“Good morning Munich!” Radio hosts have no mercy. Your good mood bores mercilessly into the convolutions of your brain. Especially with a man of good spirits like Wilhelm Gossec. He sells antiques and junk, lives and works in the Schlachthofviertel and counters the radio attack first with a strong blow on the alarm clock, and then by watching the snowflakes trickle in front of his shop window for hours.
Max Bronski has been letting Gossec roam through Munich like a stray dog since 2006, running into various crimes by chance and then resolving them courageously. Means: With clout and empathy. Gossec is a kind of Philip Marlowe von der Isar, incorruptible and tough, even tough, then again good-natured and gentle. A brooder scarred by life, who, according to his mother’s will, should have become a clergyman and who ended up with a self-made variant of Buddhism. Always straight out, unless the alcohol just shifts his optics a little. “That was not sensible,” he muses in “Schampanninger”, to continue self-encouragingly, “but people are only sovereign in free, sometimes high-percentage exertion, in which they do things that they definitely shouldn’t do.”
The Gossec stories by Max Bronski – the detective pseudonym of the writer Franz-Maria Sonner, who was born in Tutzing in 1953 – are basically novels of the season. “Munich Blues” from 2007 plays around the Oktoberfest state of emergency. “Der Pygmäe von Obergiesing” from 2016, in turn, pays homage to spring with its fragrances. And “Schampanninger”, published as the third Gossec case in 2008, begins in Advent and ends on New Year’s Eve. Munich is almost a winter fairy tale here. First it snows contemplatively. Then the hair dryer breaks in, there is mud, rain, hail, before “something really wonderful happens” and it starts to snow again.
Between these December weather capers, a white and blue smear theater around the celebrity chef Berni Berghammer is staged, in which Gossec involuntarily finds himself in the role of spoiler. And only because he ran into Lorenz Vierthaler and wanted to help the “chief of the bums” out of a mess, soft as he is. This is because he has succumbed to “the many temptations of Geyerstrasse” with its parlors and can no longer fulfill his mini job as Nikolaus.
Without further ado, Gossec slips into his costume, works off the charity appointments and ends up in the city center at some point, at an event organized by the Weissbräu, where things soon seem suspicious to him. He comes across misappropriated donations, a little coke to Berghammer’s new creation “Schampanninger with ginger cubes” is on top, and at some point a corpse is lying around. Merry Christmas!
Christmas white sausages with pretzels and beer
But the criminal cases are not the deciding factor in the Gossec novels. They tend to go along with that. The language is more important. Max Bronski puts beautiful words like “laugh pressure”, “tackle” and “leather around” into the mouth of his first-person narrator who is sniffing around. Gossec’s view of a city in transition, of people, places, and situations is also more important. “From the occupation of the offices and shops in the Glockenbachviertel,” he concludes, “you can see from which corner the wind of the zeitgeist is blowing. A new marketing elite was now sitting where electronics technicians had previously worked on computers and the Internet.” The salt lamps on rosewood plinths find their way into the Christmas market on Marienplatz, Christian Ude is still Lord Mayor and gives one of his “garland” speeches.
Gossec’s private life also has surprises in store. Friend Julius is said to have lured Jimmy Page into town for a New Year’s Eve concert. Babsi appears, a more drunk story than Ex, and makes demands. After all, his partner Emma wants him to spend Christmas with her. Emma is half-Italian and is staying with her mother at home. But that goes a little too far for the Munich street dog: “Outside of Munich, Christmas Eve would always be like Christmas in the Wild West (…) Emotionally these days, I have a list, and if you need your Christmas white sausages with pretzels and beer, you’re wrong not looking for a fish restaurant on the Strait of Messina. My mind was simply not designed for such frivolities. “
Max Bronski, Schampanninger. Novel. Verlag Antje Kunstmann, Munich 2012. 176 pages, 7.99 euros (e-book).