On Killing Oneself, Trans. by Adrian Nathan
West, Wakefield Press, 2022
“Hermann Burger is one of the truly great authors of the German language: a writer of consummate control and range, with a singular and haunting worldview.” –Uwe Schütte
In the tunnel-village of Göschenen, a man named Hermann Burger has vanished without a trace from his hotel room, suspected of suicide. What is found in his room is not a note, but a 124-page manuscript entitled Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis: an exhaustive manifesto comprising 1,046 “thanatological” aphorisms (or “mortologisms”) advocating suicide.
This “grim science of killing the self” studies the predominance of death over life, in traumatic experiences such as the breakup of a marriage, years of depression, the erosion of friendships and the disgrace of impotence―but the aphoristic text presents something more complicated than a logical conclusion to life experience. Drawing inspiration from such authors as Wittgenstein, Cioran and Bernhard, Burger’s unsettling work would be published shortly before the author would take his own life.
Hermann Burger (1942–89) was a Swiss author, critic and professor. Author of four novels and several volumes of essays, short fiction and poetry, he first achieved fame with his novel Schilten, the story of a mad village schoolteacher who teaches his students to prepare for death. At the end of his life, he was working on the autobiographical tetralogy Brenner, one of the high points of 20th-century German prose. He died by overdose days after the first volume’s publication.
Hermann Burger's Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis is basically a collection of 1046 suicide-focused aphorisms, observations, quotes, and claims, presented as a study in 'mortology' (so Burger's coinage): "the doctrine and philosophy of the total predominance of death over life". The text is introduced, however, in a prologue of sorts, recounting an episode from mid-January 1988, in a remote and desolate Swiss village where the locals grow concerned about a person who seems to have gone missing, with: "evidence of a capital crime committed by the missing person against the missing person himself"; i.e. they worry that he has committed suicide. Finding the unsigned manuscript of this Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis in the desk drawer in his hotel room certainly does nothing to reässure them.
A local doctor learns more from the missing "lowlander's psychiatric counselor" and explains to the locals that, while this Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis is an: "exhaustive manifesto of 1,046 mortologisms", based on the author's own traumatic experiences and psychological issues:
one who expounds so exhaustively on the subject of self-murder is hardly in a position and may not even desire, to carry out this unhinged act.
The missing author does (re)appear, and identifies himself, as Hermann Burger, and the mix-up is cleared up -- he was, indeed, not a suicide (and can then get on with his writing).
In the text-proper then is also noted:
247. No one need die after reading our Tractatus, because the tension of expectation vanishes into nothing -- into mortology.
248. Not every suicidal opus is contagious.
It's also noted that authors such as Goethe -- whose: "Werther unleashed a wave of suicides all round" -- and Thomas Bernhard, this: "poeta doctus suicidalis" with his fiction filled with "suicide-orgies", never: "took the step themselves". Yet Burger was to take his own life just a year later, a fact that then hangs very heavily over this text.
Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis is an obsessive('s) engagement with death and suicide: "Death is the strongest addictive substance of all," Burger writes, and: "Suicide is the one and only absolute act a person may commit without ifs, ands, or buts".
He suggests:
539. Suicide is never a way out, it is an abyss - it is not grounded, it is the absence of all ground.
540. Still less is suicide the solution to a problem. It blows all solutions to bits and pieces.
He takes suicide also as empowering:
450. I and I alone am master of this highest of all sufferings: death, killing, and being killed. Me, not some malignant tumor.
451. I am the most malignant tumor of all.
Burger only occasionally uses Freitod, one of the German terms for suicide -- comparing it also to Freispruch ("an acquittal") -- but this way of seeing the act as a 'voluntary death' allows him also to suggest:
189. Voluntary death is an affirmation of dignity and humanity, against the blind progress of nature -- freedom in its most extreme form, the last freedom we can ever know.
But, he continues, in fact: "there is no voluntary death, just as there is no natural death". (Among other German terms for suicide the most commonly used is Selbstmord -- literally 'self-murder' --, and he also considers the act as such.)
