morning. ”On the indication that you would not be fed up with it, he replied:“ Of course you get full of it. That’s energy! “
Arno Schmidt: The correspondence with Max Bense (letters from and to Arno Schmidt, Vol. 6: Ed. V. Michaela Nowotnick). Suhrkamp, 200 pages, born, € 48.