Clemens Meyer’s book “Dusts”. Review. – Culture

There are times when it is necessary to say the obvious. Clemens Meyer does this between two brackets. It doesn’t matter to him at all whether an author is a man or a woman, he writes, whether white, black, young, old, gay or straight, because in literature it’s “about a work, even if.” the author would be anonymous, work and must exist “. Meyer’s confession can be found in the essay “Why literature”, which rounds off a narrow volume with three stories.

Meyer approaches the age-old why question less theoretically than he shows himself to be an emphatic reader who has learned a lot from those he admires. Balzac, Joseph Roth, Michail Scholochow, Isaak Babel, Fred Wander, Bernhard Traven, Hemingway, even the younger Thomas Mann should be mentioned above all, but also the workers in the literature mine: Wolfgang Hilbig, Werner Bräunig and Franz Fühmann. All men, very well, but also works.

Clemens Meyer, who lives in Leipzig, is such a miner. He knows the lignite mining areas of his homeland and is fascinated by it. “The miner drives,” says one, “all of our movements underground are driving into the mountain.” In his essay, Meyer reports how, as a lecturer at the Leipzig Institute of Literature, he commissioned his students to write a short story about a cave explorer trapped in the mountain who delves deeper and deeper into his memories. The students were not very enthusiastic about the idea of ​​developing their own story from a newspaper article he brought with him. So Clemens Meyer did it himself.

His cave exploration story “Dem Grund zu” now forms the center of the volume “Dusts”. You can see how the author works on the material, how he inscribes himself into the situation in order to be fully there with the first sentence: “He felt the draft and crawled on.” The layers of time overlap for those who are trapped in the dark like the layers of earth in a mountain. He remembers being rescued from the tunnel where he got lost as a child by his grandfather, a miner. As a reader you get lost with him between the different levels of memory.

This process of penetration – less into the mountain than into the psyche of a person – is perhaps the answer to the question “Why literature”. There is no other medium that would be able to learn to see the world with strange eyes and to penetrate into other people’s hearts. In the story “Where the dragons live” this is a young girl, thirteen or fourteen years old, who is hanging around with a clique of thugs at the train station in Zwickau and taking tourists for money to the place where the NSU terrorists once stood. who are heroes for young people. The girl, on the other hand, is considered to be the “Kanacken bride” because she loves an older boy who comes from Yugoslavia. When the others beat up a homeless man in a demolished house and set fire to him in his sleeping bag, she stays to one side and makes sure that the man doesn’t get burned.

When Meyer writes about desolation, it is always inner landscapes as well

Meyer writes such scenes very coldly and yet gives this girl a big heart. All of his novels and stories are characterized by a special eye for the abysmal and the marginalized in society. He can write sympathetically about misery and poverty without ever becoming sentimental. Empathy appears as an effect, precisely because people don’t know about it.

This also applies to the short, short story “Die Glocken”, which opens the band. A man returns by train to his hometown on Christmas Eve to sit under the Christmas tree with his mother one last time before he takes her to the old people’s home. Meyer shows all his skills when he creates a mood of deep sadness with a few sketchy lines without his characters knowing about it.

When Meyer writes about spoil heaps, desolation and mines with incorruptible laconism, it is always inner landscapes as well. This also applies to Bertram Kober’s photographs of caves, rocks and decay, which are included in the volume.