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Get out of here, get out of here.

Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen's life largely consists of escaping;

to escape from what is given and intended, what is shown and exemplified.

Even when she was a teenager and her family wanted to move to a more affluent part of the city, she noticed how much she was looking forward to “getting away from this proletarian quarter”.

Ditlevsen wants to get rid of her origins economically, socially and culturally.

But she suspects early on that this is impossible, because something sticks to you that you can smell, hear and see.

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“You can't escape childhood, it clings to you like a smell,” she writes.

“You don't know your own smell and sometimes you fear it might be worse than the others.

We stand there and talk to a girl whose childhood smells of ash and coal, and suddenly the girl takes a step back because she noticed the terrible stench of our childhood. "

The work of journalist, writer and poet Tove Ditlevsen (1917 to 1976) experienced a revival in her Danish homeland a few years ago; in 2014 it was included in the literary canon and therefore recommended for school reading.

She had previously gained fame in the 80s through pop music: the Danish singer Anne Linnet and the Norwegian artist Kari Bremnes used their lyrics.

Towards the end of her life - after she had already published many volumes of prose and poetry - Ditlevsen wrote three short and short autobiographical novels: "Childhood", "Youth" and "Addiction".

The Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen (born December 14, 1917 - died March 7, 1976)

Source: picture alliance / Erik Petersen

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In the autofictional narrative style, in volumes one and two, she first traces her growing up in a poor working-class family in the Copenhagen district of Vesterbro in the 1920s and describes her social rise in the country's literary circles, which led her to her first unhappy marriage with the editor of a literary magazine.

In volume three she tells of her three other marriages and of her adult life, which is marked by her work as a writer, but also by drug addiction and psychosis.

Ditlevsen ended her life in 1976 with an overdose of sleeping pills.

Anthemic reviews

For the first time, this so-called Copenhagen trilogy is now completely in German, so far only the third volume under the title “Sucht” was published in 1980 by Suhrkamp.

In any case, only a small part of her work has been translated so far, including the famous Danish novels "Street of Childhood" (in the original 1943) and "Faces" (in the original 1968), which today are only available in antiquarian versions.

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The interest in Ditlevsen's work seems to be great, as the first positive to anthemic reviews of the trilogy show.

The Aufbau-Verlag, where it appears, is currently checking whether any other titles by the author may be translated.

It is certainly no coincidence that these works in particular have now been rediscovered: Both Ditlevsen's topoi - class exodus, social advancement, educational advancement, the associated processes of alienation - and the narrative style of autofictional biographical writing have been extremely successful in recent years, thinks of Annie Ernaux , Didier Eribon, Karl Ove Knausgård.

There was always criticism of the auto-fictional style - some consider reading Knausgård to be an impertinence because of the meticulous description of lived life.

This debate is superfluous with Tove Ditlevsen: Her texts are condensed, precise and metaphorical, next to soberly written autobiographical passages there are also essayistic paragraphs in which she tries to understand what “childhood”, “youth” and “dependency” actually mean and matters.

Her life is simply so eventful that one reads away these three books with fascination.

Ditlevsen grew up in a poor family, in a strictly patriarchal society.

Her father is a stoker and later becomes unemployed, he is a dogmatic socialist.

Her mother is a housewife, the narrator has a difficult relationship with her, she is described as cold-hearted;

she once indicated to her daughter that she had desperately tried to abort her and her older brother.

"Reading makes you strange"

The family initially lived in a two-room apartment, in "simple circumstances" as one would say.

They are simple in that the conventions are clear and the truths are simple: “Reading makes you whimsical.

Everything that is in books is a lie, ”the mother lets her daughter know when she was a child.

When the young narrator expresses her desire to become a poet to her father, who certainly appreciates literature, if she is class-conscious, he replies: “Don't imagine anything.

A girl cannot become a poet. ”That doesn't prevent her from continuing to write poetry in her poetry album.

Ditlevsen describes her coming-of-age mainly along Istedgade, the big street near which she lives and which leads through Vesterbro to the main train station.

Here she gets to know the bare life, alcoholics hang out on the mile, the whores stand on the street, and she and her friends try to teach each other the bare minimums that are needed for sex education in conversations.

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Her parents want Tove to marry and find a man she can be put up with.

She finally finds her husband in the writer Viggo Frederik Møller, editor of the literary magazine "Vild Hvede" (Wild Wheat).

He prints her first poems, at the time of her first marriage she also sells her first novel “Man gjorde et barn fortræd” (You have done evil to a child) to a publisher.

Already with her next novel “Barndommens gade” (“Street of Childhood”) she became known in Denmark.

Their milieu changes suddenly, and Ditlevsen is good at highlighting the subtle differences.

This sometimes happens casually: For example, when her father doesn't know how to pronounce “Victor Hugo” correctly, the narrator corrects him and he reacts harshly.

I get angry with my origins

She experiences a similar experience with her first husband, when he improves her pronunciation of the French word “chauffeur”.

"The remark hurts me," writes Ditlevsen, "and I get angry about my origins, my ignorance, my language, my complete lack of education and culture, these words that I hardly know."

The word microaggressions did not exist back then, that is what one would call the remarks today.

Normality and the ordinary are also recurring subjects for Ditlevsen, she experiences herself as unusual and strange.

She wrestles with the definition and concept of normality;

This is also shown by several passages, for example when the narrator curses the word “solid” or her father advises her to stay away from Herman Bang's work: “You are not allowed to read anything about it.

It wasn't normal! "

Ditlevsen's politics in her adolescence and early adult years appear only as background noise.

The fact that all the (world) politically dramatic events - how the social democratic government Stauning acts, how the Danish National Socialist Workers' Party is founded, how Nazi Germany occupies Denmark - only incidentally play a role in their lives is due to the patriarchal upbringing in which Politics is a man's business.

When the narrator lived temporarily as a subtenant with a Nazi sympathizer in her young adulthood, she heard Hitler's radio speech muffled and distantly through the wall.

This can be read almost metaphorically: Politicians always keep their distance.

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When the narrator meets her third husband, a manipulative and psychotic doctor, she becomes addicted to drugs.

After he administered the pain reliever pethidine to her, she becomes addicted to the substance - she marries him because he can prescribe her prescriptions.

These passages read like a thriller.

Youth?

"A lack and an obstacle"

Ditlevsen describes the swamp of addiction and the pull of the drug in quick, unadorned language.

In a certain way, however, the mutual dependency in marriage, which takes up a lot of space, leads back to an intellectually important encounter in her youth: through a friend she gets to know an older man named Krogh, whom she values ​​and hopes from that he could help her find a publisher.

He says a sentence to her that she will remember her whole life: "We humans always want something from each other, and I have known all along that you would use me for something."

At one point Ditlevsen wrote about her youth that she was only “a deficiency and an obstacle” that had to be overcome.

One gets the impression that her whole life has been marked by want - although thanks to her literary success no longer by the material shortage in which she grew up.

The narrator is driven, constantly trying to overcome a condition.

She only escapes him through death.

Tove Ditlevsen: childhood;

Youth;

Dependency.

From the Danish by Ursel Allenstein.

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