He cannot omit the chu-chuenden pigeons. Not the shy red cat whose affection he is courting. This also includes the pumpkin seed, which is on the seat he reserved on the ICE. Not even nature, which forces itself on him and in which, fortunately, there is a chocolate bar wrapper, otherwise the idyll would be unbearable. Everything has to go in the total diary.
For a year, playwright Wolfram Lotz wanted to write about “everything” and see what would happen with the text and with it. In the summer of 2017 he moved to a small town in Alsace because his wife had taken a job there. Two small children, a few books and a lot of vineyards. So he snuck around with notebooks, writing things down as directly as possible. He retreated to the toilet when a thought struck. He presented the experiment as “talking to himself at the open window”, a permeable writing, open and for mistakes. Give the text complete control and just don’t squint at any kind of publication. In the summer of 2018 he completed the work – and put it out. And now it is still there, the “Holy Scriptures I.”
How does that go together? First the maximum invisibility and then the fanfare, here are 912 pages, dear reader? Because if you have understood one thing after these 912 pages: Wolfram Lotz doesn’t seem like an impulsive type. If you email this question to the publisher, you are suddenly right in the middle of Wolfram Lotz’s openness experiment. He calls.
Lotz is funny, quick, lucid – and not efficient at all. Although showered with awards, he publishes little
He would like to explain that briefly himself. He knows that looks like good PR: the struggling artist who had to be persuaded to save his deleted work, which is only possible because he emailed the first part to a friend in good time. A bit of Kafka and Max Brod? No, that’s just how it happened, assures Wolfram Lotz.
He deleted it because the project was becoming more and more uncontrollable by the day and he had the feeling that he wanted to free himself from a monster. He also deleted it to prevent the diary from being published because otherwise, as he says, he likes to be “talked about” by others. And now he’s, well, allowed himself to be teased. Luckily. Because the “Holy Scriptures I” is, to stay conceptually in Lotz’s preferred habitat: really big theater. What happens on the 912 pages is poetry, prose, the finest humor, the most beautiful nonsense.
Wolfram Lotz, born in 1981, is one of the most important contemporary German playwrights. With “The Ridiculous Darkness” he wrote, so to speak, Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” for the theatre, in In “Die Politicians” (2019) he pulls the audience into the abysses of the politician’s soul in a rhythmic spoken poem. Lotz is funny, quick, lucid – and not efficient at all. Although showered with awards, he publishes little. Of course, the theater has long since grabbed hold of “Holy Scripture I”; on May 14, the world premiere at the Munich Kammerspiele will take place as an “immersive installation”, staged by Falk Richter.
For Wolfram Lotz, writing is an end in itself, his way of turning to the present. “Writing, text, transformation: The writing sanctifies the things here, the profane stuff of life, only then do I really see them, are / were they there; only then am I HERE”https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/ “Holy Scripture” doesn’t really mean the document itself (although the slight provocation is of course readily accepted), but rather the process of translating its reality into writing. What form of existence a text takes afterwards is irrelevant: “That’s how a good text develops in writing: in which the form is not known beforehand, but by pursuing an aesthetic idea”.
When reading, one is quickly sucked into the stream of notes, mini-dramas, aphorisms, neologisms and poems
When reading this “profane life stuff” one is quickly sucked into the meandering stream of thoughts. Follow Lotz in everyday family life, night walks, “The wine festival is raging here in the village”. On ICE journeys he always writes, of course, there’s time: “The train comes on time, even though it should be canceled, it’s great.” Lotz struggles with the theatre, with the literature business, with writing. Quickly jot down the shopping list and then: “to school, in the andings of the morning things”. In notes, mini-dramas, aphorisms, neologisms and poems, he unfolds the “everything” he has written day after day. In autumn 2017 Donald Trump is still President of the USA, the Berlin Volksbühne is occupied and the New York Times publishes allegations against Harvey Weinstein. While this reads like notes from another universe, it’s more the insanity of the present than the fault of Lotz.
In love with transformation, he tries on other roles, answers the phone as Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, lets Peter Handke, Durs Grünbein and Miley Cyrus do things for himself: “Peter Handke doesn’t feel like going hiking in the forest now, because it’s still raining all the time, that’s just too wet for Peter Handke.” He has a great enthusiasm for everyone, in the case of Miley Cyrus above all for the fact that she also produces highly embarrassing things in total uncontrol. He is interested in deviations in art, perhaps because: “The most realistic text can only come about through mistakes.”
Wolfram Lotz: Holy Scripture IS Fischer, Frankfurt 2022. 912 pages, 34 euros.
A discrepancy between claim and implementation arises inevitably with the question of what “everything” Lotz actually means. Because of course “everything” is not “everything”. Every author who writes autofiction faces the problem of where to draw the line. Emmanuel Carrère solved the dilemmaby defining his own concept of truth for his writing. Karl Ove Knausgård goes on the Maixmal offensive in his books and crawls into the very last hairline of his fellow human beings just to catch “everything”, which consequently often means total exposure of himself and others.
Lotz found the following formula for himself: private conversations remain private. No one close to him should fear soul scavenging. Only his two sons, O and E, float through the author’s everyday life like two friendly troublemakers every few scenes. He decides he wants to write about them because in 20 years they will probably have little in common with the children who are marching through the house happily chanting “Donald Trump.”
Not a line was edited, only typos were allowed to be corrected
The relationship with N, his girlfriend, mother of his sons does not take place. No fighting, no sex, no idea what N actually thinks about the diary project. Which is particularly striking because Lotz is invoking great openness. He names it himself: “And then, with a certain sadness, I thought how sad it is that the relationship between her and me is completely left out here,” he writes. And then: “Why I practice this so anti-cheap; what a contempt for these things it is, for life, to want to sell it in secret”.
The disclosure of the gaps, the permeability, the call – that fits the new self-image of many authors, including many theater makers, according to which they no longer claim to deliver a polished end product, or even to claim any kind of “right” for themselves. On the one hand, back doors always remain open, and where no one has claimed that it is correct, a work also eludes criticism to a certain extent. On the other hand, as in the case of Wolfram Lotz, this permeability creates a shimmering work of great credibility.
Wolfram Lotz assures us on the phone that not a single line has been proofread, only typographical errors can be corrected. That was one of his conditions for publishing the text. So he remains a big quarry, associative, raw, open ends everywhere. And yet: This book lacks absolutely nothing. One can hardly resist the power and charm of Wolfram Lotz’ “Holy Scripture I”, why should one want to? There won’t be just a part II. Because, says Lotz, it really was irrevocably deleted.