display
Sometimes time runs towards us with such speed and force that if it runs over you, you don't even have time to say “Oh!”.
It must have been similar to Merle Kröger.
For five years, the writer and documentary filmmaker hung around in archives, probably rummaging through material, seeing films, listening to music and reading newspapers on microfiches with flickering eyes - until she was on the verge of having a lung disease.
And then she wrote a novel that should now be on as many bedside tables as possible as a brick-shaped milestone in the historical thriller.
"The experts" (Suhrkamp, 688 pp., € 20) is his name.
display
A novel that Merle Kröger now knows - after the identity-political debate about the Emilia von Senger bookstore across the country - is one with a Nazi background.
And that - among other things - he is doing exactly what has been called for during the debate and still not done enough in the 76 years since the end of the war.
Forcing the past to talk, the legacies of our parents and grandparents' generation from the cellars and boxes to tell.
Kröger's “experts” are based on the legacies, memories of Kröger's girlfriend, the film archivist Stefanie Schulte Strathaus.
Rita Hellberg, this is how it starts, comes to Cairo.
It's summer 1962. Rita is fifteen.
Your father is an aircraft manufacturer, that was already under Hitler.
He is supposed to build a jet fighter for Nasser.
display
Cairo is a place; the early sixties are the time when a new world order is forming.
It's sophisticated, it's confusing.
There are lots of Nazis there, doctors, engineers.
Unscrupulous keepers whose services are needed by regimes around the world that work with grim hatred of Israel.
Rita lets herself go.
We're drifting with you.
Through a literary time sphere of eminently vitality.
Infictionalized into the material
What Kröger does with the thousands of scraps of time that she has collected over the years, BND files, newspaper notes, letters, photo descriptions, songs, she herself describes as something between "documentary essay and literary novel, historical investigation and political thriller".
She infectionalized into her material, she says.
Merle Kröger The Expert Thriller Edited by Thomas Wörtche
Source: Suhrkamp Verlag
display
A book that speaks in tongues, in which different archive landscapes begin to speak finely with one voice.
The friendship story, puberty story, contemporary history is a poetological experiment and a suspense novel.
The next stage in the historical thriller.
Everything that comes after that will have to be measured against him.