Gert Loschütz’s novel “Viewing a Disaster”. Review. – Culture

Gert Loschütz works quietly, slowly, and with concentration. He consults files, searches for documents, reads old newspaper reports, quotes from dozens of his own notebooks. And so does his narrator Thomas Vandersee. And if he does not have any administratively authenticated information, he cancels the report to reflect on the possible progress of events. He emphasizes the distress of the subjunctive and continues elsewhere. That sounds as brittle as it is; even if the forbidden lover of the narrator, Yps, bends over the “summary” with him. Yps heard the first sentence of the novel: “Not your time.”

First of all, it is about an event on December 22nd, 1939 in the train station of the Saxon-Anhalt city of Genthin (where Gert Loschütz was born). At around one o’clock in the night, a passenger train coming from Berlin races into another that had also left the Potsdam train station three quarters of an hour earlier. It is the greatest accident in German passenger train traffic to date. Almost 200 deaths were registered at that time, shortly after the war began. It is estimated that up to 400 fatalities and 700 injured. But who still knows about the train accident in Genthin today?

Over 120 pages, more than a third of his novel, the narrator reconstructs the catastrophe from minute to minute, precisely to the second in the core time of the collision. “Four seconds” is the name of a chapter that refers to the smallest span in which the accident could have been prevented. Quite soberly presented, on the one hand, the numbers game, but repeated so manically that it reflects the bewilderment in the face of what is happening – the bewilderment about the chance that makes such holes in reality, or about the reality that consists of such holes, but which we don’t want to see.

The meticulous reconstruction turns the inferno into black and white documentation

One can say that the novel “Viewing a Misfortune” is a modern meditation on the contingency of history, of social life, of all beings. Loschütz, however, strictly avoids such exonerating terms, in favor of crude facts, the pain of the real. It stays right up to the linguistic awkwardness, and he prefers to let an imagination run out in blurring than to stabilize it artificially. A file-like approach to the origins and consequences of unintentional violence.

In the center it cracks and crunches, cuts, screams and spreads: the wedged trains. But you can’t really hear that in the novel. Loschütz makes this shrillest soundless in his reduced, even stubborn way. The meticulous reconstruction turns a garish inferno into a documentation in black and white. In contrast to the literary image of the wedged features in the novel, Caspar David Friedrich’s painting “Eismeer”, which is related by far, is illustrious Pop Art. The question of the beauty of the terrible is forbidden thanks to this dampening. One could rather say that the callous eloquence of the files makes the incomprehensible accessible ex negativo. And yet this archive-based narrative form remains a compensation for the loss of meaning that defines chance. Art, even the most brittle, serves to cope with contingency.

The Genthin disaster struck three months after the outbreak of World War II. The war was also an actor, with its new timetables, blackouts, military vehicles, and the entire psychosocial dispositive of the time. But of course the train accident is also a completely unspectacularly furnished allegory of the outbreak of war. Loschütz does nothing for this impression, but one cannot fail to have it. The fact that the historical-political conditions are not reflected on is due to the will to distill the sheer facts without any explanatory embedding. In this way, the most concrete suddenly becomes the abstract.

From the archives he puts together the desperation of the Jewish lovers

The narrator never knows more than the characters. In addition to the railroad workers and criminologists, two people stand out from the disaster. An elegant Italian with the same name – Buonomo – and a petite young woman who got on together at the Potsdam train station. They pose puzzles for a while. Buonomo is finally found among the dead in the train accident, Carla, his companion, has disappeared for a while. She is seriously injured and under a false name in Genthiner hospital.

In his archive work, the narrator, not yet born in 1939, comes across a list of items of clothing that Carla from the Genthin textile department store Magnus, where his mother was an apprentice, was delivered to Carla. At this point the focus of the novel shifts, then suddenly jumps, and we end up in a seemingly new narrative that is about the persecuted Jew Richard Kuiper and his fiancée Clara. Both live in Neuss and Düsseldorf. He is racially marked as a “full Jew”, Clara, whose parents have long since fled to London, is considered half-Jewish by the Nazis. Both live in fear, have to pretend and hide and look for places to meet. Richard threatens to despair, wants to flee, Clara encourages him, tries to support him with declarations of love.

