Caskets and showcases, nests, caves, shells, snail shells – such are the places of dreamy security that Gaston Bachelard invokes in his “Poetics of Space”. With Gisela von Wysocki you can add more to them, for example the “feather-bed bunker”, in which her young alter ego hears Adorno’s voice on the radio under the covers, secretly and therefore all the more intensely. The younger and the older feel a spherical bond in the comfortably uncanny, an intimate familiarity that had to be kept quiet when years later she became his student in Frankfurt and he made her far less subtle advances. The constellation that Gisela von Wysocki describes in her novel “Wiesengrund”, published in 2016, carries a whole cometary trail of the imaginary. Now she presents a volume with prose miniatures.
“The stretched summer” is an idiosyncratic work, full of caprices, capers, ideas, a careful notebook made of “memory material”, an album not only of family relationships. And it’s a hiding place too. “I wanted to find my place under the protection of my own obscenity,” says a story in which the narrator is the only German in a Slovak spa hotel.
A character of the chaplinesken distinguishes the texts, a type of movement that also has something receding when going forward. There are forty-nine prose miniatures, divided into four sections, with headings such as “Showcases” or “People and Lightning”. In the balance between abstraction and sensuality, they are scenically very precise. Stylistically related to the writers of Brevitas, in the narrative habitus strongly influenced by gestures, one recognizes the silhouettes of Kafka, Beckett or Robert Walser in Wysocki’s art of miniaturization. This prose builds protective walls, housings, fences and at the same time takes a strolling stroll along side paths. She loves the distraction of the gaze. For example in the gorgeous cover story “The stretched summer”, a virtuoso piece of deliberate delusion. In the brutal heat of a Berlin summer’s day, the narrator’s attention is captured by an immovable passer-by who, despite the green traffic light, does not dare to cross the street. What’s stopping him? What can you see there? An apparently not at all metaphorical, but very real, rearing snake squashes, the image of which the story does not really want to evoke in order to avoid the inevitably pompous effect.
Franz Kafka, Robert Walser, Sibylle Lewitscharoff, they all have this love for miniatures
“Comedy and catastrophe”, two large words that describe the fearful state of mind of the Frankfurt student in “Wiesengrund”, are constantly at work in these prose miniatures. The stroller can thus become the first “peep box” stage. Pushed, rocked and completely dependent on the movements of the adults, the child’s gaze wanders around and becomes self-employed: “You make judgments, you enjoy triumphant happiness in disregarding requests and orders. Soon you have slipped into this feeling for the hidden and unsuccessful in the life of others. Without language yet, the mysteries that emerge are eloquent. The mother’s suspicious, unwitting gestures. The little irritations smiled away from the father. All of this, recorded in the record, belongs to them, the later times. Could be material for the conversations with psychologists that will one day be necessary. Anything that looks like odds and ends, Larifari, it could be. “
Gisela von Wysocki: The elongated summer. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2021. 256 pages, 24 euros.
The adult, recognizably gone through Freud’s school, reconstructs a childhood experience that ultimately leads to an inexhaustible aesthetic of the hidden. The true is hidden in the hidden, the productive insinuation could be pointed out. Since the 1970s, it has not only fueled the science of the soul, but also the criticism of ideology. As a literary process, this is productive in all genres, from poetry to fairy tales to detective novels. In combination with the love for miniatures, it results in a special worldview. The deeper something is hidden and the smaller it appears, the safer it is. This applies not only to Robert Walser’s miniature writing, not just to some of Kafka’s sketches, it can also be found, for example, in Sibylle Lewitscharoff’s works, drawings and “scenic objects” the size of a doll’s house. By contrast, Friederike Mayröcker, to whom Gisela von Wysocki dedicates a text of her own, has not linked the sketchiness of her notes, drawings, and language drafts with a miniaturization project. The proverbial chaos of your apartment in Vienna’s Zentagasse follows a counterprogram: the joyous wilderness and ramifications that do not require any control.
As an essayist, Gisela von Wysocki has sharpened her eye for female imaginations. “The Frosts of Freedom”, published by Syndikat Verlag in 1980, is one of the cult books of German feminism. When it was reissued in 2000, she left out the extensive conversation with the mother that concluded the volume. She replaced it with an essay on Marguerite Duras. Why? She wonders that now, again twenty years later. “Picked from the canvas in a frenzy” is something like the heart of the tape in his search movement. She didn’t think much of her mother’s “crush” for the cinema, says the writer. It seemed like “a leak in her emotional life”. But now she realizes that her mother had needed to “disappear and go into hiding” in order to cope with a life that was shaped by the “existential crises of the country”.
It is a form of postponed love that at the same time contains a pointer that points to the writer herself. The mother particularly loved one type of actress. They are beings “all to themselves”. Elisabeth Bergner was one of them, “gentle at first sight, but in reality a (…) gifted destroyer.” During the conversation at the time, the mother said admiringly to her daughter that she resembled the idol. This note is now missing from the narrative. “I am a traitor,” the author accuses herself. But that’s a cover. She has long since made use of her literary suzerainty to eliminate an attribution that she has to fend off: in the end, of all things, having lived the maternal ideal.