For Botho Strauss there are only two existential basic sensitivities: waiting and searching. Either, he writes, people stay in their place “until everything is over”, or they go out and look for “until everything is gone”. The difference is not very big. In the end there is nothing in both cases. Perhaps that is what makes the conservative so special that he does not see a big difference between local stability and exploring the world. So you’d better stay at home and with yourself. So Strauss is probably one of those waiting. In any case, he does not follow any events or events in his books.
The prerequisites for a story-driven novel would be there: there is the woman, and there is the man. The two may have loved each other. Then he left her. Something like that happens. She remains abandoned and ponders this encounter and this man. In her words, what happened can be summed up in a single sentence: “How two people in front of each other are frantically undressing and getting dressed again, that will, seen in fast motion, have been their whole story.” Not more? Not more. But whoever switches off the time – and that happens in writing – turns this nothing into a whole book.
What could become a novel is now over. In his younger years, Strauss made the story “The Dedication” out of a similar constellation. At that time it was the man who, as a deserted man, had to cope with his grief. Now it’s the woman who speaks. She is a poet and is called Gertrud Vormweg, but also likes to talk about herself in the third person as “she”. Switching to the female perspective is of great importance. For Strauss it is not only a protective cover and the opportunity for distanced role prose, but perhaps also a kind of better self into which he slips, capable of empathy and poetry, in a way that a man incapable of love in the eyes of a woman could not be. In addition, she, the woman, are less likely to be accused of occasional misogyne sentences than they would be accused of him, the man.
With Botho Strauss there is no tragedy, his characters just fall into silence
Everything is role prose. But the speaker is not a figure, not an executed person, but rather a lyrical self that consists of nothing but language. What could be an action becomes an act of speech and finally dissolved into mood and thoughts. “Should I ever tell a story,” writes Botho Strauss in the role of this woman, “she would get lost in a constant change of mood, and this change would be the last thing that still moved in the standstill of missing.”
At first, the text, which is divided into short sections, scenes and fragments of thought, sounds like a monologue for the theater stage, mythically exaggerated, as if Christa Wolf’s “Kassandra” was speaking. Strauss’s speaker also takes a step back in time by comparing herself with the Carthaginian princess Dido. Dido fell in love with Aeneas on his flight, but was abandoned by him because he had to found Rome. In her grief, she threw herself on her own sword.
Such action-like tragedy does not suit Gertrud Vormweg. But what it does in language is another form of self-dissolution and extinction as a movement towards silence. Life has passed between the “not yet” of youth and the “never again” of old age. However, the tone of “no longer” prevails, which Strauss’ protagonist transfers in the course of the speech from the mourning of the loss of the beloved to an active farewell out of weariness with the material world. So the book ends with the words that give it its title: “No longer! Not more! She steps outside the door just to look away. No more of it! And then simply: nothing more, nothing more. Not.”
Botho Strauss: Not anymore. Not more. Ciphers for them. Hanser, Munich 2021. 156 pages, 22 euros.
Nothing remains untouched by this existential aversion, not even the language itself, which Strauss opposes to media communication and mere entertainment. Being can only be touched in and with language. Strauss always succeeds in creating simple, beautiful miniatures. Then it is the words themselves that take on material form and allow writing to become a space for immediate religious experience. So the narrator writes about herself as “she”: “From now on, if she wanted to write the word God, she would not come out of the O-round again. The O no longer released her hand and her pen. They circled endlessly in it . “
So it is not surprising when Strauss – or rather his protagonist – longs for hieroglyphs, for ciphers, for “signs of secrecy”, for “protection”, for a “language of the lowered eyelid”. The “ciphers for them” – so the subtitle of the book – would therefore be a kind of secret language that “stores world knowledge like in a thimble” https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/. But “ciphers for them” also means that she herself, the poet Gertrud Vormweg, as a speaking self is only a cipher, so that language receives a body with which it can speak. Strauss searches for “words of perfect sensuality such as no skin or body could ever excite”. His ideal would be “words that you lean on, lost in them, like on a wall in a vineyard.”
Can it work? Yes, but at a high price. Because body and sensuality cannot be had without impermanence. In the end, therefore, language is not immune to decay either. Walls in the vineyard, however poetic they may be, collapse at some point. At the end of all literature, Strauss sees a person who has kept nothing of the thousand books he read but the alphabet he recited. What is left of God if He is nothing but a round O?
Strauss’ female alter ego also refers to the mythical figure of Dido. Dido received a cowhide from the Numid King, which was to determine the area of the area in which she and her entourage were allowed to settle. She cut the skin into the finest strips, thus defining the boundaries within which Carthage arose. Just like Dido the cowhide, the author cuts her text into individual lines. This is exactly what Botho Strauss’s aesthetic procedure consists of. He hopes that the individual sentences, placed next to one another, will open up a larger area than a novel limited by plot, dialogue and events could ever do.
Botho Strauss is the verbose romantic of falling silent. He speaks where nobody listens, speaks to himself on his lonely paths through the Uckermark with its pastures, lakes, rape fields and partridges, which also give this book a specific place. The writing offers the opportunity to overhear him, like the wind that blows through the trees.