Of course you can also write a book about “the German soul” (Thea Dorn) or one about a hike through the Harz Mountains (Heinrich Heine). But exploring Germany in this way is also something very German. Then there are meticulously researched specialist books about West German society or books that compile clichés about Germany and aim to be funny (also quite German). Nothing does Germany justice like the recently translated novel by Fernando Aramburu.
The Spanish writer, who has meanwhile spent more years of his life in Germany than in Spain (and then also in Hanover), took a different approach and wrote a “journey through Germany with Clara”. It’s more like a series of flying visits to northern Germany than the grand tour of the republic. Clara is a teacher who would like to be a writer. And “Maus”, husband and first-person narrator, lovingly and mockingly watches the “woman writer” fail on their joint research trip for a new book. Here Don Quixote and Sancho Panza travel through Germany and are at least as obsessed with literature as the ingenious Junker from La Mancha.
The plot is supposedly flat like the country through which the two drive. Who Aramburu as the author of the great Spanish social novel “Patria” met, in which he tells of nationalism in the Basque country with force and empathy for his protagonists, will rub his eyes. Is that the same author?
Fernando Aramburu, born in San Sebastián in 1959, has lived in Hanover since 1984 and speaks fluent German.
(PHOTO: BERTRAND GUAY/AFP)
Yes, he is it. “Journey with Clara through Germany” was written six years before “Patria” and is probably now being published in German because Aramburu has made a name for himself with his major work in Germany and the publisher is now exploring which of his earlier works would appeal to the public arrive. It is not presumptuous to predict that “journey with Clara through Germany” should not be one of them. Which in turn is at least as much due to the audience as it is to the book. A note to all disappointed fans: rescue is at hand. Who liked “Patria”., will rather enjoy Aramburu’s latest novel. “Los Vencejos” (in German: The Swifts) was released in Spain last August and is much closer to “Patria” in terms of narrative, only this time Madrid is the focus.
But if you appreciate Aramburu and want to understand what a mischievous and not at all moralizing author you are dealing with here, the “journey” is also recommended. Not because you learn something about hate and major social conflicts here (you also do that by the way), but because Aramburu calibrates his moral compass in the novel, which allowed him to write “Patria” without taking sides in the Basque conflict .
In his youth in the Basque Country he was an anarchist, Aramburu recently told a reporter El País. It was a destructive phase and he was one of those who called themselves rebels because they ridiculed things that others had created. It was only when he read Camus that he was purified and showed him what he and his buddies really were at the time: “parasites”.
Fernando Aramburu: Journey through Germany with Clara. Novel. Translated from the Spanish by Willi Zurbrüggen. Rowohlt, Hamburg 2021. 592 pages, 25 euros.
This anarchy flares up again in “Journey through Germany with Clara”. Aramburu’s first-person narrator lives quite parasitically next to the “woman writer”. This Ungustl can’t help but ridicule everything, especially German national symbolism. On the chalk cliffs on Rügen, “Little Mouse” can think of nothing better than emptying his bladder and commenting on this with romantic pathos: “And then, really only then, did I direct my gaze into the depths of the abyss and through the fine mesh of the fence I saw through the lightening ray, in his case describing a shimmering arc that came forcefully out of my body and broke up into smaller and smaller droplets until it burst ten or fifteen meters below me in an unrecognizable shower of droplets that the sea breeze blows at will and mood vanished. Before I left, I bowed to the sea. Thank you, Germany.”
The fact that “Maus” is not popular and the novel breaks down into a craggy episodic nature doesn’t exactly make it easy for the readers. But it’s always worth following this narrator, who often turns vulgar, through that “grey country” with its “grey people”. Because in the end, through the eyes of this reincarnated Sancho Panza, one catches a new glimpse of what has been traveled. Perhaps not necessarily to the German soul, but to a country that this ironic declaration of love does justice to. Because a cliché is confirmed in the end: When it comes to irony, the Spaniards are way ahead of the Germans.