This book is about the most precious, beautiful and worst that can happen to you in life.
Only recently, and long after her death, has the author dreamed of their parents being lost: “They are wandering around looking for me desperately. And dreaming, the thought torments me that they cannot find their way back because they have lost their bearings. … Or they think I don’t want to see them anymore … They are slowly getting used to the idea that at some point children will no longer want to know anything about their parents.
Michael Krüger, born in 1943, shaped literary life in Germany as the long-time director of the Hanser Verlag in Munich. He is also a poet and novelist. Most recently, Suhrkamp published his collection of poems “Im Wald, im Holzhaus” in the summer.
But suddenly the dream takes a turn and Edgar finds himself in a cheap hotel room where his parents live. He recognizes her objects, her shoes, her father’s jacket over the chair. And then the mother stands in front of an open cupboard: “She turns around, heard me, I see her astonished, girlish face, which in the long time since I’ve missed her, has become younger. (…) She is happy, but she is not really that surprised. A gentle friendliness shimmers on her face, and I realize that this is the most valuable, most beautiful thing I have ever met. But the friendliness stays with her, it weighs in the features of her face, it doesn’t reach me. The waves that transport everything in life are too short and cannot carry this expression to my heart. “
And then comes the sentence that gave the book its title: “How nice, she says. You have finally found us.”
At the end of the book, this heartfelt, sometimes very funny portrait of the actor as a young man, which describes the youth of Edgar and his family in Herford, the death of his brother Andreas is discussed in an epilogue. The author shared the room and the rest of the room with Andreas, the youngest of a total of five boys, who was a little “backward”. The oldest, Rainer, died playing with a hand grenade, and now Andreas is in the clinic with kidney failure. Why, Edgar wonders, have I asked myself the question so often: “What’s the worst that can happen to me at all?” and always gave himself the answer: “that something should happen to you, Andreas! That is the worst.” After Andreas dies, Edgar realizes, the search for his own life begins. The book is dedicated to the two surviving brothers.
The father is probably not satisfied with what he is
Between these two extreme emotional states, Edgar Selge spans the family history of the chief public prosecutor and prison director Dr. Edgar Selge and his wife Signe. The very first chapter is an unforgettable tableau: The father invites the juvenile prisoners to an afternoon concert followed by a snack in his private house (sandwiches and apple juice), in the evening he plays with a professional from Hamburg in front of friends, “Academic couples from our small town “.
The son does not know whether the father dreams of being a pianist. He suspects he’s quite content to be who he is: an especially good piano-playing prison warden. “My music-making father in the midst of his prisoners. How many people have I already told about it. Over and over again, over and over again different. It has been like this all my life. Now I sit here and write it down. I hope I don’t disappear between sentences. The more precise I am, the more strange I become to myself. “
Music is the real engine in the family that drives everything. All children play an instrument, they all understand music and can talk about it, including the mother who turns the page. She is the weak point when it comes to gaming. “If you are as addicted to the beautiful violin tone as my father, it becomes a torture to accompany this woman.” Then the otherwise close relationship is threatened. “You don’t say it. Nobody wants to admit it: not yourself, not my brothers – and me? I just can’t overlook it.” And while the director Dr. Selge Beethoven plays, the prisoners are amazed to find that the furniture they have made is in the director’s private house. “Strictly speaking, the imprisoned feed us,” says precocious Edgar, “not just because they grow our vegetables and fruit. Basically, simply because they are there. We live off the lawbreakers. My parents see that different of course. But I have to reverse their views in order to come to my own. “
But the father’s weakness soon comes up too: his work during the Nazi era and his anti-Semitism, which is described as an incurable disease. The hardest pages in this book are when the children torment their parents with their past; when they hypocritically ask whether Mendelssohn’s music is also “without depth” like the rest of “Jewish music”. At lunch, the father claims that the Jews are creative, but not creative. He wants to express his admiration for the entire Russian-Jewish violin tradition, but in the sense of: Shoemaker, stick to your last; you Jews are great at playing the violin. But do not imagine that you can compose, write poetry or paint.
And Edgar? He’s cheating his way through
Edgar, the recalcitrant boy to whom the usual upbringing methods do not adhere well, feels sorry for his father: “He doesn’t want to come across as a Nazi, but his entire structure of thought and language was built during this time, and he won’t find another one that quickly Nothing is left of the völkisch movement that once supported him. All that clings to him are cheers, intoxication, tumult, empty pathos of the German nature, megalomania, hatred of the Jews and all those who think differently, and above all the camps! How is he supposed to deal with the fact that he knew more than he admits? He doesn’t know how to get out of there without crossing out a part of his life. It’s the same with our mother. “
She shakes her head because the children have no idea how the Jews would have pushed them out of their seats back then. “In the theater, in the opera, in concert halls, in the universities, in the fine restaurants, in the newspapers, in politics, oh, everywhere you looked: the Jews have always been there. They are everywhere in front of your nose sat. “
And Edgar? He’s cheating his way through. In the evening he climbs out of the window to get to the late night screening of the cinema, but is seen and told off. And where did he get the money to go to the cinema? Stolen, unfortunately, but since he doesn’t think much of the pedagogical skills of teachers and parents, he has to take unusual measures. He even used up the class fund for self-education. Go down to your father and apologize, says mother. “These stairs. With every step down I move into the funnel of punishment. Why do I do this? Always putting one foot in front of the other to apologize, to make amends? Because I want to bring the others to the point to see for themselves the futility of their educational efforts. “
“With their beautiful, serious faces. In which wrong decisions mean something.”
One of the great things about this book is that it is written in the present tense throughout; So we grow up with Edgar and look out into the world with him: We discuss with him the question of whether he might have criminal energy (and what that actually is), we pour a bottle of cocoa into the hair of an honored classmate with him, and when the teacher yells at him: “Don’t you want to apologize, you monster?” we shake our heads with him; and we would have loved to bite our tongues with him when he once again tormented his mother with the past.
But above all, after looking so intensely through his glasses, we understand the ambivalence with which Edgar treats his parents: “This is how they both stand under the living room lamp. With their beautiful, serious faces. In which wrong decisions mean something. Mine Mother with her disappointed life. And my father with the fear that his life will fall apart with hers. His fear affects me. And her fulfillment of duty, her unexperienced anger over this fulfillment of duty, terrifies me so much that I completely forget her love. “
A firstfruit? Might be. But above all else: a delightfully told, an important book.