Jörg Fauser: But. Always. With words

The writer Jörg Fauser “wasn’t one of those people who wrote when something came to mind, but he simply wrote, from morning to evening, every day,” says his former friend Y Sa Lo in the biography “Rebell in the Cola Hinterland.” . Its authors, Matthias Penzel and Ambros Waibel, came up with a lot of ideas for Fauser. Because their book, which was published by Diogenes at the end of spring, is the revised and expanded version of their biography, which they published in 2004 with Edition Tiamat: from 287 pages to 640 pages in the new edition. At that time, Fauser, who died in 1987, was mainly known to nerds and other insiders, even though he was doing pretty well in business at the end of his 43 years. But in 1984 in Klagenfurt, Marcel Reich-Ranicki judged the literature of Fauser, who was speaking there, for the official literary scene: “It’s not bad at all, it just doesn’t belong here.”

Fauser was considered an outsider throughout his life. This was entirely self-chosen, as Penzel and Waibel emphasize, because through his parents in Frankfurt am Main – his father was a not particularly successful painter, his mother was an actress who worked as a reader for the radio – he had contact with middle-class circles but he didn’t give that much. In 1986 he described his position as follows: “No scholarships, no prizes, no public money, no juries, no committees, no member of a professional association, no clique, married but otherwise independent.”

Fauser was considered a journalist among writers or a writer among journalists, as Penzel and Waibel paraphrase a statement by Claudius Seidl – and in fact all three of them are primarily journalists who are interested in this man, whom some call the “German Raymond Chandler.” hold because after starting out as a pensive cut-up experimenter, he finally achieved success as a romantic-realist crime writer. In their introduction, Penzel and Waibel also quote the indie pop singer Christiane Rösinger, who pointed out in 2004 that Fauser was read particularly by men, by artists, painters or musicians who see themselves as outsiders: “They suffered from themselves, from life , the city and the conditions.«

And of course you quickly get to the crime classics by Chandler, Dashiell Hammett or Ross MacDonald and their heroes, the investigators who, as sad, male moralists, try to get by with a lot of alcohol, or the depressive-ironic machismo of Charles Bukowski, but This also applies to the brilliantly sober descriptions of situations and characters by these authors, which are usually as painful as a punch. You have to train that first until you can do it as well as Fauser.

He was not against the state, but against the cultural sector. He was first an anarchist and then a member of the SPD with sympathies for Helmut Schmidt, but always had empathy for those “at the bottom” with whom he worked for a long time in the precariat and at the stand-up bar soff. With him, the contradictory becomes “unique, a USP,” write Penzel/Waibel.

It is clear to her that Fauser is a very complex writer and reader: “He prefers to experience adventures sitting, at a desk or in an armchair with a book in his hand.” That’s why her extensive, differentiated and very readable biography is The story of the development of a very good writer, from an “after-work poet” to a “full professional” with advances of 100,000 DM, “between “castigation and excess,” who wrote every day in a ritualistic, disciplined manner and even took boxing lessons to keep himself fit, and in between: days on end Diving into the places of alcoholism. He never wanted to be anything other than a writer. His biographers write that he worked on a lot of different things: “But. Always. With words. At the keyboard.”

Fauser, as becomes clear in this book, thought about how he could do it the whole time and discussed it non-stop with his friends, especially with the German beats Jürgen Ploog and Carl Weissner. Penzel and Waibel spoke to many of them, including such colorful figures as the former secret service agent and later publisher Heinz van Nouhuys and the camera and driver Reinhard Oefele, whose hair-raising stories are hinted at here as if they had sprung from a Fauser story .

At a time when hardly anyone did that, Fauser refused military service, then became addicted to opiates while doing community service in the hospital, went to London and Istanbul and then back to Frankfurt, where, among other things, he worked as a security guard and tried out many things as a writer. Tireless, ambitious, often on the verge of going crazy. So he drifted through the 70s, including the political, cultural and drinking hall scene, and transformed himself from an avant-gardist to an original realist. Perfect in “Raw Material”, his masterpiece and autobiographical novel from 1984, which is of course about how someone becomes a writer against all odds.

But he was also a poet, radio play author, translator, editor and essayist because he wanted to make a living from writing; for him it was simply a matter of business. But he didn’t want to do any shit about it. Being able to or want to or should write like Jörg Fauser is still the aspiration for many authors who have not fallen on their feet.

Matthias Penzel and Ambros Waibel: Rebel in the Cola hinterland. Diogenes, 640 p., hardcover, €32.

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