When he looks in the mirror, a stranger stares at him, “a scarred, pale face with bony, stubbly cheeks and a black patch over the eye; mouth twisted, panic in his eyes”. Kay Oleander’s world was reasonably fine until recently – until the 54-year-old police officer was hit by a beer bottle during a demonstration in downtown Munich and lost an eye. Who from the crowd, whose “crying for freedom and allegedly abolished civil rights” got on the policeman’s nerves anyway, threw the bottle?
This is the initial question that Friedrich Ani poses in his new novel “Bullauge” (Suhrkamp). And in a first answer, the injured police officer, who is now brooding at home, leads to a possible perpetrator: Silvia Glaser, who is also physically disabled, is urgently suspect – and has hated her since a fateful accident that ruined her hip The police, who they see as complicit in this anyway: “You are all the same” is their attitude, which ultimately brought them dangerously close to being a right-wing populist party.
Ani revolves around the topic of police in particular
This would pave the way for what is in many respects a typical Ani thriller, which he will present on October 4th at the Literaturhaus. It almost goes without saying that the novel takes place on the streets of Munich, in Munich apartment buildings and dive bars. Also that the mostly empathetically drawn people are always damaged in some way, sometimes only on the inside, this time also on the outside. They fight with their own demons and those of others. And this time they are particularly obvious – and highly political.
In “Bullauge” Ani focuses in particular on the subject of the police in all its many facets. He doesn’t give easy answers when he shows light and shade, presenting officials as friends and helpers as well as louts or even enemies of the state with right-wing sentiments that are secretly rampant. With connections that may even go as far as an attack on the Federal President at a ceremony marking the anniversary of the laying of the foundation stone for the Jewish Center on St.-Jakobs-Platz.
So it is once again an explosive experimental arrangement that the multi-award-winning Munich writer has chosen for his new thriller. Most readers will probably ignore the fact that the relationship that develops between the police officer and the police hater does not seem credible down to the last detail – and stay spellbound until the case, after a few twists and turns and escalations, turns into a surprising final scene. You will be drawn into a somber world that is disturbingly similar to reality; will dive into political and human depths. Because as Silvia Glaser says to the policeman Oleander on a beer-drunk night: “I look through you like through a porthole, and all I see is a black sea.”
Friedrich Ani: Porthole, Tuesday, October 4, 8 p.m., Literaturhaus, Salvatorplatz 1, literaturhaus-muenchen.de