Cosmos Kall in the Eifel: Norbert Scheuer’s “Mutabor”. Review – Culture

The strangest place of power in German literature is the cafeteria of a small-town supermarket. You can see them straight away, cheap armchairs, low tables, a gold-framed mirror, a television on which n-tv is playing silently. Norbert Scheuer describes the appearance of the regular guests there always similar in his books: “They wear corduroy trousers, short-sleeved plaid shirts, fuzzy cardigans, caps with the emblem of their football club or the company they used to work for. Most have been employed by a single company their entire working life, either at the ready-mixed concrete plant in Milz, which has been since years closed Lafarge cement plant or the municipality.” At ten in the morning the old men park in front of the door and sit down so that they can keep an eye on their cars, the shoppers and cashiers, the whole place in general.

The social realism of this scene contrasts with the epic force that arises from its repetition and the fact that the municipality of Kall in the Eifel, where the supermarket is located, is in Norbert Scheuer’s literary work in the middle of the German historical space, the global treasury of myths, the universe seems to lie: a pars pro toto for everything there is in the world. Scheuer’s novels, nine so far, are all set in Kall, where the writer also lives, at least have their origins there or lead back there. It’s always about drawing more threads into the fabric of reality in the provincial town of Kall, making it denser and linking it to the great narratives of mankind.

Norbert Scheuer spent his working life as a programmer at Telekom and only later made writing his main occupation. The patience with which he measures the dimensions of his small town, making them huge and tiny, becomes more impressive with each of his Eifel novels. Individually, his books appear narrow, humble, cocooned in their particular interests and perspectives. Together they open up an enormous narrative cosmos. Scheuer’s Gesamtkunstwerk tries out how the meaning of the close, the particular, the provincial is deformed on a shrinking globe.

Powerful mythical instances grow in his world in the everyday familiar. The old men in the supermarket café, for example, one of whom always seemed to be there when something happened in the area, see everything, know everything. They are, as the latest Kall novel “Mutabor” openly puts it, “something like the ancient choir that comments on everything in the background, explains everything, sheds light on it and yet hides a lot of what it knows”. In fact, this time the “grey heads” stand more for the wanton silence of violent secrets.

The main character and first-person narrator Nina Plisson stands imploringly in front of this omniscient collective and asks for her own story: she has only vague memories of her mother, she doesn’t know who her father was, she only knows of a photo that hangs in the local inn , of a man on a horse whose face someone has scratched. Notated in pencil on the reverse, the word “Mutabor”. Nina is looking for an origin that an entire small town wants to hide from her. Readers of Scheuer’s earlier books are inevitably part of it, believing they know more about the girl than she does herself. She has appeared in earlier books.

Then you read it and you’re no longer sure: it was still called Plission in “Am Grund des Universums” from 2017, so it lost an “i”, just like the imaginary brother that she always dragged behind her and now apparently almost forgot Has. It is impossible for Scheuer to have made such connection errors, rather he clouds the orientation of subtle readers with tiny shifts.

The density of fairy tales and myths in this novel is very different

In the background of the village silence, a genealogy gradually builds up in “Mutabor”, in which Nina is somehow related to many important characters from Scheuer’s novels. Despite this, she seems like the most lost person in the world. Abandoned by mother and father, rejected by the grandmother who raises them, taken in by a retired teacher and a Greek innkeeper for dubious motives, in love with a boy who hardly notices them.

She is, to put it in a language that is not Scheuers, one of those infamous people who exclude societies as disruptive, inappropriate, dangerous: injured and defenseless as it is, the community pushes them to the sidelines, and there they pull they all the more apprehend the subterranean violence of the collective. In her story, which she puts together piece by piece, a chain of abuse events is revealed, from gang rape after a folk festival to the primal scene in which the little girl Nina observes something like her own conception several times: “Stiffened and almost stunned, I listen I the things that no one can truly hear without being infatuated, disturbed, or enchanted by them, that can only be endured blindly and in bondage, if at all.”

Like many outcasts, Nina has a direct line to the psychic. The inkblots in her exercise books create fantastic stories in her head. Norbert Scheuer’s son Erasmus Scheuer added these drawings to the book as non-verbal bearers of secrets. On beer coasters in the pub where she sometimes helps out, Nina finds miniatures of an eclectic mythical sphere that reflects her story. Her counterpart is a forgotten daughter of Medusa, invented by Scheuer: Zoe, who, like Pegasus and the hero Chrysaor, sprang from the neck of the decapitated Gorgon.

And unlike the characters in the fairy tale of “Kalif Storch” that her grandfather tells her, Nina does not forget the magic word “Mutabor” at the decisive moment – even if it may not always work in Kall, North Rhine-Westphalia.

Open detailed view

In the series of Scheuer’s novels, the density of fairy tales and myths in this one is very different. And as much as he expands the small world of Kall into the anthropological general, they also come across as signs of repression: They envelop the violence and constant threat that life in the midst of all supermarket normality brings with it for Nina . Naked and plain it would be too ghastly to look at.

In the end, the flood that appeared in Scheuer’s earlier novels and actually happened again in the summer of 2021 also returns, also in Kall. Norbert Scheuer reported in the SZ how the relentless floods swept away cars, gas tanks, entire businesses, an eerie realization of his stories. But then how about the local people have helped togetherto clean up. In his novels, this also works like a metaphor of the subconscious: how everyday things are washed away, how a layer of scrap is removed and one or the other forgotten thing rises to the surface.

However, the Kall ecosystem releases some of the heroines and characters in Scheuer’s world precisely after such catastrophes. They leave the place that means the world in this literature. Nina for example. This allows the hope that things will continue for them beyond this mythical village and community of destiny.