Literature: Being a doll and a punching ball

Before lemons appear in “Lemons” by Valerie Fritsch, the reader is made a witness to a horror story in which there are only violently damaged characters, but no unscathed ones. And because the prehistory also influences the posthistory, one wonders whether the lemons were not just a fantasy or a hope for the south, as in Goethe’s famous “Song of the Mignon” from “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship”: “Do you know that? Land where the lemons bloom.” This novel also knows hope, plays with it as a form of change, improvement and healing, and then lets it burst like a bubble. This is reminiscent of how Erich Kästner transferred Goethe’s lemons into a harsh reality of violence, immaturity and obedience: “Do you know the land where the cannons bloom?”

Violence is the central theme of the book. Starting with childhood, whose paradise, as in Valerie Fritsch’s earlier books, is expanded into an eerie and ghostly one, we get to know the young August Drach as his parents’ plaything or rather punching ball. There in the old and rotten house on the edge of the village, which is full of junk and junk that the father plans to use to make money, with dust and discarded memories, the Drachs live an exemplary life of a family idyll that crumbles until it breaks apart.

Mother Lilly doesn’t just read fairy tales full of powerful and violent transformations to August, she seems to pathologically live in one herself, taking refuge in the princess-like hopes of her childhood in order to be able to overlook the reality in which the father has the son beaten up so that he didn’t have to put up with his own weaknesses and inadequacies: “How his father always made him small and grew up because of it.” This man can only show his love to his dogs; he takes refuge in beatings and self-pity. His actions are always those that have slipped away from him, as are those of his mother, who clings to her son with an excess of tenderness: “He fell into his father’s hands and his mother’s wide-spread arms. The parents were a picture of protection and threat, a Janus-headed creature who looked at you first with a cold face, then with a pitying one.’

In this perfidious world, August learns to lie because lying helps him escape from it. But he cannot save himself because the mother’s weakness suddenly turns into a special form of violence after the father leaves them both behind, which is clinically and trivializingly referred to as Munchausen syndrome by proxy after the Baron of Lies. Lilly, who once worked in nursing, prevents possible abandonment by her son by turning him into a defenseless doll with Parkinson’s and migraine medication: “As soon as he was sick, she couldn’t keep her hands off him, warm Her cold hands took care of his fever, mothered him, mothered him, and August hardly noticed in his delirium, only saw the red-pursed lips hovering above him in the corner of his eye.

Chance saves him twice from this monstrous overreach of his mother. Once he gives him a carefree summer in the south, surrounded by blooming lemons because his mother accidentally leaves the pills in a rest area toilet, and August can claw his fingers into the flesh of a lemon to assure himself of his own vitality. Another time he is struck by lightning and Otto, the dispassionate doctor of the village, who has become his mother’s new husband but tolerates his mother’s poisonings out of love, sends him to a nearby but distant hospital after his recovery “in a late outbreak Resistance” away from his mother and into the city.

Some can save the city. She gives the appearance of being able to be someone, someone else, someone who realizes herself, who finds herself, who is able to fully absorb herself in her career and love happiness, and then return proudly to the scenes of her own growing up as a made person and find out that you have outgrown your childhood shoes and have outlived what you experienced. “Lemons” tells these happy ending stories and success stories, makes them appear as unlikely possibilities and breaks them down again, gently sometimes, but usually brutally, with acts of violence, hard cuts and beatings, as if these were only the consequence or the repetition of past events. As if all happiness were only possible as a desperate hold, as the damaging pain of love of a damaged soul.

“Lemons” is a book about violence, but even more so about the powerlessness that people experience through events such as loss and change. Having to endure but not being able to stop something from happening is one of the most powerful motifs that connects the sections of the story. Violence, Valerie Fritsch tells us in a powerful, clever, disturbing and subtle way, is a weakness that is only confused with power and strength. A weakness that needs to be prevented and that perhaps preventing it can only make real strength and lemon-like light-heartedness possible.

Valerie Fritsch: Lemons. Suhrkamp, ​​186 p., hardcover, €24.