Repeatedly, there is rather disturbing romanticizing of the act -- "His example is so courageous, so momentous, that we must ask why every suicide that comes to light fails to inspire a wave of imitators" (though, in fact, it is well-documented (e.g.) that reports of suicide do lead to an increase in suicides) -- as Burger also suggests:
243. In view of the nuclear and ecological disasters, the looming omnicide, that the world faces, the suicide's solution is an artistic and revolutionary act: he anticipates -- pars pro toto and for mortology's sake -- a fate the entire world must sooner or later undergo. This resolute step puts him leagues ahead of the chronically healthy clinging hungrily to life.
Burger takes suicide seriously; he is amusingly dismissive of simplistic explanations and excuses:
154. I cannot bear to live anymore is not a theory, it's just pissing and moaning.
So also:
675. Frequently, we find the most wretched suicide notes accompanied by whole file folders full of attempts to document the path down which none may follow. Frankly, this is a dilettantish approach to suicidalism.
Yet, in a sense, this Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis is nothing but such a collection of attempts .....
Still, Burger understands that:
343. We seldom understand a suicide, because his reasons are not objectively transparent and his existential pain cannot be shared.
Burger invokes and quotes from suicide-literature -- both by authors who merely treated the subject (Bernhard, Goethe, Cioran) as well as those who went through with the act (Jean Améry, Kleist, Trakl). He ranges from Camus and his claim that suicide is the: "one truly serious philosophical problem" to Kafka to the terminally ill Fritz Zorn's approaching-death account Mars (Burger suggesting: "If we defined a terminal illness such as cancer as organically assisted suicide, then Fritz Zorn, author of Mars, may also be considered a suicide").
Burger devotes significant space to the example of constantly death-defying and -challenging 'parasuicidarian' Harry Houdini -- suggesting, however, that even his death can ultimately be considered suicide, Houdini's insistence on performing despite a doctor's "unequivocal diagnosis", a ruptured appendix that killed him: "call it suicide with organic assistance".
Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis is not merely a disquisition about death, but a call to engage with the subject -- which Burger sees as the subject of all subjects (and which becomes here, in every sense, all-consuming). So, early on, he even clamors: "We must found schools for suicides, exitus institutes !" while the final summing up has him state (and then essentially underline):
1044. I die. Therefore I am.
1045. Quod erat demonstrandum.
1046. Finis.
Central to the book is also the dichotomy:
67. Death is private, a path down which none can follow, but also public, because each death is simultaneously the end of the world.
Burger's own suicide, so soon after publishing this, colors every aspect of a text in which it is already practically impossible to separate work and author (Burger presenting himself in the opening section not just by name but giving his passport number) and forces the question of whether, as intellectual exercise (or whatever kind you want to see it as), it was a success or failure.
His suicide also makes some of the poignancy then all the more pointed -- not least:
145. Every suicide leaves behind the insipid sense that he could have been saved, if only ...
Burger's suicide gives the text a greater immediacy, and it makes it difficult not to read it (also) as the author wrestling with (or, it must be said, wallowing in ...) his many demons. Both as such, or read (if you can) extra-autobiographically, as it were, Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis is a fascinating -- and discomforting -- addition to the body of suicide-literature, grappling with that greatest of all issues, death itself. - M. A. Orthofer
https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/suisse/burgerh_tractatus.htm
Hermann Burger (Menziken, 1942) is one of the truly great authors of the German language: a writer of consummate control and range, with a singular and haunting worldview. Yet it is not surprising that he fell into obscurity after his death, from an overdose of barbiturates at age forty-six. He shares this fate with many of the most august names from the peripheries of German-language literature who, never managing to escape from the ghetto of Austrian or Swiss publishing, either gave up in exhaustion, or went on writing and were forgotten nonetheless.
