Novel: Magdalena Saiger: Disappearance as an opportunity

The nameless first-person narrator in Magdalena Saiger’s first novel “What You Don’t See” is a burnt-out city dweller, an art geek: someone who deals in art and “makes” artists. But that doesn’t really seem to fill him anymore; he wants to get out of there, but doesn’t know how yet. Then yes. The culprit is a deer that appears to him in an area of ​​gravel and tracks that is inhospitable to his taste. A kind of awakening experience, as the deer is also considered a symbol of departure. Blinded by the mysticism, our art manager decides to break out – it’s obvious, damn deer – to throw everything away, simply disappear, go into hiding and try making art himself. He obviously doesn’t yet have a concept of gravel as a beauty, just in monetary terms, but who knows, the decision is made ad hoc, he makes it known that he wants to change his life. We take note of it.

He’s a bit of a cynic, more of a professional cynic, but switching sides sometimes can’t do any harm. The misanthrope imagines a remote area as the location for the crime: “The deeper the hinterland, the better, the hinterland of hinterlands, the refuge behind the refuge.” He finds what he is looking for in an abandoned brown coal mine in Lower Lusatia: a devastated landscape, some people call something like a lunar landscape. Maybe that’s nice, but it’s rather uninhabitable – and above all the result of foreign control by capital interests, so it’s not that far away from where our protagonist came from: Things weren’t any different, at least there are no people there anymore. Change was no longer possible in the company, the ruts were too old, the changes here have long since been completed, no man’s land. (Garzweiler II near Erkelenz-Holzweiler, Heinsberg district, sends greetings.)

What remains is the human being, the one. The village was “relocated”, but the opencast mine was quickly classified as unprofitable and deducted. The usual one-euro shops. On the edge of the now disappeared village, in a dismantled warehouse, our protagonist begins his project, the final line. Until then, the films “Local Hero” (1983) and “Burning Life” (1994) are perfect cinematic soundtracks. Anyone who has ever been to the site of the old brickworks in a community between Peine and Hanover called “Zytania” also associates something like this. And you can imagine doing away with annoying people.

Magdalena Saiger has a telling name: Saiger is an adjective that is usually used as a synonym for “vertical” in mining and geology, but in the context of a novel it is conceivable as “upright”. In the first part of her award-winning mini-book, the author describes the protagonist predominantly as a rebellious system questioner with a sock shot. Zero social skills. Actually not viable. He is infected with affluence-saturated human weariness and obsessed with his plan to fold an oversized paper labyrinth, a walk-in work of art that no one should ever see. Is it the labyrinth in the mind, the inner bullfight? Ms. Saiger explains to us in good time that labyrinths are not actually mazes. “The only dead end in a labyrinth is therefore: in the center.” A dance figure that was probably “depicted” in the labyrinth was no longer understood “at the latest in the Hellenistic period.” Well, part of the paper tiger’s plan is to destroy the work on the spot anyway, and there should always be time for a happy dance on the rubble.

But first our hobbyist creates order in the external chaos. This is reminiscent of the fictional character Lieutenant John J. Dunbar, when he finds Fort Sedgewick deserted and, using a one-man subbotnik, quickly starts a cleansing operation that baffles the Redskins. Even when Saiger’s work hints at the edge of the defined somewhere, one is reminded of “Dances with Wolves” by Michael Blake, because there Dunbar absolutely wanted to do “service on the edge of the settlement border”, i.e. at the outermost interface of his own world or perception. Saiger’s protagonist, on the other hand, had committed himself to a life in the service of art and thus to his self-imposed dependency and is now trying to evade the cycle of exploitation.

But the self-imposed loneliness, let us say: silence, is quickly over. A second, gaunt figure (and the last one in the book) appears. The labyrinth artist calls her Giacometti. He’s the only one who didn’t allow himself to be relocated; he’s defending himself against disappearance, while our art business dropout has exactly that as his goal. Giacometti, the “guardian of the village,” acts as a living oral history of the eradicated, associations with Fahrenheit 451 come to mind. The two do not become friends, but initially there is cautious respect.

As a result, we feel like we have been transported into the “stalker” worlds of Andrei Tarkovsky and the Strugatzki brothers. Towards the middle of the book, the suggested utopia turns into a dystopia: it quickly becomes clear that our artificial man is not getting any better in his new disguise; the criminal energy in his body is strong. There is no rescue, no way out, no nowhere, only stations of escape. The story becomes an artistic rampage and no one ever sees the finished work – including the artist, who ultimately even betrays Giacometti. The initially very poetic language becomes almost rabid and rabid as it goes on. This is intentional and fits. Cliché images such as rusty metal & poppy flowers are thankfully not overused. As an aperçus, interesting facts about the cultural history of the labyrinth and facts about paper as a material that smell like ribbon work are served. For a debut, the novel is amazing!

Magdalena Saiger: What you don’t see or the absolute uselessness of the moon. Nautilus, born, 168 pages, €22.