“For as long as I can remember I have been drawn to adversity – death, suicide, crime, hatred, madness.” This is how “Orkus” begins, a book that was published in 2011 and in which Gerhard Roth writes about the world we live in, but also and above all about the world Roth lived in, which was not necessarily and always congruent with reality. (It should be noted that no one for whom fantasy is not more important than measurable reality can be a writer.) In “Orkus” fact is mixed with reality in the writer’s head, sketches about Kafka, Camus or Qualtinger alternate off with autobiographical stories that occasionally feature people and things that don’t exist in the usual sense. Four years before “Orkus”, “The Alphabet of Time” was published, in which Roth tells about his childhood and youth. Both books are exemplary for autobiographical writing, for writing in general.
Gerhard Roth, born in Graz, has now died at the age of 79. He was one of those Austrian spiritual people who suffer so much from Austria that, consciously or unconsciously, they always want to contribute to making this strange country better, more bearable, more lovable – but only after they have looked into its abysses and made them public to have. Proof of this is Roth’s cycle “The Archives of Silence”, which is as powerful as it is small-scale, seven volumes on which Roth worked for a good 15 years until 1991. In Obergreith, a small village in Styria, Roth lived between 1977 and 1986 in, as they say, simple conditions, initially without running water and with an outhouse. He collected stories, worldviews, pictures, not only, but also because he wanted to get to the bottom of those authoritarian influences that made Austria a willing accomplice to the German Nazis and that had survived the war. Over time, Roth also became part of “normal” village life in Obergreith. All this, the abysses and everyday life, are reflected in the grandiose novel “Common Death” from 1984, which stands in the middle of the “Archives of Silence”. Above all, it is the story of the mute Franz Lindner, son of a beekeeper, who ends up in a psychiatric institution, where he divides life into stories, stories that also divide his life.
Roth was a relentless commentator on contemporary Austria – out of love
While the “Archives of Silence” are primarily protocols, analyses, narratives, sometimes vivisections of Austrian things and states of mind, Roth’s second cycle goes further. His two final volumes are the autobiographical ones, “Orkus” and “The Alphabet of Time”. Like the last volume, Roth also called the eight-part cycle “Orkus”. Its structure is based on Joyce’s “Ulysses”, which in turn was based on Homer’s “Odyssey”. And it is, Roth readers would say, a logical continuation of the first seven-volume cycle “The Silent Archives”. While the first cycle was Austrian homeland literature in the best possible sense of the word, trips to Egypt, Japan or Mount Athos are the foreground and background of sometimes mysterious, dangerous stories in the second cycle. Her protagonists mostly find themselves in contexts beyond their control, at times beyond their mind.
Roth’s father was a doctor, and he wanted his son to be a doctor too (that’s what doctor dads seem to have). The son dropped out of medical school, however, and from 1966 he earned a living for his family as an employee in a data center in Graz. In the mid-1960s, this was still a rather exotic activity. His first book appeared in 1972, a kind of novel entitled “the autobiography of albert einstein”, all in lowercase, which reflected the thoughts of a person who thought he was Einstein and said such sentences: “I remain here like a microbe, the coat collar full of hair”. This was called experimental literature at the time. Luckily for Roth and his later readership, the author emancipated himself from this phase.
Gerhard Roth was a frequent writer and a frequent traveler; his most recent books, a trilogy set in Venice, are about prompters and art historians confronted with crime and moderate madness. Roth was also a sometimes almost relentless commentator on contemporary Austria. He liked to mess with the usual suspects from the ÖVP and FPÖ. That probably also had something to do with his deep love for Austria. However, he was anything but the classic nagging intellectual; Thomas Bernhard once mocked him for his admiration-like attitude towards Bruno Kreisky.
In personal dealings, Gerhard Roth was a reserved, sometimes even cheerful person who liked to tell and hear stories. His love for his difficult homeland can not only be read in his books; it has also become manifest in the cultural center of St. Ulrich in Greith in Styria. Roth had the idea of founding a cultural center in his home country and was very committed to the construction and operation of the Greith House, which opened in 2000. Since then, in deep Austria, the house has shown how abysses can be closed.