Burger might have seemed the exception at first: by 1979, with his third book of fiction, he signed with S. Fischer Verlag, making the leap into the higher echelons of German publishing. He would later break with them publicly in favor of Suhrkamp, which would release his finest novel, Brunsleben, as the first volume of the projected tetralogy Brenner. Had he finished, it would likely have cemented his reputation as one of the late twentieth century’s most important writers. That Brenner had represented from the start a losing struggle between the author’s ambition and his waning attachment to life was evident in the second chapter of the incomplete second volume, Menzenmang (1990). There, after recounting his hospital admission for depression and suicidal ideation, the narrator—recollecting his toy car, the “time-annihilation machine” that is one of the ciphers for evanescence in the novel—decides to buy himself a Ferrari 328 GTS because, “as my life has a maximum duration of two to three years, there’s no point in saving, in restraint, in squirreling away.” And indeed, Burger, who had bought himself the same car, and posed with it in a famous photograph wearing a driving cap with a cherry-red scarf, was dead three days after volume one of Brenner hit the shelves.
Depression
Burger’s suicide was the endpoint of a life of torment, which he wrote through under the mercilessly stern tutelage of depression. He was bipolar, and never made a secret of his illness. Rather, with real passion, though reluctant to make a show, he railed against fate, which had marked him out for a premature end—as the author never doubted. The ineluctable specter of suicide left him no choice but to view his life from the perspective of tragedy: one whose denouement had an uncertain date, but a definite form. It was natural, then, that he would place himself in a long line of author-suicides situated on the outskirts of the German language, from Georg Trakl to Paul Celan, the subject of his doctoral thesis, to Jean Améry.
Tipping his hat to Wittgenstein, Burger entitled his 1989 apologia for suicide Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis. This sinister hint at the approaching disaster comprises 1046 “thanatological” aphorisms. With characteristic relentlessness, Burger exposes his private thanatology (“as we term the precepts and philosophy of the total dominion of death over life”) and “the grim science of killing the self” also known as suicidology.
Unlike Jean Améry’s On Suicide, which might serve as a companion piece, Burger’s book is suffused with an irony that provides, as in all his texts, a counterweight to a sorrow that it never manages to completely subsume. Reading it, one frequently shudders, as with mortologism number 109: “The sufferer of endogenous depression ought to be praised every day he forgoes taking his own life. Instead people wait patiently for him to do so, and then console those who remain behind.”
Defense Reaction
Unusually, Burger’s suicide seems to have played a significant role in his disappearance from publishers’ catalogs and bookstores and thus, inevitably, from the consciousness of the reading public. Whereas a spectacular end of this sort often gives rise to voyeuristic curiosity about an author’s work, Burger’s pitiless candor as he openly contemplated his doom provoked a defense reaction in many. In his work, the parade of prospective suicides and aficionados of death were not simply a literary conceit, but rather the avatars of an existential balancing act in which eloquence and vigor in the artistic approximation of suicide become a strategy for eluding it.
Thomas Bernhard as Exemplar
Burger never denied that his reading of Thomas Bernhard had been decisive for the composition of his work. Burger encountered Bernhard in his twenties, after he’d changed his program of study from architecture to German literature. He had already published one volume of verse and another of short fiction, both stamped with an extraordinary sensory awareness and a refined feeling for detail; but the evolution from these early works to his first novel, Schilten, could not be more dramatic. The idea for the novel came to Burger during a visit to the writer and schoolteacher Jannis Zinniker in Schiltwald, the model for the village of Schilten in Burger’s book. Surprised to find his friend out of class, Burger asked where the children had gone. “I had to send them home,” Zinniker said. “Today there is an Abdankung, that’s our word for funeral.” “Do you know,” Burger replied, “you’ve just hit on the subject of a novel? The burial ceremony pushes the lessons aside, the cemetery takes precedence.”
In a series of twenty quarto notebooks delivered as a School Report Addressed to the Inspectors’ Conference, to use the novel’s subtitle, Schilten tells the story of Armin Schildknecht, a former schoolteacher who has been relieved of his duties on account of the distressing nature of his lessons. After losing his employment, Schildknecht buys the schoolhouse, moves into the attic, and composes a report to justify his actions. Rather than prepare his students for the life ahead, Schildknecht has tutored them in cemetery lore and death science, and commanded them to practice suspended animation, forcing them to lie in a covered hole in the floor reciting poetry to themselves while preparing for the eternal nothingness that awaits. Modeled on such Bernhardian chroniclers as Prince Sarau in Gargoyles or the painter Strauch in Frost, Schildknecht is the first in a long series of deranged protagonists who will voice Burger’s misgivings about the futility of habituating oneself to life.
