Gert Loschütz’ novel “Ballad from the day that is not over” – culture

Gert Loschütz is a hint. He fuels a great intensity, but leaves a lot open. Mysterious constellations, wandering searches form the center of his texts, and on the one hand this corresponds to the attitude to life of the present, on the other hand it has an amazing technical and formal basis. Many of Loschütz’s prose pieces are based on radio plays, and he is a virtuoso master of this genre. Individual moments come to the fore, and associative links create an echo chamber, ideally a specific kind of magic. It’s less about the plot or a psychologically detailed tableau of characters. The prose by Gert Loschütz also works with these means.

The last year very successful novel “Viewing a Disaster” owes its existence to a radio play produced in 2001, and the “Ballade of the day that is not over” which Schöffling Verlag is reproducing immediately because the author has finally been recognized is based on a radio play broadcast in 1988. Adapted into a novel, the book appeared for the first time in 1990, albeit under the title “Flight”. The fact that Gert Loschütz, away from the all too big limelight, works very slowly and spends a long time refining his movements is already evident in this long history of his work.

1990 was the year of German-German reunification, and everything was focused on this vibrant present. The title “Flight” was clearly due to the circumstances of the time, but the text never deals with politics. The focus is on a far-off day in the 1950s when the protagonist with the speaking name Karsten Leiser fled from East Germany to West Germany with his parents as a schoolboy. This day haunts the entire novel as the moment when the fate of the first-person narrator Leiser was decided, and the existential dimension is emphasized in the original radio play title “Ballade of the day that is not over”, which has now been resumed.

So it’s a day in May, a specific reason for the flight is not given, everything has something timelessly threatening. Karsten Leiser’s childhood is cut off on this day, he feels alien in the Hessian “Wildenburg” and he will never shake off this strangeness again. The basic mood of being uprooted, driven about, and disoriented corresponds to the existentialist sense of time designed by Sartre and Camus. The fact that it has a concrete biographical trigger for the narrator creates a peculiar tension that characterized the radio play, but challenges the novel in a new way.

This isn’t about storytelling. There is no chronologically comprehensible plot, and the occasional appearance and reappearance of characters appear more like phantasmagorias. In Karsten Leiser’s head, different time levels and key experiences are constantly crossing. It only gradually becomes clear that the linchpin of the inner events is the early change of location in the 1950s. The text begins with rhetorical invocations of that day, without naming what happened on it, and the aesthetics of the radio play peeks through pathetic snapshots: something is being prepared, something is in the air.

Individual events stand abruptly side by side that took place on that day in different years. They play in places that seem almost extraterritorial: on the Irish islands, which mark the outermost edge of Europe, or in Sardinia. So as far away as possible from Plothow, the hometown in the GDR, and Wildenburg, the first destination in the Federal Republic. But even at the geographical extremes, the protagonist can’t get rid of the key date, and he recapitulates the course of that day in several attempts. Childhood memories wash up, becoming clearer and more detailed as the text progresses, and the early years in the West intersperse with the growing sense of homelessness.

Open detailed view

Certain motifs are slowly emerging. Leiser came across a certain Burckhardt in his school class in western Wildenburg. In what seemed a senseless act of desperation and violence, he once beat him up, and this is linked to the stay in Ireland through concentric circular movements of the text. In distorted, enlarged scenes, his past catches up with him again. In the Italian sphere, the genius loci if this suggests, it is more likely to be through lovers and failed relationships. At first, the entire narrative seems as if it were addressed to a female “you” – who then enters the plot as a “Vera” in the third person. A network of references forms, in which Karsten Leiser is so entangled that he never controls the threads himself. The fact that he was suddenly catapulted out of the supposedly protected space of childhood influences his actions and feelings right up to the present.

This novel has its strongest moments in iridescent scenes that refer to something unspoken. Once Karsten Leiser spends a few days on the Sardinian coast with an enchanting lover. One afternoon, while she is sleeping, he walks along a dry riverbed until he comes to a place where he suddenly feels one with himself. A “connection” emerges, and one suspects that this landscape, the view of the river that is filling up a little with water again and the “pines” that border it, reminds him of the plot inscribed to him.

He can’t share the feeling with anyone. His mistress becomes suspicious when he disappears every afternoon to visit this place, suspecting him of secretly meeting a maid. This creates a momentum of its own, a dream logic that allows him to really follow this girl to her apartment, even though he knows his lover is watching him. The next day he finds the hotel room empty, she has left. In episodes like this, his exposure to inscrutable contexts is ingeniously condensed. There are several images in this book that appear razor-sharp, but which disappear again on closer inspection.

Loschütz leaves individual vignettes in the text suggestively. In a novel, however, this technique has its limits. The idea of ​​staging that day of flight as a lasting trauma becomes overused in the long run. It is also supposed to give the novel a formal vanishing point, but in the end it seems too artificial as a template for the mysterious moments of being lost. The situation is similar with the character of the writing, frequently traveling colleague Götz, who appears as the sovereign antipode of the protagonist Leiser and with whom the book ends questioningly. This character does not seem suitable enough to bundle something and carry the end of a novel. However, such concerns do not go down to the basics. The strength of Gert Loschütz is the small form. Balancing them with the formal requirements of a novel is a never-ending challenge.