People eating a pear as an excavator advances in a quarry. That’s Strunk’s profession.
Photo: IMAGE/Photo mode
Mr. Heidbrink is not feeling well: insomnia, depression, uneasiness about the overall state of the world, ominous knots in his thinking apparatus. We know that. That’s why he decided to spend a month in a clinic on the Baltic Sea. »Excuses are not valid and are forbidden. He’ll get through this.”
Already on the way there in the car it becomes clear: he needs a stay in the hospital. »His face in the rearview mirror: not a pretty sight. A pseudo-intellectual, old child, Woody Allen Jr., pale, cheesy, sickly, his eyes red and blurry.” Jonas Heidbrink, mid-30s, privateer by profession. He will never have to work again in his life: he has sold his successful start-up and is financially secure.
Many of those whom Strunk uses as characters in the novel are not members of social minorities, but rather socially conforming idiots and conformist fellow travelers.
In the private clinic where he goes for comprehensive treatment, he will have a regular daily routine: health checks, therapy sessions, discussion groups, various courses. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. “Vital signs, soup and boredom.” Cost: 823 euros per day. And he, the “self-payer with luxury problems,” will meet his fellow patients, who are of course all bizarre characters, at least viewed from Heidbrink’s perspective.
The comedian and writer Heinz Strunk, who now has a fairly high output of prose – a new novel or collection of stories is published every few months – as always enjoys describing the grotesque. The imperfect, misshapen, crooked, embarrassing things about other people seem to fascinate him most. And from this he also extracts a large part of the tragicomic inherent in his prose. A literary procedure that is sometimes interpreted as misanthropic.
Strunk has also been repeatedly accused that his stories derive their humor from misogyny and the evil eye on intellectually and socially disadvantaged people. But that is probably a one-dimensional reading. If it were made absolute, in the future every sentence that is formulated today in the tradition of an aesthetics of ugliness would have to be examined to see whether it might “hurt anyone’s feelings.”
Many of those whom Strunk uses here as characters in the novel are not members of social minorities, but rather socially conforming idiots and conformist fellow travelers, average idiots who are intellectually stuck at a basic level, executors of the local social conditions, calendar sayings and fortune cookie wisdom, mouthy talkers, talking containers of ideology. Which, of course, can be laughed at.
Heidbrink, from whose perspective the story is told here and who has the function of observer and judge, sees his fellow patients as human caricatures: They choke, cough, drool, spit, fart, and fluids also come out of them. One has “lowered his head and is letting a long string of saliva dangle from his mouth.” Another is “a man without ideas, without charisma or attraction” who, like many middle and upper class men, seems to think himself the greatest. Yet another, whose face looks “like a dried-out, overripe pepper,” exudes a “musty grandpa smell of nicotine, dust and spilled food.” One of the women’s “eyes have sunk into their sockets, the bags under her eyes are like melted candle wax.” Another is “at the mercy of her petrified suffering day and night, the weight of which has fixed her mouth in an eternal downward movement.”
None of them are able to eat halfway sensibly: one, for example, who wants to eat “the biggest lettuce leaf Heidbrink has ever seen,” “stuffs the whole thing into his mouth and uses his fingers as he does so Help. His thick turtle neck vibrates as if he were choking out fish.” 50 pages later we witness how an “egg-shaped bald man with a full beard” begins to eat a pear “cracking, bursting, cracking. With every bite he opens his mouth wide open (…) It sounds as if he is eating rubble, an excavator biting through a quarry.«
Heidbrink, who now has “doubts about the authenticity and significance of his own sufferings,” does not exclude himself from the array of pathetic buffoons he observes and even suspects himself of being a malingerer or “just a wanker suffering from a general weariness of life.” ” to be.
But it is not only the patients whose inability to live is exposed here and who suffer from the loss of vitality, illnesses, aging and the deterioration of the body. The characters juxtaposed with them are ridiculous and grotesque in a different way. Frighteningly healthy model men with a will of steel, who seem to come straight from the toothpaste advertisement: “Mr. Rolff should easily be over seventy (…) agile to the point of abandonment, someone who will still be able to do the splits at eighty, who will unite himself through iron discipline maintained a youthful figure. His eyes sparkle.”
Anyone who expects Strunk’s new novel to have a plot in the traditional sense may be disappointed. For long stretches nothing special happens here. Heidbrink reflects on his everyday clinical life and indulges in self-observations and the studies he carries out on the patients around him. In between, Strunk occasionally sprinkles in one of his Strunk sentences, which seem to come easily to him: “A shimmering septic tank with fecal spray and greasy vomit foam quickly forms on the forest floor.”
The bold title, “Zauberberg 2”, is of course pure coquetry and tongue-in-cheek humor or the result of Strunk’s nonsense, but at the same time it is also successful marketing: in the year of the 100th birthday of the novel of the century written by the favorite writer of the bourgeois German feature section Throwing a novel onto the market that appears to be a sequel to the work in question is a well-placed gag.
But apart from the fact that the materially carefree male main characters of both novels complete a stay in a remote, exclusive sanatorium – Hans Castorp in the Swiss mountains, Jonas Heidbrink on the Baltic Sea in Western Pomerania – and in extremely different ways the thematic leitmotifs “illness” and “decay”. /Decline« are literary processed, the two works have nothing in common. There are a handful of smaller allusions, and a chapter made up of “Zauberberg” quotes has been added. But Strunk’s laconic, carefree, sometimes silly narrative sound is neither comparable to Mann’s philosophically deep-diving, irony-saturated, opulent wide-screen prose style, nor are the themes that Thomas Mann dealt with in his “Magic Mountain” published in 1924 (love, the mystery of… Time, death, the opposition between art and life, Schopenhauer’s philosophy) in Strunk a role.
His specialty as an author is the art of drawing a panorama of complete sadness and at the same time transforming it into comedy. He describes to us the misery of bourgeois existence in the present. »Basically they are all misplaced in a psychiatric hospital; It is more the world outside that needs therapy” (Die Zeit).
Heinz Strunk: “Zauberberg 2”. Rowohlt 2024, 288 pages, hardcover, €25.