A hallmark of Burger’s work was exhaustive engagement with his material. Schilten was the product of years of research into Schiltwald and its surroundings, architecture, local funerary customs, and the ins and outs of the Swiss educational system. Similar work would go into his collection Diabelli, the titular story of a “disillusioned illusionist” determined to make himself disappear and to end an acclaimed but futile career. Burger was familiar with the prestidigitator’s art, and had even taken the magician's oath in the course of his investigations. Though he dazzled journalists, publishers, and critics with his tricks, he never revealed their secrets, whether verbally or in his texts. In a prize lecture, Burger would state, “I gladly admit that the circensian matters more to me than everyday normalcy, that magic fascinates me incomparably more than the true physics of things.” Behind this was something darker: Burger’s conception of life itself as an elegant deception, a ruse rendered more or less plausible by the elaborate distractions that overlay it.
Ailment and Indulgence
Burger’s second novel, Die künstliche Mutter, is significantly more autobiographical than one might suppose, given its fantastic setting. In this glum but sardonic account of a specialist in German Literature and Glaciology, Burger took up the theme of his own psychosomatic affliction, his “genital migraines,” as the protagonist terms them. The book takes place in an otherworldly institution where patients, lying on beds in tunnels carved in a massif, absorbing the heat and moisture, are subjected to a battery of bizarre therapeutic measures. To devise his hero’s elaborate medical history, Burger devoured reams of psychiatric literature and even took a cure himself near Bad Gastein, in Austria, where guests rest in underground caves to enjoy the allegedly salubrious effects of the area’s high radon concentration.
Even in the early tale “Die Notbremse,” where an Epicurean in a dining car reflects on the consequences of pulling the brake, Burger’s sybaritic inclinations were already evident, and it was only natural that his masterwork would attempt “to reconstitute, through the medium of cigars,” the sensual world of childhood, which had vanished into air like smoke. Early in Brenner, Burger affirms:
There are ur-phenomena of tone, color, and scent that are often predestined, so to speak, irrespective of their contingent nature, to tune an existence like a stringed instrument; and the adult, when he attends a concert, an exhibition, a theater opening, searches, as though after a lost picture book, for the traces of these earliest magical impressions.
In the guise of his narrator, Hermann Arbogast Brenner, Burger, the cigar lover, composes an autobiography of ashes: part wish-fulfillment, part settling of accounts, with the languid, bitter feel of a last smoke before an execution. Here Burger reveals, in the rawest form to date, his sorrows, his rancor against his family, and his solitude in the aftermath of divorce; at the same time, his style sheds the last vestiges of his Bernhard-worship to arrive at a dense, crowded idiom, rife with dialect and ornate, Latinate turns of phrase that possess rare evocative power.
At twenty-three, on a road trip to Berlin with his friend Kurt Theodor Oehler, Burger had already pronounced death the most important part of life. A few years later, in “Das glücklichste Tag unserers Lebens,” he would write, with reference to the fairy tale “Hans in Luck”: “You can’t ride happiness and you can’t milk it, you can’t slaughter it and you can’t polish it, all you can do is forget it and in that way, hopefully, not disturb it.” Reading Brenner, it is hard to escape the sense that things were the other way around: that it was long-buried happiness that had come to avenge itself on the author in his late misery. Page after page in Burger’s magnum opus attest to his intense longing for temps perdu, giving sense to Ilse Aichinger’s phrase, “Nothing looks so much like homeland as the things one takes leave of.” The five hundred pages that exist give only a vague sense of the direction Burger’s work would have taken. Many questions remain open, particularly with regard to the novel’s autobiographical content. Only one thing is certain: for Burger, as for Kleist, there was no help in this world. - Uwe Schütte
translated from the German by Adrian Nathan West
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/special-feature/uwe-schutte-on-hermann-burger/
Hermann Burger, Brenner, Trans. by Adrian
Nathan West., Archipelago, 2022
“Hermann Burger was an artist who went the whole hog every time, didn't conserve himself. He was a man with a big longing for happiness.” --Marcel Reich-Ranicki
Appearing in English for the very first time, Brenner is a delightfully unusual novel full of dark humor tracing the childhood memories of the book's eponymous narrator, a scion of an ancient cigar dynasty.
