A man, author and publisher opens the PDF file containing the third volume of the journals of a deceased colleague who was his mentor and whom he admires. He types his name into the search field in the hope of not getting a hit. “My hope is not fulfilled.” Reading for places has something like a bird of prey and requires search commands. It’s after “sharp” spots where it can snap. Or a suspicion drives the reading, sure of the telltale signal words that can corroborate it. Jealous people or censors read passages, but so do philologists who are on the trail of a motive.
It is not surprising that the current success of “autofiction” is linked to a violent upsurge in an elementary form of this ancient cultural technique, the search for names. do i occur Does X occur or Y? And how do I get away, does X come, does Y get away? Theoretically, the formula applies that the person writing the text turns into an “I-figure” and this “literarization” covers all the people mentioned. But the fact that the genre is so close to life means that the real namesake can hardly avoid comparing their counterparts in the text with their self-images.
For the third volume of the diaries, the word “unsympathetic” had to be invented
In the spring of 2019, for example, when Berenberg Verlag sent him a PDF with the third volume of the diaries of essayist Michaelrutschky, Marc Degens printed out the total of 32 hits from his name search and recorded his reading impression as follows: “I would easily describe myself as a kind characterize a stupid steamy chatterer. A genetically degenerate scion of an alcoholic clan. Stupid, pretty to look at, but too fat. I’m bothered by the many distortions and inaccuracies in the summaries of the conversation. The thrust is correct, but the details are imprecise and the nuances are missing.”
Michaelrutschky gathered a circle of influential essayists around him. He died in Berlin on March 17, 2018.
(Photo: Matthias Reichelt/imago images)
His mentor, who died of cancer in March 2018, gave the material for this volume to his estate administrator Jörg Lau and his friend Kurt Scheel, editor of Merkur for many years, who created the printed version. When the book was published under the title “Toward the End. Diary Records 1996-2009”, Scheel was also dead, he had taken his own life at the end of July 2018. He had previously completed a foreword in which he invented the word “unsympathetic” to describe what was hurtful and embarrassing in Ruth’s writing, which also affected him, in a way that did not entirely give up the common ideal of coolness and sovereignty. He had already reported on this gloomy side of the material in his blog while he was working on the edition.
In the end, with a heavy heart, he attested to his friend and traitor to having written an important book. A major role was played by the fact thatrutschky did not speak of himself in the first person, but instead put the ego in the cipher “R.” had transformed. This could be interpreted as a seal of approval for “literarization”.
So now, on the few pages that he printed out, Marc Degens had to read that he was a big talker who took books with him on vacation but didn’t read them. The slim book that he has now written arose from the slight potential for offense in the few pages that he printed out of it. It is itself autofiction, written along the life of the injured person.
Marc Degens: Selfie without self. Berenberg Verlag, Berlin 2022. 88 pages, 18 euros.
Degens reports how he found out about the death of the mentor, pulled his books off the shelf, laid them side by side, photographed them and posted the picture. How, after reading the passages by name, he only reluctantly takes part in a collective reading from the diaries in the Berlin Literature House. How he talks to friends aboutrutschky, reads and comments on the reviews. How anger and disappointment overcame him during a radio recording in Hamburg, where he was allowed to present his publishing program, and all he suddenly saw in his mentor was “sensationalism”, “toxic masculinity”, the “uncomfortable stepping down and hunching up”. .
The “series for autofictions” that he publishes only exist because Marc Degens believes “that in this field some of the currently most interesting literary texts are being created, which is also due to the decline in importance, which also applies to the decline in importance of other literary genres have to do, such as the novel, has grown out of strong competition from television series, streaming, social media, computers and role-playing games.” He’s collateral damage to the flourishing of autofiction, to which he enthusiastically contributes. In the end, he copies an idea from his mentor, who, after the reunification, had given an issue of his magazine “Der Gemeintag” the title: “How the GDR is only now emerging.” For the GDR, Degensutschky comes in, in a role that is not exactly flattering. The final picture freezes him as the West Berlin counterpart to Sascha Anderson, as a traitor in the middle of the circle who betrays him, if not to the Stasi, then at least to the public.
Against the last book of his mentor, he puts up the defensive wall of not reading
But this revenge is not the most striking gesture of this book, but the consequence of the search for one’s own name, the non-reading of the rest of the text. In the middle of the book, he visits a journalist friend who has read the diary, talked to authors close to him about the text and written a detailed article about it. He reported to this journalist “that I only skimmed through the diary and did not read it and only know my passages, the passages read out from the Literature House and the quotations from the reviews”. A text remains unread that does not exhaust itself in the embarrassing self-exposure of an aging man, the quarrel with the limits of one’s own success, the malaise towards fellow human beings. The dead of the older generation remain unread, childhood and youth in the many dream logs, unread the epiphanic moments of the experience of natural beauty, in which the sociological fine painter, asrutschky is famous, steps aside because it is important, the play of light over a landscape to put into words in Rügen.
The index on which Marc Degens bases his mentor’s last book is a defensive wall. It restricts the enthusiasm for autofiction at best in a practical way, without theoretical-reflective effects. Incidentally, the insult rivals the residual admiration that he shows to the mentor. From this remnant admiration comes the compliment that the mentor basically wrote a trilogy of novels in his diary volumes, consisting of an “Employee Novel”, a “Wende Novel” and now an “Artist Novel”. The praise sounds a little hollow. Wasn’t the form of a novel completely worn out, no longer of any use and in urgent need of being replaced by autofiction? And how can Degens attach the predicate “artist novel” to a text that he has not even read? Isn’t that at odds with Wolfgang Herrndorf’s sentence, which he approvingly quotes: “Because literary criticism never dwells on work criticism, it always becomes personal”?
Already in the immediate reactions to the third volume ofrutschky’s diaries, the formula was omnipresent that in his last book someone had written the novel he had always longed for. The award of the novel rating was only a defensive magic against the impositions of autofiction. Degens’ book shows how weak this defensive spell is.