Literature and the post-war – the novel as well-designed chaos

Now that the German Book Prize has been awarded and the trade fair in Frankfurt am Main is over, hardly anyone is talking about the actual subject of the spectacle anymore: literature. What resonates are the whispers about Clemens Meyer’s complaint about not having received the prize. We agree with Anna Yeliz Schentke: “You can also be annoyed by Clemens Meyer at the same time and read his freak out as a prankster behavior… and still be happy that there are people who, in this adapted ‘literature business’,… give an F to them keep good company and give space to your anger.”

The media’s ridicule of Meyer often contained a touch of educated middle-class grandeur. Who writes stories and who is heard remains a class question. Meyer’s loud complaint in shameless Saxon was obviously far from the company’s established etiquette. The very nature of what was said seemed presumptuous. Admittedly, being able to read a 1042-page novel like “The Projectors” requires a lot of requirements. Sentences like “Now the night is pushing the day into its teeth” are not easy to say, as they offer no understanding and even less easy identification. However, if you let yourself get involved with it, they conclude all the more about the usual narratives of language images: “The novel as modernity understands it is a monolith, a chaos of voices.” Meyer wrote such a monolith.

With the chaos of voices, the unreliable narrator himself sets the method of the novel: a well-designed chaos that shows possibilities and realities and offers few certainties. “The Projectors” is as rich in characters as it is in different time zones and languages. It is a story and a novel, just as it is a fairy tale: »I am Hakawati, a storyteller. Dr. May«, it says on the first white page. Anyone who finds themselves in the rich colossus of stories by Hakawati, the storyteller Dr. If you don’t want to lose it, you can try to orient yourself using the table of contents, sources, chapters and different fonts. However, the novel aims to lose orientation between the Velebit Mountains and Leipzig, world wars and socialism as well as cinema and psychiatry. We immerse ourselves in all of these places with equal intensity. Edges and directions mix and fray. Ambivalences and contradictions are exacerbated. And this is precisely where the undeniable quality of this text lies.

The story carries us through a century, across generations and yet could not be further from a historical generational novel: “reality disappeared and reality appeared”. The novel is never linear; From chapter to chapter a new way of telling the story and making the telling talkable is added. As readers, we always suddenly appear at some point in Novi Sad or the forests of the Velebit Mountains. One thing is never certain: are we currently at war, at peace, at the cinema?

There doesn’t seem to be a center: “BADAMM BADAMM BADAMM, the chronology is starting to get mixed up for me, live so to speak, a consequence of my journey at the beginning of the nineties, last century, a consequence of the consequences.” Is it the failure of the Yugoslav dream that Phantasm of Karl May or the narrative power of cinema? What should be told here, what requires these rapid leaps in time, what is looking for its characters across generations, what is not in one Form alone seems to work? Meyer’s narrator says at the end that it was “a simple story, and the old man told it to the people he met on his journey when they asked him in surprise where he was going.” And shortly afterwards he “checked the projectors” – was the whole trip just a movie?

Cinema! Projecting and telling

Whether in a hospital bed, in the cinema for days, on trips or at conferences, the restlessness of the characters is one of the few constants in the novel. Partisans, GDR citizens, psychiatrists, communists, cineastes, cowboys… They are always on the move: on the run, in exile, arriving or about to leave. Characters who constantly have to leave the life they know and look for or fight for a new one. And just as there is no stability for the characters, there is no stability for the readers either. We read in the ever-present uncertainty as to whether what has just been told is a fever dream or reality: “‘Doesn’t he mean his dreams?’ ‘No, colleague, facts for once!'”

One of the most striking characters in the novel is the “Cowboy”. A fallen partisan who, after being imprisoned, begins his exile in the Croatian Velebit Mountains, writes dime novels in West Germany and shows films in the collapsed Yugoslavia. For him, the world of cinema connects East and West, socialism and capitalism, realism and pop culture. In the fight against the fascists, he risked his neck for the dream of the Yugoslav Republic. The fascists are defeated, Yugoslavia is there, but the cowboy is banned from his party. Several chapters later, his lover’s children, mourning the approaching end of the republic, toast the recently deceased Marshal Tito.

Projection is one of the most succinct narrative methods in the novel and the cinema is the place where history, present and future come together. During the World War it provided a hiding place from the fascists, it was a place of work and a place of longing. Films based on the books by Dr. May are based on which the protagonists of the novel move. But was May really in the “wild west” or not? Are his novels based on his travel experiences or are they phantasm or projection? »We have to hold on to it and grasp it, the present, and yet hope for the future!«

It’s not just the fact that the mountains and lakes of Yugoslavia are the backdrop for Dr. May’s stories may explain his presence in the book. Rather, May’s stories and the films based on them become a universal foil for individual dreams. In the stories, individual lives intertwine with the general world. For example, a young German fascist who goes to war with his comrades on the side of the Ustasha discovers his dreams in these stories in the same way as the old partisan. Non-simultaneous simultaneities. Overlays and political ambivalences that remain contradictory. An “Indian” appears in a Croatian village. Beads and fringes on the leather jacket, feather headdresses on her head. The people of the village are in turmoil. The first Indian in the village, previously only known from the novels of Dr. May. The disguised, French member of the film crew is an Indian for precisely that reason: he is a European and exoticizing projection onto the unknown.

About failure and dreaming

In “The Projectors” there is always a big dream that is fought for or mourned for. As intangible as this dream is, writing about it is also fragile. Between war and loss, dreaming is fragile. Regardless of whether it is Yugoslavia, the GDR or a seemingly small, private dream of a better life: before disintegration, people dream. Or to put it another way, only those who have had dreams before can perceive loss. And even though the (one) country in which one could dream of a better life is no longer there, the traces of the dreams run through the entire book as remnants and present losses.

Clemens Meyer has written about how history is made. About what remains and what disappears in and after the telling of history: countries, revolutions, wishes, lives. Even though the book hardly knows any geographical boundaries, it is a text about the East, about the GDR and about Yugoslavia. A book about the dreams and hopes that connected people with socialism and one about how they collapsed. Meyer picks up where Heiner Müller, Thomas Brasch and many other GDR writers left off: writing in contradictions. Writing great stories that are about nothing less than to win a world. »The Projectors« is a book that opens up the possibility of imagining a world other than the current one.

And as debatable as Meyer’s reaction may have been after receiving the German Book Prize, it also shows which stories are appreciated and which are forgotten. Meyer’s loving, exhausting chaos of a history of the socialist East and the remnants of a dream that was never fully realized is nothing that needs to be preserved: this is how the outcome of the book prize ceremony could also be understood.