Perpetually shrouded in a thick cloud of cigar smoke, Herman Arbogast Brenner, scion of an old and famous cigar dynasty, has decided to kill himself––but not until he has written down his forty-six years of life, in a Proustian attempt to conjure the wounds, joys, and sensations of his childhood in the rolling countryside of the Aargau region of Switzerland.
Estranged from his wife and two children, he decides there is no point in squirrelling away his fortune, so he buys himself a Ferrari 328 GTS, and drives around sharing cigars with his few remaining friends.
In this roman à clef, writing and smoking become intertwined through the act of remembering, as Brenner, a fallible, wounded, yet lovable antihero, searches for epiphany, attempting to unearth memories just out of reach, which spring forth from memories of a red toy car, the sound of a particular chord played on the piano, or the smell of the cigars themselves.
Brenner is the final work from Hermann Burger, who died by suicide in 1989. The book publishes days before what would have been the author’s 80th birthday
Swiss writer Burger (1942–1989) makes his posthumous English-language debut with the revelatory if sputtering story of a fallen tobacco empire and its despairing heir, Hermann Arbogast Brenner. Brenner, estranged from his wife, children, and siblings and fighting a yearslong battle with depression, buys a sports car, believing his life will end within a few years. As Brenner continually hints at his soon-to-come suicide, he drives around Switzerland, visits friends, and discursively muses on his intellectual interests, all while smoking cigars. He recalls his brief stay at a children’s home where he was viciously bullied: in Brenner’s recollection, his bully made him crouch for hours, attacking him when he tried to move, but the nuns who ran the home refused to believe that their star pupil could be so ferocious. However, when Brenner revisits the home, he also remembers people showing him great kindness, and now questions the veracity of his own memories. Taken in total, and thanks to West’s lucid translation along with a series of evocative photos, the chronicle offers a cogent view of a rambling man desperate to shape his life into meaning. It’s a bit of a slog, but fans of a certain style of discursive Euro fiction will find this pleasantly diverting. - Publishers Weekly
Neurasthenic tale of cigars and suicide by Swiss writer Burger.
“Distinctions collapse, existence has no feeling of proportion with regard to death, when your number comes up, it’s best to just slink off without disturbing anybody’s sleep….” So thinks Burger’s protagonist, heir to a minor cigar empire in a quiet corner of the Aargau—quiet, that is, until, having decided that there’s no point to keeping a healthy savings account given the nearness of death, he buys a “rossa corsa Ferrari 328 GTS with a removable hardtop and a maximum speed of 166 mph.” Not much happens in the book, though a cigar aficionado will learn a great deal about different kinds of tobacco, means of storage (“The cigar must be stored at the proper humidity, sixty to sixty-seven degrees is ideal, and sheltered from abrupt changes in temperature”), and additives that “impart the right aromas” to the tobacco. Add to that occasional disquisitions on the peculiarities of alpine weather, and Burger’s encyclopedic leanings are given room to roam. Burger’s smoke-filled narrative, each chapter headed by a different brand of cigar, is at its best when it’s at its most Proustian, a stogie triggering a memory and with it a philosophical observation, whether a defiant defense of smoking (“a privilege of the mind and of the senses”), a takedown of psychiatry (“Analysis—and this is the perfidy of it—robs us of our myths”), or a Susan Sontag–esque meditation on depression, which Burger calls a metaphor that allows the afflicted to proclaim, “This is how miserable I am!” It adds up to a slog of a tale that makes any given Dürrenmatt work look like a light comedy. The translator is to be commended, however, for his innovative rendering of Burger’s mix of Swiss German with Hochdeutsch, the former signaled by outlandish phrases in italics such as “he ken turn eh fine phrase too.”
