Leipzig Buchmesse – Rolf Dieter Brinkmann: The Nator -based

Rolf Dieter Brinkmann you have to imagine as a angry person. In the almost 35 years that had been on earth, the poet loudly wrote and loudly loudly and consistently lived in poverty against the muff, the mendicity and hostility to life of the West German post -war society, into which he was born in 1940. In Vechta, Lower Saxony, where Daniela Klette has been in custody for a year, he was born: the father was a finance officer, the mother, housewife, died of cancer in 1957 when Rolf Dieter had already dared to dense. In 1975 on a reading trip in England, Brinkmann is hit by a car in London – “Perhaps the only genius of West German post -war literature,” as Heiner Müller called him is immediately dead.

Half a century later, the Rowohlt-Verlag, where ten Brinkmann books have been published postally so far, has been published by the first biography. The title, of course, a Brinkmann quote: “I go to another blue”. The literary scholar Alexandra Vasa wrote her together with Michael Töteberg, who worked for Rowohlt and as a film journalist for many years. On the approximately 400 pages, with a beautiful photo section in the middle of the book, is largely chronologically processed. The two were able to fall back on large quantities of unpublished material from after and prayers. They use many letters from Brinkmann, so that in phases the impression arises when reading, Brinkmann told how it was back then.

Childhood was very happy, the Allied Bombardments traumatize the boy, pictures eat themselves in the head. As a student, Brinkmann does not shine, but he disturbs, but becomes a member of a rhetoric club, where he presents his first poems and voluntary lectures on self-chosen topics, among other things about existentialist literature, which does not like conservative classmates. A bookseller apprenticeship in Essen follows, probably a single placking, but he gets to know his wife Maleen on the Ruhr and, as an apprenticeship colleague Ralf-Rainer Rygulla, with whom he will later publish US poetry in the legendary anthology »Acid«. The move to Cologne follows; He rarely takes his studies in pedagogy seriously, but it is becoming increasingly clear that he wants to be a freelance writer, which means a fight against himself, the FRG society, its cultural business for Brinkmann.

Brinkmann constantly writes poems, short prose and sends his texts to magazines, publishers, authors – even to Gottfried Benn, whom he worshiped. According to the obligatory cancellations, he comes under: A talent that can be said too little with the narrative volume “The Humanization” at Kiepenheuer & Witsch comes across established and tied what he hates. His poems are reminiscent of pop songs, look at the world without ripening them rhetorically. It is often scenes, consequences of perception in a clear -up language without being hypothermic. Its prose shows a conscious awareness of the big city, cinema, music, painful outbreaks of anger, erroneous light -light self -reflection.

Maleen gives birth to the son Robert, he has a mental disability. Brinkmann rages against the big ones, can be tender to the son. The novel “Nobody knows anymore” knows about it. As for the often arduous marriage of the two, the biography remains discreet. There is little money in, it is haggled for advances, written in shops and pubs. A merit of the biography of Töteberg and Vasa is to walk Brinkmann’s work, work and rage in the literary operation exactly without being carried away, stylizing it as noble rebels or dismissing it as a stänker spinner.

Even with left -wing students around 1968, according to the press, he could not cope with a “nasty -razed manner”. At a reading at the Cologne University, which was created by Brinkmann himself as a happening, he is said to have called the enrolled: “You have been set up, you have been set up”. He did not become a partisan – the letters, for example to the communist -oriented writer Hermann Peter Piwitt, show that everything was contrary to the phrase. According to his biographers, he is slowly becoming a “cult figure”, but many do not want to have anything to do with them.

The money is not long in the back and front, “the whole company is dirty, it has always been, and God’s an amateur, I am also not intended to leave this status”. Nevertheless, he can get into a scholarship in Rome, the famous Villa Massimo – Brinkmann hates it, the city, the house, the other scholarship holders: “You know the market, you know the market, you are fighting for a better chance of market, you are actually nameless assholes.” A few years later as a guest lecturer at the Germanistic seminar at Houston, it is inevitably, it is better, it is going better, it is better, it is going better. into conversation and acquaintances.

The Autodidakt Brinkmann has a wide horizon. He loves the Beatnik literature, uses the cut-up technique for text collages made known by William S. Burroughs and admires the poet Frank O’Hara. The band »Westwärts 1 & 2« with poetry, prose, photos is its most ambitious work. Töteberg and Vasa largely do without interpretations of Brinkmann’s literature. They are concerned with writing scenes and techniques, and a literary business history is also told casually. “I go to another blue” can be read smoothly, does not appear crowded with the most pedantic fan or philologists. The biography is suitable for readers who have been thoroughly, little or so far with Brinkmann – all of them, and they always have occasion.

Michael Töteberg/Alexandra Vasa: I go to another blue. Rolf Dieter Brinkmann – a biography. Rowohlt, 400 pages, born, 35 €.