Literature: Read – been there

Cooper

When Rainer Werner Fassbinder died in 1982, Ian Penman wanted to write a book about the best German film director. He only managed it almost 40 years later, during the pandemic. “Fassbinder” is as much a kaleidoscope of the old “Fassfederal Republic” between paranoia and provincialism as it is a review of biographical fragments from Penman’s everyday and cultural experience. For the British pop journalist, Fassbinder was “queer before his time,” a “one-man revolution” with a “beefy intellect” and the “do it yourself, do it now, do it fast” ethos that unites punk and the hippie movement «; someone who produced, wrote, shot and edited almost all of his films himself. In these, “every detail sits precisely, like in a stained glass window,” because Fassbinder created “his own Hollywood” to establish the “cinema as an alternative home”: “If there is a common thread that connects all of his films (and the… injured, abused, damned characters that populate it) … then there is the feeling that something is really wrong in the post-war Federal Republic of Germany.« Fassbinder died at 37, he made 43 films in just 16 years.

Ian Penman: Cooper. Thousands of mirrors. Suhrkamp, ​​254 pages, br., 20 €.

May

When Karl May was already famous, he wrote to a reader: “Dear Miss! Winnetou was born in 1840 and was shot on September 2nd, 1874. He was even more wonderful than I can describe him! To this day people try to convict him of lying, but the fifth of 14 children, who served seven years in prison as an impostor and began writing his novels based on maps and encyclopedias , always stuck with it: “It’s all more than true.” Because “it happened to him. He is that. He is Kara Ben Nemsi, who is Old Shatterhand, i.e. the hero,” write Enis Maci and Mazlum Nergiz in their tribute to this writer, whom they never read as children. The two theater dramatists ask themselves what our society could have to do with him: »Everything that is disturbing is missing in May’s works: women, states, wage work. Nevertheless, he does not violate it, the civil order, he simply designs a space that can do without it. The Wild West as an exception that proves the rule. That legitimizes it in the first place, where it rules.«

Enis Maci/Mazlum Nergiz: Karl May. Suhrkamp, 160 S., br., 18 €.

Goetz

How should one ideally write literature? Over the course of his 70 years of life, Rainald Goetz has thought about this: »You have to be in a state of HYSTERIA in order to be able to write texts that really say what you have in mind. Completely obsessed with ideas, words, concepts, details of the language, the fine balance of overtones and undertones of what is written, no, it doesn’t sound exactly the way it should sound, something is still missing, what’s wrong, where is getting too thick imposed, insisted too penetratingly, digressed for too long, where the language was too poetically abbreviated, where it was too commonplace.” He told this in February 2023 at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, which can be found in “wrong”, an anthology with more or less poetological texts the last 15 years, which he calls “smaller interventionist texts”. It also contains his acceptance speech for the Büchner Prize 2015, which he ended with a quote from the Viennese pop group Wanda: “If someone asks what you stand for/say: for Amore, Amore.” Because Goetz hates “the concept of coolness,” as he revealed in 2014 to the magazine “de:bug,” which was still in existence at the time, when, looking back, he describes his time in raves and nightlife in Munich in the 90s as follows: “We were passionate afficionados, we were completely uncool, simply because we were so enthusiastic about certain things.«

And how does the journalist see it? In the spring, Goetz interviewed the “Zeit” editor Moritz von Uslar, who told him about his conditions, about “feeling completely overwhelmed, fighting against it and wanting to get something done,” which then creates “work, so to speak.” In general, the following applies: “The increase in good journalism is of course not literature,” but rather “very good journalism.” Even more generally: every writing has “a masochistic side.” Goetz agrees with him on everything except the feeling of masochism: “It clearly doesn’t apply to me.”

On the last double page of “wrong” you see Goetz kneeling in his study, reading something. This is the last free seat in the room. Everywhere else there are books, papers, magazines. nd

Rainald Goetz: wrong. Suhrkamp, 365 S., br., 24,70 €.

Schimmang

In “Farewell to the Discourse Participants,” the writer Jochen Schimmang takes a fragmentary look back at his own history and looks at the things that seem important to him in the present. This is a small-scale but entertaining method to somehow deal with the big problems (movement left, intellectuals, rearmament) and names (Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Alberto Giacometti) – as well as with his lifelong desire to be “French.” , “ready to respond to every statement with the right apercu, accurate but, for heaven’s sake, not brilliant, good taste but not brilliant, the long history of the country behind you” and a “pastis in front of you on a summer evening at seven o’clock.” Café in Arles as well as in Cherbourg, a certain way of living and also of dyingas Fernand Braudel did in his loving trilogyThe identity of France named”.

Jochen Schimmang: Farewell to the participants in the discourse. New off-road routes. Edition Nautilus, 120 pages, hardcover, €20.