Of some interest to students of postwar literature in German. - Kirkus Reviews
"There is, for the reader, a compelling claustrophobia in being immersed so thoroughly in such a warped subjectivity. It is this, ultimately, that Brenner shares with the best of Thomas Bernhard’s work: not merely the sheer bravura of a three-page sentence, but how such sentences capture the swerving freneticism and unreality of a mind in the act of consuming itself . . . Masterful and devastating . . . " --Charlie Lee, The Nation
"Narrated by a man on the brink of death, Brenner is a baroque – in places manic – extemporization, a profusion of extraordinary involutions and convolutions, of abrupt temporal and tonal shifts. A novel of multiple registers, it’s in part a recuperation of the intense pleasures and torments of childhood, in part a settling of scores. This is an astounding translation of an astounding book." --Jonathan Buckley
Hermann Burger’s Brenner is an autobiographical novel about childhood traumas and the pleasures of smoking a cigar.
Hermann Arbogast Brenner is the heir to a Swiss tobacco empire who is approaching his own end. Wrapping up his affairs, Brenner drives in his newly purchased sports car to visit friends in the Swiss countryside. He wants to talk about life while also smoking his way through a case of cigars.
In a mocking celebration of Marcel Proust and his madeleine cookie-triggered involuntary memory, Brenner chooses which cigar to smoke in the hope of conjuring a particular event. He only starts reminiscing after the cigar is lit. Each chapter focuses on a specific cigar; some brands are real, others the imaginary products of Brenner’s company. The characteristics of each cigar are extolled before it is lit: Brenner compares them to women, life, the theater, and expressions of the human condition.
The memories conjured unfold similarly to how the cigar being smoked develops its “pneuma,” an Ancient Greek word for breath that Brenner appropriates to describe his experience. Among the memories that are conjured, Brenner revisits his complicated relationship to his parents, the bullying he endured during a traumatic stay at a children’s home, the significance of his favorite toy car, and the challenges of building a career while suffering from depression.
Brenner comes with a translator’s afterword, wherein the challenges of translating Burger’s prose are discussed, and suggestions for reading the text are given. The translation is excellent: it keeps the meandering sentences under control, solves the problems posed by the idiosyncrasies of Swiss German, and maintains Burger’s voice.
Complicated but rewarding (just like a fine cigar), the novel Brenner takes its time to get to where it is going. - Erika Harlitz Kern
https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/brenner/
This was to be the first of a tetralogy of novels about the life of Hermann Arbogast Brenner, a not very well-disguised portrait of the author himself. Sadly just three days after it was published, he took his own life. He had started but never finished the second part. The book had a certain amount of success but then, as all too often happens to Swiss German literary works, it faded away. We should be very grateful that the excellent Archipelago and translator Adrian Nathan West have made it available in English.
I read a brief review of the book and the reviewer complained that not much happens. Well, I suppose that not much happens in Proust or Joyce but, as in this book, a lot does happen if you read the book carefully. My only surprise on reading it was that I had not heard of the author before and, after reading it, that it really was a first-class book.
Hermann Arbogast Brenner descends from a tobacco family but, as he will later explain, because his grandfather foolishly died at sixty-one instead of eighty-one, the firm passed to another branch of the family and our hero’s father, instead of being a tobacco magnate, was an insurance inspector. The firm is now in the hands of Hermann’s his second cousin, Johann Caspar Brenner. Hermann gets on well with Johann. Indeed Johann gives him a generous pension and also a seemingly unlimited supply of the finest cigars.
