Jochen Schmidt’s novel “Phlox” – Culture

Memories, at their best and most honest moments, are about expeditions. Something archeological clings to them, because the handling of what the memory holds changes from age to age. It has to be viewed and reorganized again and again depending on the new direction and perspective in life. You never get to the end, because the principle of suddenness also applies to memory work: something that had previously been ignored suddenly emerges from the collection as fresh and new as it has never been seen before, thereby transforming the entire context of memory that has apparently been archived so securely.

The writer Jochen Schmidt, born in 1970, called his memoir “Phlox”, it tells of a trip to a village in the Oderbruch called Schmogrow. At the same time, it is a voyage of memory into the place as a childhood paradise, as a sheer endless labyrinth of mutually overgrowing stories. What at first appears idyllic, as a dreamy realm of old customs and habits, rural ways of life and wisdom, richly instrumented in narratives, unfolds in the somewhat breathlessly droning stream of Schmidt’s memorization and invocation of village and country, of people and neighbors, of loved ones and distant acquaintances , of refugees and those left behind, turns darker into black and evil.

As soon as Schmidt, without hesitation, also digs up the war and flight experiences, the survival circumstances of the smugglers and those who landed there, the realities of Nazi rule and the atrocities of the Russian occupation emerge, without ever wrongly moralizing. Schmidt remains true to his principle of uninterrupted storytelling, which he does not disturb or obscure with falsely deep musings or contrasting reflections.

This juxtaposition of narration and what is narrated, of remembering in the most diverse layers, is almost imperceptible, but staged effectively. At no point does the author arrogant about his experiences, he never uses them to know better or even to distance himself. Schmidt stays very close, whether he describes the gardens and old fruit trees, memorizes harvesting processes from the old days, describes the house and its premises or reproduces the dialect colors that resonate in Schmogrow when the elderly talk about their lives.

In this way, the readers also get deep into the Schmogrow universe, because there doesn’t seem to be any way out: always right in the middle and surrounded by the author’s constant suada on his research tour. That can be tiring, and the abundance of details isn’t so vivid that it sticks in one’s own memory. An unforeseen effect, however, occurs while reading Jochen Schmidt’s rich Schmogrower Allerlei: one catches oneself en passant drifting off into one’s own world of memories.

The Schmidt experiences in the Oderbruch tempt you to draw parallels, let faces and voices of your own past shine up. You go into Frau Fiddeke’s house and think of the roaring pictures of deer in some of the godmother’s apartments. There is a smell of stored fruit, and the story of a plum jam crops up that Uncle W. once told about.

It is quite possible that Schmidt, with the almost unfiltered density of his narration, could also be aiming for the same kind of memory animation in his readers. In any case, the phlox in Jochen Schmidt’s village Schmogrow is blooming so intensely that the perennials in their own front gardens are beginning to smell. If you remember correctly.