First of all, the obvious: Mülheim is not Hollywood, and the Cologne Stadthalle is not the Dolby Theater. David Bowie and… are also in the 1960s building with its fabric-covered walls Metallica occurred. Nevertheless, for everyone who took part in the Academy Awards in Los Angeles as an Oscar nominee less than a week earlier, a reading event in the Rhineland and then at “Schääl Sick” would certainly not be the closest follow-up event.
As Sandra Hülser sits down at her reading table to the expected loud applause, an older lady scurries down the middle aisle to the ramp and places a yellow rose on the edge of the stage. There is a small water carafe on the table. “Maybe I can put them in here,” Sandra Hülser thinks out loud. Then the rose stays there for the time being. This is not a disregard for a gesture of adoration, but a sign of modesty. Sandra Hülser isn’t here to be celebrated, it’s not primarily about her.
The fact that Hülser – not in a Schiaparelli dress like at the Oscars, but in a simple black jacket – took on the role of the reader on the penultimate evening of this year’s Lit.Cologne is not only due to the fact that she is the most unassuming star imaginable. She has also come to show, and yes: celebrate, the life of an author whose work she associates with a special personal performance story. In 2016, Hülser had enormous success with a stage version of Wolfgang Herrndorf’s last, unfinished novel “Pictures of Your Great Love”. The audio version later won an award.
Herrndorf died in 2013. The main character of the evening is a person who will only be present in his texts. Tobias Rüther, literary editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper, published a widely praised and widely read biography about the painter and writer on the 10th anniversary of his death last year. He will read from it. Sandra Hülser will recite the original quotes and will therefore be Herrndorf’s voice. It will be, to use an overused word, a touching evening.
Herrndorf is one of those artists, like van Gogh or Kleist, whose life you think of in terms of its end. For many people it seems that he only got his aura through cancer. Through his enormous literary production in the last three and a half years of his life, catalyzed by this illness, the most celebrated result of which was the young adult novel “Tschick”. And his suicide in August 2013.
The biographer sees Herrndorf as a tremendous German rarity, a comic genius
Rüther shows this person, this teacher’s child from a clinker-brick settlement in Norderstedt, not as a tragic figure, but as someone whose artist’s gaze has been “a child’s gaze” all his life. As that tremendous German rarity, a comic genius. But also as someone for whom his internalized loneliness remained constitutive for his world view and description.
“That’s who I am sabishī“, said young Wolfgang to his mother. He had picked up the word on television, it means “lonely” in Japanese. When Sandra Hülser reads it, she smiles, a smile of affection and compassion. This compassion that comes over the Pure representation goes far beyond this and becomes noticeable again and again in the lecture: texts from a thoroughly “Federal Republic world” with its “pesticide-treated landscapes” (Rüther), which Hülser, who grew up in the GDR, shows as a pan-German, pan-human experience.
When she reads the story of Mr. Klever, the pensioner with a dachshund who shouts to order the neighboring children to leave the neighboring field while they are playing, she is quietly but visibly pleased when Rüther reveals that they put chewing gum on his bell to do so. It is a biographical anecdote and an excerpt from “Tschick”. Because even though Herrndorf said, “If I ever write anything other than pure fiction, please shoot me,” everything is never pure fiction, but always obviously a mixture of what has been experienced, what has been imagined, and what has been imagined.
Sandra Hülser’s quality, which is anything but self-evident in literary readings, is the somnambulistic certainty with which she hits the tone that the respective passage and type of text require. The narrator of the novel “In Plush Thunderstorms,” for example, describes his friend Desmond as follows: “If you were to chop Desmond into seven or eight pieces, you could get a few decent humanities scholars out of him, but he’s practically not viable on his own.”
Sandra Hülser reads it as if Herrndorf’s words were speaking themselves
It’s not easy to manage this mixture of dry contempt for the humanities scholars and ironically broken affection for the friend, who is based on a fellow student from Herrndorf’s unhappy time at the Nuremberg art school. Sandra Hülser, minimalist, subtle, completely immersed in the text, reads it as if she were the author herself. Or rather: as if his words spoke themselves.
When he reports that he “initiated self-medication with ammonia vodka, not without success”, this is at the same time a result of a thoughtful observation of his own existence and a sense of linguistic style, which hardly needs to be added to in the lecture. The analytical, even protocol-based distance that the author himself maintains when describing drunken party make-outs also requires, above all, a sensible understatement in the lecture. Anyone who has ever seen a few bad readings in which a text is acted out so vehemently that the rind cracks will understand how well Sandra Hülser does this. Nothing crashes here.
It remains evident throughout the evening how much both Tobias Rüther and Sandra Hülser love Herrndorf’s work and his comical approach to the world. A highlight is the list of possible titles that Herrndorf, who had been diagnosed with a brain tumor for some time at this point, put together for his next novel “Sand”: in “Sandbox of Madness” Hülser has to smile, in “guilt and dune” she laughs as if read it for the first time and everyone laughs along. A strangely intimate communal moment in this large hall.
Rüther reports on Herrndorf’s last months. How they drag on, how his control over his own body lets him down. Huller quotes the last records, which are completely unsound. She reads Georg von der Vring’s “In der Heimat”, from which was quoted at Wolfgang Herrndorf’s funeral: “On the Weser, Unterweser, / You will be like you once were, / Through the reeds and bank grasses / The flood penetrates in, as it once did” . There is sniffling in the audience. Rüther reports that there were yellow roses on the coffin.
The final applause is loud and long and well deserved. Sandra Hülser picks up her own yellow rose and takes it backstage.