Yes, this book is about cigars as much as anything else. You will learn far more than you ever wanted to about the whole tobacco business: the history, the crop, the harvesting, the processing, the types of tobacco, the huge amount of cigar varieties, cigars vs cigarettes, social customs concerning tobacco products, even the role of tobacco after sex in French films and a lot more. Hermann may never have been very much directly involved in the tobacco business but he has a huge knowledge of it and is an an enthusiastic smoker. His only wish was to be a passionate cigarier. - The Modern Novel
Read more here: https://www.themodernnovel.org/europe/w-europe/switzerland/hermann-burger/brenner/
The Swiss writer Hermann Burger (1942–1989) wrote his first novel between 1970 and 1972, but it remained unpublished during his lifetime. The typewritten text is entitled "Local Report" and is now part of Burger's estate, along with its numerous preliminary stages. The aim of the research project is to reconstruct the genesis of this novel within 3 years and to make the result available online in cooperation with the Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH), University of Cologne as a text-genetic first edition in electronic form as well as the editorially developed version to publish the transcription in book form.
Lokalbericht is Hermann Burger's first novel, written in 1970 but only posthumously published in 2016 (and online). It is basically a two-part novel; there is a short (five page) third part, but it functions essentially as a postscript (and neatly offers an explanation for why the novel was not published when Burger (more or less) completed it).
Lokalbericht begins with narrator Günter Frischknecht, a PhD student in literature, embarking on a -- this -- novel. He begins with the title, the novel beginning:
Lokalbericht – den Titel, das Schwierigste an einem Buch, habe ich schon. Fehlt mir nur noch der Roman.
['Local Report' -- I already have the title, the hardest part of a book. Now, I'm just missing the novel.]
As this already suggests, this will very much be a novel about writing a novel. With its protagonist whose name clearly echoes that of the Magister Ludi of Hesse's The Glass Bead Game (he is a fresh- (i.e. new-)Knecht) -- a work (and game) that is almost immediately alluded to --, Lokalbericht also promises to be ambitious in its reach, an attempt to show what literature can do (even as also its title promises a closely circumscribed focus, a very localized report).
Frustrated by the academic approach to literature, Frischknecht/Burger is looking to move beyond it -- albeit, much of the time, still from within: among the characters he engages with through much of the text is his doctoral advisor, Professor Kleinert; among the first things he does is suggest to Kleinert a new subject for his dissertation: fed up with interpretations of works that claim to know better than its author what a given novel is about, he figures why bother with basing interpretation on an actual novel in the first place and suggests writing an interpretation of an invented one. (His advisor is not amused.)
Exposition 'against interpretation' is just one of the novel's themes and purposes -- nicely realized in one of the novel's more vividly imagined scenes that involves an actual demonstration against interpretation, the poets rising up against it, with a whole canon's worth of long-suffering writers paraded out and, for example:
Rilke brach unter der Last der Fehlinterpretationen nieder und musste gepflegt werden; Hauptmann hetzte weiße Mäuse auf uns; Novalis leuchtete mit einer Taschenlampe schamlos in die unio mystica
[Rilke collapsed under the load of misinterpretations and had to be tended to; Hauptmann whipped up white mice against us; Novalis shamelessly shone ino the unio mystica with a flashlight]
Lokalbericht is a novel of a young author trying to figure out how to write a novel. As Frischknecht, the author moves back and forth into his own narrative; occasionally, even the first person voice is not sufficient and he addresses the reader even more directly and intimately, in 'letters to the reader'. Yet the layers of explanation he offers seem meant as much for him, as he actively explores what he is doing, and what he can do.
Even the actual writing-process -- the typing of the manuscript -- becomes subject-matter, Frischknecht describing the acquisition of not one but two typewriters, replacements for the old 'midwife' of so many of his poems, and their potential; among the pleasures of the first-rate edition of the novel and the superb website-presentation is being pointed to and able to see the different typefaces as Burger did indeed purchase said typewriters at this point in the (writing of) the text, suggesting also just how metafictional this exercise is. (There's even a photograph of Burger at work on the novel in front of his Hermes Media 3, one hand resting on a copy of Günter Grass' The Tin Drum, as if for reässurance.)
