Edgar Rai has written more than 20 novels, six of them under the pseudonym Moritz Matthies. He was born in the Hessian hinterland in 1967, studied musicology and English, teaches creative writing in Berlin and publishes at least one book every year.
His latest is called “Ascona”, it tells of the exile of the writer Erich Maria Remarque, who was the bestselling author of the Weimar Republic with his World War II novel “Nothing new in the West” – one of the Nazis persecuted. SA thugs disrupted the premiere of the already censored Hollywood film adaptation of the novel, the film was banned entirely in 1931, Remarque’s books ended up at the stake in 1933, the writer fled to Switzerland the day after Hitler took office. In “Ascona”, the new Chancellor’s motorcade comes towards him as he leaves the city. A night-time encounter in the icy cold, he is not sure whether Hitler really was in the car, as if he did not want to admit it. It was not his idea to flee Berlin so hastily, his partner had urged him. As Katja Mann was more clairvoyant than her Thomas, Ruth also reacts more resolutely than the hesitant Remarque.
No problems at the border, no money worries, actually no worries at all
Still, it was easier for the successful writer to flee than for most of the intellectuals on the arrest list. Remarque had already bought a villa near Ascona on Lake Maggiore in 1931 and relocated his main residence there: no problems at the border, no financial worries, actually no worries at all. And this, he instinctively senses, is not a good prerequisite for a writer. At least not for him. Perhaps for his colleague and friend Emil Ludwig, the disciplined, prolific writer, or for the great intellectuals, Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, whom he despises because of their arrogance.
But for him, who only despises the haughty and incidentally lives the Swiss idyll in all modesty, it is nothing for him: “He had to be in danger if he wanted to understand what his writing was really about. Perhaps he could now Great success. ” And he does not have to look for the danger, it comes closer without his intervention, creeps up with the growing number of prominent emigrants, who make it terrifyingly clear that no one is immune from persecution, that there are no inhibitions and limits of shame, that always the whole family is in danger. And that everything happens very quickly. Long before the Reichstag fire, the lists of opponents were drawn up, everyone who has ever stood against the Nazis is in mortal danger.
Edgar Rai: Ascona. Novel. Piper, Munich 2021. 256 pages, 22 euros.
Edgar Rais “Ascona” is not a sermon of indignation and rousing, but a confident, light-footed factual novel. What was not so historical in detail could have always been so. And what the reality Remarque owed in terms of passion, here it is event. The night with Marlene and of course with Jutta, the new companion. But Rai sometimes leave his writing skills, and things get petty and petty. While Jutta “has her uterus cut out”, Erich “fucks” Marlene or dreams of it – always manageable excesses. “There was a knock. Marlene, trembling with passion. You sweet grumpy bear. Kiss me. No, if so, then … And then they were on the bed, they over him, the most delicious surrender.” Here the reader has to add what the writer did not succeed in: a psychological scenario that goes beyond banal externalities and that would tell something about the character of the man, about his visions, his thinking, his desperate addiction to enjoyment.
But Rai doesn’t care about the tragic, rather the fascination of normality, the everyday. Behind the ordinary he looks for the lurking demons, the unexpected, the danger. But she doesn’t want to adjust, not even on the seemingly risky crossing to New York. “It was said that German submarines were lurking off the coast. Nobody could say what would be tomorrow. Or in an hour. But now, here, at this moment, he was alive.” That sounds like something out of a novel from the 1920s and it would of course be great if the succinct tone turned from banality to existential melancholy and longing. Just like back then on the Queen Mary.