On the cover two beautiful girls who – in a mirror? – look, us, look at. sisters? The book is called “My Sister”. One has a camera in her hand. She captures the moment. “I press the shutter button. The shutter opens. For a 1/30th of a second. An eternity.” This is Bettina Flitner, the photographer, and she writes here about herself, her sister, her family. You look at the confusingly beautiful photo, open it, and after a single page you are spellbound until the last sentence, when the nurse says: “So that you remember.”
It’s a memory book. Of childhood, of wounds, pains, losses, of joys, adventures, beautiful journeys, rootlessness, moving forever with my parents. But from the beginning, from the first page, we know: first the mother took her own life, then the sister. The brother calls, found the dead sister in the bathroom, couldn’t the doctors do anything more? “They only opened the window. That’s what they always do.” And in the next sentence the memory of a phone call 33 years earlier, almost to the day, the father is on the phone: The mother did it, she is dead. At 47 years old.
This book has power and tenderness, emotion and intelligence, the beautiful, the terrible, the whole of life fans out, and that in a language that always remains transparent, floating, few adjectives, it goes straight ahead without frills, and the reader can not stop following a story that is told in such an unsentimental and yet deeply touching way, from sentence to sentence, from country to country, from time to time, because it is interlinked, skilfully intertwined and told almost casually.
Why was the narrator spared from the depression plaguing her sister?
The past is deeply embedded in the present, will also accompany the future, everything flows together, is always there, forms one’s own life, one’s own face. And the narrator knows that, even if you can’t name it exactly, everything has always been there side by side – “The fear and the courage. The sadness and the joy. To trust everything and yet to feel like nothing.” The mother, the sister. “But I’m getting more and more wrong. I’m not standing there voluntarily. But I’m setting myself up there.” Standing aside may save her life.
For Bettina Flitner, who is a photographer and, despite all her empathy, proves to be a grandiosely laconic storyteller with a clearly structured view, it is only in memory that incomprehensible events suddenly become clear, hints become understandable, the depressive mother! You should have known! The insecure sister! Where did you lose them, where weren’t you paying enough attention? And who is the narrator herself, where does she stand, why was she spared from the depressions, the darkness in this family?
The pain and the questions bring back forgotten memories, believed to be irretrievable, of happy times with dark clouds that you don’t want to see in happy times. “What? Should you? When? Know? Should?” And the questions about the last time – who saw her last, what did she say last, were there any hints? “When did it start that my sister couldn’t stand it when things weren’t whole anymore? When they had a hole or a tear or a stain. A broken item always had to be disposed of immediately. Fixing it was not an option. Because none Repair was complete.”
And so the sister, whose soul could no longer be repaired, finally got rid of herself. But what had destroyed her in such a way? The death of her mother, the many changes of location, or was it in her from the start, the black ravens that were chasing her, that had also been chasing her mother, against whom nothing could be done? There is a family predisposition, says an uncle, it runs in the family, a genetic component. Also the grandfather, also an aunt, an uncle… “You obviously didn’t inherit it,” says the father imploringly.
Can one really inherit “that” or does it (also?) sneak up on the wrong course? The sisters were close together as children and yet they are so different, it becomes apparent as they get older. And the parents have grown apart: “The words and gestures our parents spat out stick to the doorknobs, the banisters, the furniture, the walls. (…) They also infected us.” The mother and sister yell, “It’s from a violent injury.” And Flitner writes: “In these moments, my mother and my sister seem to me well-made-up, well-groomed actresses who tear down all the beautiful stage decorations in free fall and end up buried under the rubble.”
Although the shock is palpable, the language remains sober
Flitner talks about the rubble and reconstructs the living structures, looks for the first cracks, when did it start, can something like this happen for no reason? An unforgettable sentence from Hans Henny Jahnn’s play “Medea” comes to mind for this book: “Can a god of life weave a carpet for no reason? Is agony an idea like a colorful pattern and all hand-wringing just an ornament?”
Bettina Flitner: My sister. Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2022. 320 pages, 22 euros.
He can. God is absent, in this book, in our life, the carpet of life weaves itself out of agony and happiness, and nothing is conceivable without the other. Just as Bettina Flitner captures moments in her pictures, she also captures moments in this book that grow together into a life. She does so with resolute sobriety, despite her palpable shock. Her language is clear and without any pathos, short, firm sentences, nothing is swept under the carpet, nothing glossed over. But also: don’t forget anything nice. Even if it was only a 30th of a second. She tells how she photographs: with the fearless, clear gaze that knows that every moment is unique. It doesn’t need any decorations, it also shines like that.
Writing, says Flitner, saved and comforted her. Once she dreams of her sister and in the dream she asks her: “Why did you do that?” And the sister says, “I don’t know.”