How do we know that exactly if Gert Loschütz remains true to his story from the files? Due to possible claims for damages by the accident victims, the Reichsbahn collects all the travel data of the train occupants. Clara, traveling in a somewhat opaque way with the elegant Buonomo in Berlin and on the other hand assuring Richard of her eternal love, leaves her correspondence from this time to the railway, where the narrator calls it up decades later. From there and from the Düsseldorf city archive. So he quietly, slowly, inconspicuously put together the desperation of the Jewish lovers.

When the logic of circumstantial evidence comes to an end, the potential of the subjunctive is exhausted

Does Clara use the kind-hearted Buonomo as an organizer for a visa to Argentina, Richard’s dream country? Is she traveling by train and in Berlin because of her loved one and is not allowed to write to him? Gert Loschütz strictly adheres to the narrative form of external focalization. He always knows less than his characters, who only begin to become whole people in a good half of the novel, rise from the papers. A liberating reading experience that to a certain extent “normalizes” the novel. Still, there is a thin edge that holds people in place. They are cut out like silhouettes from the material of ignorance. We just fill them with our imagination and our wishes for them.

Together with the dramaturgically extremely retarded structure of the novel, its narrative form and the transitions between the various narrative spheres and chapters, this is another daring move of the narrator. A kind of circumstantial logic takes effect where no document is sufficient. If that comes to an end too, the potential of the subjunctive is exhausted. This, too, is a rather negative process, in which the probable is the enemy of the desired imagination.

The third (of four) spheres of the novel is the youth story of the Genthin narrator Thomas Vandersee. There are some indications that it was his mother Lisa who, as an apprentice, brought the clothes for Clara to the hospital. After the war, mother and son became citizens of the GDR, and since the mother fell in love with a violinist, who was always called “The Gifted”, they followed him to West Berlin, where the faceless musical genius failed completely.

This is followed by a highly complex search for a father, or better: the involuntary discovery of a father by the young Thomas, who is so far removed from the Genthiner and Düsseldorf stories that one is no longer sure that he is still in the same novel. Even if it is irritating, there is still a method. Gert Loschütz stages chance in his stories according to its effect in reality. Obviously, it seemed to him to be a lie to provide the parts with coherence.

The last two passages seem almost crazy: Thomas’ mother Lisa found a piece of paper in a music book with the name of Richard Kuipers Düsseldorfer Straße: Mintrop. That could mean that many decades ago the Richard-loving Carla asked her to write to him. But why? Because of the emigration from Nazi Germany? Maybe a sign of love? Yes, sure! This hope is so small and touching that it reminds you of the hard-to-forget end of the love novel “A beautiful couple” by Gert Loschütz. The narrator’s parents, who have been separated for years, look over the roofs of a small town every evening at the same time where the other is standing and looking too.

Doubts and overwhelming never stop when the narrator discovers at the very end in the archive of the Düsseldorf nursing home, where Clara died decades after her story with Richard Kuiper, that her name was finally Mrs. Öttinger and that she married five more times, each time a man by the name of Richard. In “Inspection of a Disaster” Gert Loschütz strains chance in the disorder of life rather badly for the order of the novel. You can also say that he instrumentalizes him, with which he extinguishes him in a subtle way. For this feat he needs the documentary method. Sometimes it is irritating, then again overwhelmingly terrible or beautiful. Like the five Richards. This symbolic coup, this incredible overdetermination should be out of the files? So from life?

Yes where else from? We’re not checking it out. We swallow hard for once, give up our skeptical reserve and let ourselves be seduced by the attempt to build the world “from files” and “from chance” at the same time.

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