Landolf Scherzer – “The Fights”: Five countries in one village

Some have a biography, others just a (tabular) CV. Some cannot do without constant self-design and self-invention in order to confront the monotony of existence, others accept early on that they are trapped in the inevitable.

The course of life: For the reporter Landolf Scherzer, it was always the course of the world. Above all, hope for the world. Because the star above the sailing ships of utopia beckoned red. Until the GDR became the East. Now it seems faded, the firmament. In this situation, Scherzer, this passionately researching social adventurer, writes, surprisingly to himself, a family history from his immediate surroundings – as if he had to overcome paralysis. He doesn’t just ask people, he asks himself: Why the village instead of the vastness? »Because I’m no longer curious about today’s major world politics? Or because behind the lies… I can no longer find the simple truth?”

The easy one? It was never the material of this chronicler of diversity. With the story of the Thuringian Kämpf family from Benshausen – maids and farmers, rifle makers and trade teachers, believers and comrades – he writes a book against the cliché of the so-called little people.

The book contains a sentence from a family member: “If only I had never been born.” But also these sentences: “We talked about politics and almost didn’t understand each other. I’m glad that we still feel one.” So nothing is easy, some things are sad, even more brave. Marianne Stracke, née Kämpf, sums up existence: Nobody can “free themselves from the constraints of their time. Not yesterday, not today and nowhere in the world.« So this about the narrow scope and large cosmos between fate and self-determination, between creative power and chance experience.

What motivates people to write down their lives? It is a feeling for the deep layers of the past beneath all the present. For years, Marianne Stracke had written down the history of her ramified and rooted family and preserved testimonies, diaries and letters. Two cardboard boxes. After Marianne’s death in 2004, one of her five sons brought her to live with Scherzer in neighboring Dietzhausen. They remain untouched for a long time. The reporter had met the former LPG boss by chance ten years earlier on a Rennsteig hike. A correspondence was established; Marianne calls Scherzer an “encourager” or the “funny Landolf”; Many of her letters are answers to what torments the author: “And now you ask me what else the purpose of writing is?” April 1999.

The book itself provides the answer: honest writing is self-help. Is confidence that there will be an open space in the exchange where the world smiles and says: Nothing gets better, but you are not alone. That’s a lot. Scherzer drank some Benshauser Bärwurz schnapps with Marianne Stracke, and at some point he got to work: the boxes! And the conversation path into the family. A history unfolds from the times of the emperor to the state socialist innovations, niches and hardships. The political red and black and the warlike brown colored the relationships, made them bright or gray, created enmities but also clarity. In the afterword, editor Jens-Fietje Dwars speaks of “German-German conflict, from five Germanys.”

The author writes under strict self-compulsion to differentiate; he knows: almost all idealism ends in the realization that in the end there is less to it than was thought for a long time. Isn’t this true of so many political movements? You are there, but not completely in it; you are complicit and innocent too. So Scherzer has written a book against everyone who takes a colonialist look at the past: they grasp and judge from the perspective of a later time and believe that they know the earlier things more precisely than those involved remember. As I read, I find myself stirring up old frequencies and letting them resonate through my head: family, commitment, tradition, home.

If, as the French philosopher Pierre Bayle said, nature is a kind of diseased state and man is far more inclined to evil than to good; if, as the misanthrope Molière thought, it would be unparalleled folly to interfere with the improvement of the world; If we observe in ourselves and others every day that we don’t talk like we think and don’t act like we talk – if that’s all true, then you should wash your hands without being moved, sit down happily at the dinner table, get used to it unchangeable states?

Scherzer, who has a gift for upheavals, couldn’t survive like that, not to himself. He doesn’t hold grudges, but he doesn’t ward off sadness. He remains a seismograph for rude awakenings in the mill of history, but he is also still a sensitive person for persistent dreams. Lessing dreamed of education, Goethe of education, Schiller of dignity, Heine of freedom, Brecht of social justice. How should one live – if one is allowed to be alive at all (war, disasters, cancer)?

Scherzer reports what every person probably has to take stock of every evening: I fell behind myself again today. But strangely, that doesn’t detract from the narcotic longing. Longing is also repeated in Benshausen, as if there were no experience to disprove it. No longing can be brought to an end.

What little people are? Dwars speaks of “unheroic heroes” in the afterword. Also the fighters: children of chaos, some brave, others foolish, some so damned seductive to war and others so damned unhappy even in peace – behind the German-Soviet barbed wire that also ran through Thuringia. Archaically bitter, touching: Artur Kämpf struggles through the Ukrainian swamp in 1944. Grabs the last edge of bread. Suddenly a Russian. Two enemies, one bread. Arthur breaks bread. And later tells his daughter Marianne: “He was a little person, someone who wanted to escape death. Like ours. Neither more nor less.”

Scherzer also obtained 20 “foreign” pieces of information on the topic and embedded them in the history of the fight: artists, craftsmen, younger and older people, a cross-section of society. Short replicas of the coincidence of being born and the struggle not to miss out. Little people? That sounds like a little citizen. Being a little citizen is emancipation! Is liberation from human excess, to live and also to want to rise above it. Measure! The Kämpfs understand something about this, Artur was the tailor from Benshausen! Taking measurements also means keeping things in moderation, hard and cheerful. Not a condition, a fight.

I look at the cover of the book. Distant view of a Thuringian landscape. Forests, meadows, fields. The many layers of green seem like layers of history; in the foreground a small village, spotted, integrated into the green and yet unprotected when you think of German centuries. Thuringia: hardly an area of ​​elemental forces. Here everyone knows how to talk about the beauties of being moderate; Everyone knows, as another poet wrote decades ago, namely Hanns Cibulka, who lives in Gotha, “that the apple tree needs time to grow, and the person who sees this growth every day is different in many ways the one who transfers what is possible to infinity.”

The book is a religious document: it believes – in people. Yes. Unpathetic, with attention to detail, it unfolds a beautiful intercession: to always remain in a careful, caring dialogue with yourself (and your loved ones and the world!). And perhaps literature begins where memories are mixed in with stories that we didn’t even want to tell. In this sense, Scherzer is an approachable, open-hearted trapper. That also makes this book an experience.

Landolf Scherzer: The Fighters. A Thuringian family story or The great power of the little people. Edited and with an afterword by. Jens-Fietje Dwars. Edition Ornament by Quartus-Verlag, 280 pages, hardcover, €25.