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What I still have to say takes a cigarette factory, ”said a song by the indie band Brüllen from the late nineties, an allusion to Reinhard Mey's campfire classic“ Gute Nacht, Freunde ”, where the farewell words a few puffs and“ a last glass in Stand “last.
In 1998 Judith Hermann's first volume of short stories, “Sommerhaus, later”, was published and a lot of cigarettes were smoked there, first and last, cigarettes after, before and in between. The enigmatic Sonja from the Hermann story of the same name, which has long since become classic, for example, who appears out of nowhere and disappears into nowhere, smokes incessantly.
Judith Hermann, then in her late twenties, set a new tone in contemporary literature with her debut volume.
Her stories were read as an expression of a generation feeling, unrelated, unfounded, rootless, living in the moment, given over to coincidences.
A symbol of this volatility was the cigarette smoke, which rises and disappears, leaving only a smell.
The duration of the dump shared with a stranger in front of the door or in the corridor of an ICE was the rhythm of accelerated time;
the short story is the perfect form for it.
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The protagonist of Judith Hermann's new novel “Daheim” used to work on the assembly line in a cigarette factory, she takes a box with her every day and looks at the machine at “all those cigarettes that people would smoke outside in the city.
Before work.
In the break.
After eating.
While arguing.
During love and after love.
Smoke."
Judith Hermann: "At home".
Verlag S. Fischer, 192 pages, 21 euros.
Source: Fischer
In the prologue of the novel, which is also nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, the narrator recalls an episode from that time almost thirty years ago. One day, in the checkout line, she approaches a strangely dressed elderly man who introduces himself as a magician who is looking for an assistant for his trick of the sawed-up maiden and gives her his address. When she knocks on his door after a week to think about it, he suggests that they go together on a cruise ship to Singapore to give three performances a week during the trip. "You get an outside cabin, you can stand at the porthole and smoke with a view of the sea."
She lies down in the box for a test, is sawed up to appear and then leaves.
On the morning of departure, she gets ready to go: "I put my suitcase in the hallway by the door, sat down on the balcony and lit a cigarette." But she doesn't go on board.
End of the story.
Prologue as a stepping stone
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End of story, beginning of novel.
The first pages of “Daheim” sound like an unpublished Hermann story from the nineties.
A lot of smoke about everything: a young woman who follows a coincidence, then finally turns around at the last minute, with no reason for one or the other.
The story of the abandoned career as a sawed-up virgin is like a stepping stone from which the novel catapults itself into the life of a woman in her fifties, to a completely different end and a different beginning.
When does a retirement work begin?
Perhaps when you realize that you can no longer put your whole life's commitment on some “later”.
In fact, “At home” is set by the sea, “in the country, on the eastern coast”, where the narrator rented an old, dilapidated house after her daughter Ann moved out and separated from her husband.
“Loneliness” would be an understatement.
Her brother lives in town, who has opened a bar here where she works, but the two of them don't have a close relationship.
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It is a real new start, a return to the lot with very little luggage and a lot of fears.
One morning the door suddenly opens;
an animal rumbles in the house.
It is not so easy to start from scratch somewhere in nowhere, as it used to be in a conjunctival life in Singapore.
After all, there is a neighbor named Mimi, a large farmer's daughter from the area who has mutated into a local artist, who takes the refugees under her sprawling wing.
And her brother with the also very local name Arild, who lives alone on the farm with a thousand pigs, rarely speaks in full sentences, eats frozen food and drinks apricot schnapps from the canister.
He lights the cigarette with the storm lighter and holds it between thumb and forefinger.
"It's been a long time since I saw someone smoke like that."
Cliché of the country egg
This cliché picture of the primitive country egg becomes, well, the lover of the newcomers after Mimi has hung up in the farmhouse parlor JJ Cale and crouches on the leather couch: “Arild danced on socks, the beer bottle in his left hand, he danced like a bear. He pushed me into the corner of the room and opened his belt buckle, his wrists were furry, I got on my knees, I couldn't remember ever having been touched in such a way. "
In a life crisis, someone moves to the country and looks for himself, gets to know and love a couple of quirky locals and discovers the true meaning of life in simplicity - from this rather worn constellation Judith Hermann develops a novel that is not at all clichéd against almost any probability. Or rather, a novel that plays with these clichés, citing them as well as the existentialist cigarette mania of the twenty-year-olds.
Ann, the narrator's undressed daughter, who is on a trip around the world in the North Sea, gets in touch via Skype: “She holds the papers in the camera, rolls a cigarette, pounds the tobacco, lights the cigarette expressively with a match.
- I say how many cigarettes you smoke a day. ”If a short story is enough for a pack, then this novel is, well, not exactly a cigarette factory, but at least a machine full of it.
Nike, the mermaid
The generation issue is mirrored several times. A tragic constellation develops around the narrator's brother, who has fallen in love with a woman named Nike, who is more than three decades younger than him. Nike, who was neglected and abused as a child and now exploits her self-proclaimed savior from the gutter and tortures childlike cruelly, is a great supporting character. A broken ten-year version of Sonja from the nineties, which also appears out of nowhere and cannot feel at home in the present. At the same time she is a mythical revenant of the mermaid washed up under the cold, bad people, who Mimi traces in her not so down-to-earth art.
Mimi and Arild embody people with roots, which the narrator, shaped by the present, will always lack.
All she can achieve is to lose her fear: fear for the daughter, fear of the unknown animal, fear of the apocalypse (which is also heralded here in a dry, rainless summer), fear of another one To enter into a bond.
"Making plans, not thinking about how these plans can fail, that they will fail, almost everything in life fails."
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Where do you get the courage and world confidence in mid-life to put yourself back in a magician's box, whether he has a saw or a storm lighter?
After her dreamy start with “Sommerhaus, later”, it wasn't always easy for Judith Hermann.
The pressure to repeat success but not yourself was a heavy burden.
Three volumes of short stories followed in twenty years, plus a first novel in 2014, the unconvincing stalker story “All Love Begins”.
“At home” is the convincing story of a radical new beginning.
Judith Hermann: "At home". Verlag S. Fischer, 192 pages, 21 euros.