Literature: Gunter Falk: Trapp trapp, creak creak, squeak creak

To be continued” – this announcement opens like a motto Gunter Falk’s volume “The Dark Side of the Cube”, which collects all of his texts from the years 1977 to 1983 “in the reverse order of chronology”. 40 years ago, shortly before Christmas 1983, Falk declaimed, shouted and whispered texts from this book in his rough smoker’s voice in the Forum Stadtpark in Graz, supported by the Neighbors, a jazz band led by Dieter Glawischnig, which was in the process of establishing the genre “Jazz and Lyric« in cooperation with Ernst Jandl and Gunter Falk to take it to another level. Glawischnig would often appear on stage with Jandl. But Falk died unexpectedly on the night of December 25, 1983, aged just 41. The sequel was omitted. The writer and sociologist was suddenly torn from his work. And when people talk today about the Graz group, the authors associated with the magazine “manuscripts”, other names come up – for example that of Gerhard Roth, who was most recently something of a Styrian state artist, or Wolfgang Bauer, who… In 1970 he celebrated international success as a playwright, but was later only world famous in Graz.

This is not just because those named Falk survived for decades. Gunter Falk’s slim work – the collected literary texts barely fill a 300-page volume – is certainly the most aesthetically and intellectually demanding in the circle of the “Grazer”. Unlike authors like Roth, Peter Handke or Barbara Frischmuth, who gave in after their more or less experimental beginnings and returned to more marketable forms, Falk consistently pursued his path. He was a member of the Bielefeld Colloquium New Poetry, which brought together concrete and experimental literature and which included, among others, Hartmut Geerken, Eugen Gomringer, Helmut Heißenbüttel and Gerhard Rühm – the latter, according to Falk, was the most important role model of his early days. His three books were published in Germany and spread Falk’s reputation far beyond Graz. Otfried Rautenbach published his debut volume “The Peacock is a Proud Animal” in 1965 with his legendary publishing house Hagar, subtitled: “Meaning Models.” In short prose texts, Falk reduces narrative clichés to absurdity: “Everyone was in the swimming pool. The swimming pool was open. The three men and she were in the swimming pool. The swimming pool was open because it was summer. It was summer because it was hot. It was hot because it was summer. It was summer because this short story takes place in summer.” Or he builds an entire text out of comic noises: “trap trap trap trap trap trap trap/creak creak/squeak creak squeak/breath.”

In 1977 and 1983, respectively, the two volumes “The Dice in Some Sentences” and “The Dark Side of the Cube” were published by Klaus Ramm, a renowned avant-garde publisher in which Ludwig Harig, Franz Mon and Oskar Pastior, among others, also published. The reputation of the Graz group was at its peak at that time; Alfred Kolleritsch’s magazine “manuscripts”, in which Falk also published regularly and which today only exists as a shadow of its former self, was read carefully throughout the German-speaking world; In 1975, Jörg Drews and Peter Laemmle published the volume “When the people of Graz set out to conquer literature”. There is also a contribution by Klaus Ramm about Gunter Falk: “I like Falk’s texts so much because they make it so difficult for me to find anything else – be it understanding or meaning – as text.”

Falk earned his doctorate on “gaming systems and gaming behavior.” And he has a very playful approach to experimentation and concrete poetry. Many texts are designed according to permutative patterns, but with the “clock tower song” Falk has also written a shrill satire on the Horst Wessel song: “the rows apart/air is there to breathe/the marriages are tightly closed/say yes to dying «. And the pop-savvy author does not seal his literature against his own life problems: »Hans is a drinker/Hans is a drinker because he drinks/Hans drinks because he is afraid/Hans is afraid because everyone knows that Hans is a drinker (… )” His “Credo” begins with “I don’t believe in God, in the victorious class, in the ruling class, because the rule is bad, the victory is far, its result is doubtful, the state is violent, the people are bad, the philosophy stupid (…)” And the character of Franz appears again and again in short prose texts, whom he lets experience “adventures in a class society”: “Franz, an official who used to study a lot, decided to go off the rails. He seemed to be aware of the metaforic nature of the expression; His will was composed, the handshake he recently gave the office manager didn’t warm him: he was, as usual, subordinate.”

The Austrian writer and filmmaker Hermann J. Hendrich once stated: “As is well known, most artists vehemently reject a philosophical-critical discussion about their work.” This also applies to the protagonists of the Graz bohemian movement – with the exception of Helmut Eisendle and Gunter Falk: He is also at the forefront of the alcohol-fuelled literary scene. However, he leads a second life as a sociologist and is able to maintain a critical distance from his artistic work.

A selection of his essays is now available in the volume “On the Disappearance of the Author” and shows an intellectual who already embraced Bourdieu and Foucault when it was not yet fashionable to do so. In “Who or what is a writer?”, for example, he analyzes the market mechanisms of the literary business, which lead to producers and products becoming interchangeable: “That this basic fact is somewhat contradictory to the collective fantasies of uniqueness, genius, depth and timelessness , with which literary makers, friends and administrators cloud their consciousness, is obvious and is occasionally suspected.” Other works focus on “reading in a class society” or the “social dimension of drinking and its conditions of attribution.” In it, Falk highlights the differences in the way alcoholism is dealt with across social classes: “In a barely visible process of political production and enforcement of rules, legitimate and illegitimate consumers are defined, searched for, “arrested,” rewarded, punished, “on the right Path kept’ or treated.” He dedicates a text about “destructive and constructive aggression in individuals and in society” to Karl Marx and Konrad Lorenz.

The essays are still worth reading decades later, as are the poetic texts. It would be time to rediscover this author who combines the art of language and political alertness in a way that has always been very rare.

Gunter Falk: words were once people. All poetic texts. Ritter-Verlag, 312 pages, hardcover, €27. Gunter Falk: About the disappearance of the author. Essays and reviews. Ibid., 344 pages, hardcover, €32.