Munich: The 3rd book by Sportfreunde-Stiller-Drummer Florian Weber – Munich

In a circus, Florian Weber would be a clown. Melancholic Pierrot, provocative Eulenspiegel, bossy white clown – he has it all. And as a drummer Sportfreunde Stiller and Howler Singers Soccer field Heroes or as the rapper MS Flinte he is above all a music clown, moderating ring master and on stage like the stupid August. The sporty guy with the nose ring would be the ideal cast for “stars in the circus ring” if that still existed. In any case, he likes the circus, and every year his wife’s aunt invites him to Circus Krone or somewhere in the provinces. He is particularly fascinated by acrobatics, he did gymnastics for ten years when he was a child, and as a teenager he spun around as a breakdancer.

The main character is a young man from Munich who meets the clown Birdy in the Appalachian Mountains

The jack of all trades (musician, visual artist, radio presenter, author, qualified sports scientist) reveals this passion and knowledge in his third novel “The wondrous aesthetics of the protective posture when drowning” (Heyne Hardcore). He has the main character, the young German, or more precisely: Munich, Heinrich Pohl, in a yellow-blue striped mini-tent somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains, marveling at a clown named Birdy, how the flick-flack follows flick-flack, catapulting himself onto the back of a llama with a Reuther board, climbs up a rope “just with arm strength” like an Olympic gymnast and then twirls around on the trapeze in a “terrifying manoeuvre”. “I forget all heavy thoughts and rough considerations,” says the first-person narrator: “I am inspired and in love.”

According to the 48-year-old, the circus “with its colourful, exploding world of color and movement” is a grateful source of motifs for stories. One thinks, also in his novel, of the tragic Gelsomina in Fellini’s “La Strada” and of Irving’s “Circus Child”. “Nice book,” says Weber. He actually wanted Heinrich Pohl to inherit a circus, he says, but he failed with this idea. That certainly says something about the way he writes. Even with his third book, he doesn’t feel like a professional writer, but more like a storyteller, and the spontaneous writing works quite well (even if it demands a lot from his editor Markus Nagele, himself a rock musician). So he got stuck in the idea of ​​inheriting the Manege, unlike Alexander Kluge, who landed an award-winning film success in Venice in 1969 with his story about the reform circus director Leni Peikert. But: “There had to be a clown, and then I said to myself: Then we’ll hit him in the water right away. And I have to see how it all fits together.”

The 48-year-old Forian Weber weaves impressively vivid stories that are all nested in their different tones.

(Photo: Mirco Taliercio)

Weber initially swims when writing. Like Heinrich waking up from a faint in a lukewarm sea. In sight: no land. Just a swaying horizon, a styrofoam box he’s clinging to, a llama kicking around him, a piano on an inflatable boat, cans of Mexican beer and soon a suitcase with a severed hand and an unconscious clown in a life jacket. A situation like an escape room game, only in the water. The coordinates: 27,847,156 degrees latitude, -79,610,289 longitude, i.e. in the Atlantic north of the Bahamas, west of Vero Beach. But Henry doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know anything. This is an ingenious starting point for Weber, who gradually feeds his main character with bits of memory.

The author has accumulated a lot of useless but interesting knowledge, which he is happy to demonstrate.

When the bobblehead sees a Aztec gull above him, his thoughts fly back to his childhood, where he showed this water bird, which lives in America, to his favorite uncle Wendelin in the middle of Munich in a natural history book. “Schlauberger,” he says. One could sometimes say that to Weber. He has accumulated a lot of useless but interesting knowledge, which he likes to demonstrate. Fortunately, he is also in line with his adventurous character Wendelin, who says to his pupil: “But you don’t know everything by a long shot. You have to experiment yourself. Life is a damned experiment. Don’t think twice, just do it.” That’s all he is: “My nature is to try out everything, not only in the macrocosm, i.e. writing, making music, painting, but also to feel everywhere in writing. The question is, is it then consistent, so I don’t lose myself, because I write like this, write like this.”

In any case, impressively vivid stories unfold that are all nested in their different tones: from Wendelin’s time as an exchange student in Sweden, where he found the love of his life while ice skating with a local. About Heinrich’s childhood, the humiliation of cliff jumping at Dollinger Weiher, and growing up in his uncle’s antiquarian bookshop on the Viktualienmarkt amidst wondrous knick-knacks and half-truths promoting sales, which is very reminiscent of Donna Tartt’s US epic “The Goldfinch”, which Weber, for once, doesn’t know at all . And the all-enlightening trip of the two through the southern states of the USA. Weber also traveled there with a student friend who lives there. The shamanic peace pipe ritual in Arches National Park, the sly dark-skinned sales boy in the petrol and vegetable station El Sabino Grocery & Fuel, who says that there is a grain of truth in every cliché – that reads as if it has been experienced; and some finely staged as inspired by Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road”. For example, the Southern States sketch when Heinrich is surrounded by a bunch of pointed-cap Kuklux Klaners who first threaten him and then prefer to keep him in their nest as a leader: “The German should be familiar with Hitler and stuff like that.”

A satire also against local Reich citizens? Weber often shows such an attitude. In a music video as MS Flinte, he once turned from a bearded guy into a woman – there are also queer passages in the book. Weber doesn’t spare himself the “protective attitude”, neither does the reader, it’s about cancer and loss in the family (he lost his mother very early). And, like a drummer, he takes the time and rhythm he needs: sometimes bubbling and wide, sometimes almost agonizingly monotonous and narrow. At times he narrates epicly, like Thomas Glavinic in The Greatest Miracle, which is similar in structure and ending. Sometimes everything tumbles insanely constructed like in a Heinrich Steinfest novel, while he turns the cosmic reading order upside down like a trickster (yet another foolish figure).

Literature: Similar to his regular trio "Sportfreunde Stiller" the drummer Weber also takes the time and rhythm he needs when telling the story.

Similar to his regular trio “Sportfreunde Stiller”, the drummer Weber also takes the time and rhythm he needs when telling stories.

(Photo: Marcel Chylla)

The dynamic fits. Always on stage with Weber. Before he appears with the Sportfreunde Stiller with a new single as a harbinger of the album that will be released in August, in the opening act for Herbert Grönemeyer (June 8th, Olympiahalle) and open air at the Dachau Music Summer (August 20th), he sets off alone for the reading tour. The driven man feels more exposed than in his regular trio, judged in his thoughts, blanker.

That is precisely the essence of the circus: the risk, not just the physical one. An analogy to life, or as Clown Birdy says: “Do and forget. Do and remember. Do wheels. Dare somersaults. Juggle apples. Hit the keys. Walk on hands. Jump through hoops. Take risks. On the Drop the hood. Feint. Make it disappear. Make it appear. Handstand on horseback. Drum brushes and piano melodies.” As if it were the timetable for Weber’s head births, which the author Jan Weiler rightly called a “Flo circus”. And there’s always a clown calling out: “In the circus, the world is as colorful as it should always be, but unfortunately it rarely is. That’s why I’m always a circus. I’m always a clown.” And that’s why the reader is so sad when tassels, curls and red patent-leather shoes disappear under the sentence: “The sky is always wet at the bottom of the sea.”

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