A poet who writes about his dreams is absolutely sovereign, actually unassailable. They are the most personal, uncritical, their logic is only self-explanatory. Like that of art, if you look at it seriously and sacredly. Martin Walser, for whom the word “great writer” was put together, has always drawn his huge life’s work from his own self, from his own self and did not want his books to be measured by anything other than the quality of experience that one finds in them.
For decades, however, he was also an unmistakable voice in public life, in the shrill debates, even without social networks. In the meantime it has become quieter around him. Journalists don’t visit his house on Lake Constance that often anymore, but the people from the Marbach Literature Archive were there recently and took parts of his legacy with them: 75 diaries, among other things, his private library.
Now Walser is 95 years old and sends “postcards from his sleep” for his birthday: dream protocols, similar to the unforgettable ones, in which Theodor W. Adorno was suggested a “dick washing machine”, whereupon he claims to have woken up laughing. Dreams are the most intimate, the most personal, but if you are allowed to read the dreams of others, you are looking for something in common, something that is anthropologically recognizable.
Disintegrating body parts could be such an element: “Half the genitals gone,” Walser notes: “I have to hide it in a box. Look at me. Luckily it grew back!” Or the idea of forgetting everything at the wrong moment: “I’m playing in a piece by myself”, but not a word is heard, the audience leaves: “and it turns out that I didn’t say my lines. You have them all waiting for me!”
Martin Walser, Cornelia slime: The dream book. Postcards from sleep. Rowohlt, Hamburg 2022. 144 pages, 24 euros.
In sexual dreams, dark marginal figures appear quite often in this “dream book”: “It starts, wants to start, there are two dark but fantastically dressed women, young, strict, sitting on the edge of the bed and watching exactly what we are doing.” Another time: “In bed with a young woman”, there is again a hunch: “Suddenly I get up, walk around the double bed, at the foot of the bed something is sitting under a dark cloth, as a black silhouette. Mom. You must have heard everything.”
The dreamed mother also listens at the doors of the inn in which Martin Walser’s childhood home in Wasserburg can be recognized. A lot of his dreams play out there and the artist Cornelia Schlemme illustrated the book with overpainted historical postcards from there and from Lake Constance.
“There is no subconscious”
The staff of the Federal Republic, other great men, also appear in Walser’s dreams with strikingly strong contours. An explosion rips him and Jürgen Habermas up into the air: “We cling to each other, hug each other. Habermas is more afraid than I am”. Thomas Mann appears, Hitler, Rudolf Augstein on a motorcycle, Pete Sampras (“I say I want to squeeze that master hand a bit.”).
Martin Walser has been at odds with literary critics ever since he had a key character by Marcel Reich-Ranicki appear in the novel “Death of a Critic,” whose caricature critics in turn saw had anti-Semitic traits. In the dream he meets Reich-Ranicki and “a kind of Michel Friedmann”. All three are lightly armed: “A short skirmish with the sticks”. In another episode, Joachim Kaiser wears “cotton gym shorts” on which the criticism of the Walser novella “Dorle und Wolf” is printed: “He has sexual intentions.”
Sigmund Freud once appeared in Walser’s dreams, perhaps a little threateningly: “You couldn’t say anything because he always knew what you were going to say.” Walser doesn’t think much of the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams: “There is no subconscious,” he writes, and braces himself against the interpreters: “My dreams don’t have to be interpreted or even translated using the cheapest key,” they say. “You are clear enough to me.” Being allowed to stay is perhaps the prerogative of old age. Or the poet.