The chapters of the first part mainly explore, in a variety of ways, the literary, an attempt by the narrator to figure out purpose and possibilities. Among the things Frischknecht acknowledges is:
Angst, Angst habe ich natürlich, sonst würde ich nicht schreiben, Angst vor drei möglichen Existenzformen: Lehrer, Schriftsteller, Kritiker, Angst insgesamt vor einem Leben mit Literatur, für die Literatur.
[Fear, naturally I feel fear. Otherwise I wouldn't write. Fear of three possible forms of existence: teacher, author, critic. Fear, all in all, of a life with literature, in literature. ]
He can't imagine the life of a teacher, something he worries he might be reduced to. Other significant recurring characters warn of the dangers of the other alternatives: aside from the academic, Professor Kleinert, there's the critic Felix Neidthammer (a hint of jealousy in that family name, 'Neid hamma') -- at best (or worst) an interpreter of the literary whose directions for reviewing (a list is provided) are an author's worst nightmare -- or the bookseller Laubschad, who can barely stand anyone buying a volume from his store and does little but lose himself in the constant stream of books coming his way.
Reading is a central concern in Lokalbericht; in many ways it is more of a concern to the narrator than writing. Academia has shown him the dangers of reading being reduced solely to interpretation, while the critic Neidthammer's approach -- meant for a wider audience -- seems little better. At one point, in a late letter to the reader, Frischknecht describes the institute 'Legissima', which will take unwanted reading off your hands and do it for you (the service also then providing summary sentences for conversation-purposes, formulas that allow the non-reader to spout wisely about said book(s)).
As Frischknecht warns -- again in a letter addressed directly to the reader --:
Lesen ist gefährlich, viel gefährlicher als Schreiben. Deshalb wird je länger desto mehr geschrieben und immer weniger gelesen. Sie allein sind die Helden der Literatur, wenn es in der Literatur noch Helden geben darf.
[Reading is dangerous, much more dangerous than writing. That's why more and more is being written, and less and less read. You alone are the heroes of literature -- if literature can still have heroes.]
In looking for an ideal, Frischknecht hits upon the local editor for the daily newspaper: not only a secure writing position but one that offers a steady flow of work and a large readership, the work disposable but also covering the significant. The localized and specific of course also appeal to him -- and in the second part of the novel, roughly the second half, he offers a much less wide-ranging narrative, focused closely on place (the town of Aarau) and one event.
While the first part is untitled, the second part is presented as: 'The Celebration, or so-called reality' ('Das Fest, oder die sogenannte Wirklichkeit') -- suggesting that maybe he isn't quite going into it (or didn't come out of it) with quite the desired confidence, the presentation in literary form of reality. The focus is an annual youth-celebration; Frischknecht specifically recalls his eighteen-year-old self, and the crush he had on local dentist's daughter Isabelle von Arx -- an unfulfilled longing explaining also the repeated references to dentally-related dreams and fantasies, as well as additional possible interpretations thereof, a variation on purely literary interpretation.
The final part sees Neidthammer critique and comment on Frischknecht's novel, and his attempt at capturing the real. 'I wouldn't write this novel yet', he suggests to Frischknecht, in an amusing out that Burger wholeheartedly embraced: let it lie for one, or two, or ten years he suggests, there's no need to rush to publication. Distance is the best corrective, Neidthammer suggests, in a world where too much is flooded unthinkingly onto the market.
The conclusion is, of course, all the more poignant and convincing given the fate of the novel, as Burger did indeed not publish it, and it lay dormant for decades. It was, however, certainly worth resurrecting: Lokalbericht is not just a clever novel that considers what literature can do and its place in the modern world, but also an impressive display of writing. Yes, there are elements of apprentice-work here, experimentation with form and style -- but Burger already displays a very confident touch and style. His command of language, and the way he plays with it, alone make the novel worthwhile; beyond that, it's a whole lot of fun too, as Burger is a gifted comic writer.
It's worth noting, too, that the edition of this work is exemplary, with useful (and in-depth) supporting material and commentary, complemented further by the superb website, a great example of what can be done online to enhance the reading and study of a literary work. - M.A.Orthofer
https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/suisse/burgerh.htm
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