Growing up: A life cannot be wasted

It doesn’t often happen that you land a bestseller in Germany with a book that takes place in the republic’s unrenovated, smelly and hellishly loud punk cellars. What’s more, it’s told as a cumbersome oral history that doesn’t follow a linear narrative thread. Jürgen Teipel achieved exactly that a good 20 years ago with his book “Waste Your Youth,” which was called a “docu-novel.” It was about the brief heyday of West German punk and post-punk from the end of the 70s to the “Neue Deutsche Welle” in the early 80s . Some say he sparked a punk revival back then. It is difficult to verify whether this is true. Today it is definitely a bestseller and cult book.

Teipel recently presented a new, autofictional novel, “But I Can Fly.” Anyone who previously only knew him as a music journalist will probably rub their eyes in surprise. Because the nihilistic “back to concrete” spirit of days gone by has disappeared. But if he had kept it, he might not be alive anymore. Because Teipel is now 63 years old. A youth can be wasted, but a life cannot be wasted in the long run.

Instead of other people’s stories, Teipel tells his own for the first time in “But I Can Fly.” Unlike “Waste Your Youth,” it is a quiet, sometimes deeply sad, but at the same time hopeful book. The focus is on stages in his life that may sometimes appear incidental to outsiders, but which decisively shaped Teipel’s life. He tells of humiliations, his deformed self-confidence at an early age in the Bavarian province, which can be traced back not least to the oft-described arguments with his tyrannical father, his inability to love, but also of interpersonal healing attempts, therapeutic wrong turns and failed and successful love .

His relationship with his father runs like a common thread through the book. “You are no longer my son,” is a sentence he heard repeatedly as a child. Elsewhere he describes a nighttime car ride in which the father suddenly stops in front of a children’s home and says: “If you keep doing this, you’ll get in there.” This sadistic urge to either expose, embarrass or intimidate his son becomes apparent later as an emotional burden that is difficult to compensate for Teipel, which makes it impossible for him to open up to people and build trust for many years. The meticulous examination and close interlinking of current emotional worlds and flashbacks suggests a high degree of psychoanalytic sensitivity.

The book’s 13 chapters resemble finely composed miniatures. They are rarely placed in a direct narrative context, but that is not a shortcoming at all, on the contrary: coexisting side by side, Teipel succeeds magnificently in creating a touching atmosphere across large stretches of the individual sections of the book, which is precisely why is able to captivate because it renounces moralizing dualisms. There are no heroes and no villains in Teipel’s story. The tyrannical father also finally lets his guard down and turns out to be an emotionally needy figure – marked by old age and illness. The fact that Teipel not only allows these ambivalences, but actually encourages them, is a literary stroke of luck.

At the end of the story, the narrator’s deep-seated injuries are relieved by supposed banalities: a bee that he saves from drowning. A cat whose attempts to make physical contact he no longer avoids. And an old woman who heals sick wild birds and whom he begins to visit regularly. Teipel’s 20-year-old punk self might have responded to all of this with a dry “You fucking hippie!” But this is another story. What matters is that Teipel can finally fly despite all of life’s demands. The fact that he is able to take his readers with him on the arduous journey into the sky is a testament to his great storytelling skills.

Jürgen Teipel: But I can fly. Schöffling, 224 p., hardcover, €24.

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