The “normal” is overestimated – if it exists at all. With this approach, Ingvar Ambjørnsen was a role model.
Photo: Tine Poppe
Until the 80s, there was a flourishing city newspaper movement in West Germany. My journalistic socialization took place there. I was not allowed to study, I was able to write what was missing was the practice. I hired at the “city newspaper” in Braunschweig. Money was not to be earned there, but I was able to gain a lot of important experience. A dust of peace was emblazoned on my red R4, which was the spirit of the zeit at the time and not the only sticker. The driver’s door made a large scale for our newspaper. A whole stack of this sticker was lying around in the editorial team, no one else used it.
Once a month, practically all West German city magazines fluttered onto the editorial table, which was in a spacious cellar dungeon in a bourgeois quarter that provided us with a sympathizer -free. Books came every day. For example, Doris Gehrke’s crime novels, from which we were allowed to regularly bring forward prints. In this way, I came across authors who were not or little known to me, for example Michael Wildenhain (“The Cold Skin of the City”), Richard Kalich (“The Creature”), Bert Papenfuss-Gorek (“Dreisehntanz”)-and on a certain Ingvar Ambjørnsen, this Norweger had the “San Sebastian Blues” (romantic). He still the most unknown superstar of the FRG.
On the interior cover photo of this book from the Edition Nautilus, a slag looked challenging with a tense. Ambjørnsen looked like a smoking corner clique from the moped -driving smoking corner of the Cranachstrasse secondary school in Wolfenbüttel. I attended the junior high school there, but during the breaks I was often over there. I didn’t have moped, I didn’t smoke yet, but these people were simply more sympathetic to me.
If I hadn’t given my passion for the “city newspaper”, I might never have come across this fantastic author. He shaped many of my generation like no other. So that we understand each other correctly: I mean the handful of percent of writing who have always been looking for the offset and have therefore found it. You didn’t know that it existed, but you had the longing for it. Who is looking for finds. Always.
Ingvar Even Ambjørnsen-Haefs died 69 years old last Saturday, as his publisher Cappelen Damm announced on Sunday. In 2009 the chronic lung disease COPD was found in the “long -standing smoker”. His wife, the famous translator and author Gabriele Haefs, had a 24/7 job for years, she made it possible for him to continue working. For example on his blog, where he passed on his creeping death without dramatism and with the same clarity and honesty, which also distinguished his work, to his followers. Not quite as extreme as Christoph Schlingensief, but very honest.
The Ambjørnsen, born in Tønsberg in 1956 in Tønsberg and in Larvik (small town on the Norwegian south coast), always wanted to be a writer. At 25, he was able to live on it, he said, from then on his books appeared in Norway. As a house -occupier, he was part of the Oslo subculture, and also worked as a gardener, a lettering and psychiatric. His literary model was Jens Bjørnboe, the “Godfather” of the Norwegian counterculture of the 1970s. In April 1985 he moved to Hamburg, his future wife Gabriele Haefs. When he started, he was not alone: his buddy, 19-year-old writer Erik Fosnes Hansen, was sitting in the same sleeping car compartment, who was on the road to Stuttgart.
The following year appeared in the Buntbuch-Verlag Ambjørnsen’s first novel in German, “Saron’s skin”, and at Cappelen “Hvite Niggere” (Weiße Nigger), a novel about freaked out, luckyers and dropouts, but above all about the three provincial friends Erling, Charlie Lie and Rita Tunberg. It is one of these books that can save lives: “After that, I was a celebrity in Oslo. Norway is actually a small town. ”In Germany it appeared in 1988 at Edition Nautilus, which published a part of Ambjørnsen’s early work. In 1993 “The Golden Vacuum” also appeared there, rather essayist and approximately the unreliable storytelling. A nameless first-person narrator, a writer in the crisis, does not get his fear of life and panic attacks under control and tries to symbolically get rid of his name. A motif that appears again and again at Ambjørnsen.
The indicated image change finally led to a break with Nautilus: the publisher did not like the new hero Elling. But the tragicomic eling tetralogy, finally published by Piper, became a world success. Petter næss’ film adaptation was nominated for the Oscar in 2002 as the best foreign language film. This success was committed by the adaptations for the stage realized by Axel Hellstenius, in particular “Blutsbrüder”, the second part of Elling, who had first performance in “Schmidt’s Tivoli” in Hamburg in 2003 and was then played on 50 theaters.
In 2012 Ambjørnsen returned to Nautilus with the novel “The Oridongo”. It is a subtle milieus study on the residents of a Norwegian island. The protagonist Ulf Vågsvik has put his old name, as well as the nameless first-person narrator in the “vacuum”, and is striking, similar to the nerd Elling, which the functionalist image of man of the elbow company, the permanent compulsion to exploit. Allusions to be recognized are easy to recognize on Joseph Conrad’s story “Heart of Darkness”. Is the Oridongo the Congo? It is important that it is a journey to yourself. A motive that the author tries in many of his books: help yourself, otherwise nobody will help you. However, this is not formulated with the forehead boring index finger, but with the sympathy from the Ambjørnsche universe. All books are about strange people, because the “normal” is overestimated – if it exists at all.
What there is is a praise of simple life. In the Norwegian forests, the novel “Die Nacht dreams from the day” (2014), through the subliminal Knut Hamsun, Peer Gynt and of course the fool and lazy Henri David Thoreau are buzzing. The main character Sune says of herself: »I am just a shadow on earth; This is about my weight in great context, and I want to be, a shadow in a large context, no meat lump in the small. “The shadow metaphor often appears at Ambjørnsen, including in the book” A long night on earth “(2013), in which protagonist Claes Otto Gedde in the subway, after a nap, so does not help:” Dinosaurs were, they were many and they were deformed, but only shadows, half unreal. “
Ambjørnsen wrote over 50 books that were translated into 30 languages, including his legendary youth crime series “Peter and the Prof” and the children’s books about the friendship between a dog and a cat, “Samson and Roberto”. In the 1990s, he provided me with various short stories for my magazine »The Sturuluser«, all of them in German first publications. Later, when I worked for the Berlin “Street newspaper” temporarily and asked him for literary contributions, his quick answer was: “Take what you want!” Ingvar also wanted to publish a novella in my small publisher Edition Dead Monkey at the end of the 90s. The only condition: the book should have a cover. The fact that it did not happen is that I am also a nerd: my fellow campaigners did not move with them, I alone did not feel the responsibility, even if Gabriele Haefs said that there would certainly be Norwegian funding for such a project.
Ingvar Ambjørnsen was the literary mouthpiece of the invisible, the vulnerable, the marginalized. His protagonists did not stand for heroism, they fought for their right to exist. Understand the others without judging him. His life and words were silent resistance: life, writing and love from the edges. The fifth elling band, “Echo of a friend” (2019) can and should be ordered from Nautilus.