Family novel by Anja Hirsch: There is a forgery inherent in every storytelling

“This book is a novel,” asserts Anja Hirsch in the follow-up to her debut, and she continues: “As a literary work, individual passages relate to real events and people from contemporary history.

It combines echoes of actual occurrences with artistically designed, fictional descriptions and thus creates an aesthetically new, artistically exaggerated reality. "

The literary critic Anja Hirsch, born in Frankfurt in 1969 and now living in Unna, tells a family story on two levels. It begins in 1914 with her grandmother Dora and alternately describes, chapter by chapter, the efforts of granddaughter Isa in 2014 at Lake Constance, where she retired because of a marital dispute to understand the documents of her grandparents and her father. Isa is a "war granddaughter" who wants to illuminate and understand the gaps in the past, partly with the help of real documents, partly with her imagination. The first-person narrator has a short but impressive scene from the documentary “The Woman with the Five Elephants” about the life and work of the great Dostoevsky translator Swetlana Geier as a stimulating image. The old lady looks at a piece of clothstrokes it lovingly and muses: "Even when translating, you first break tissue, then you fill it in again."

Conquer a modern world

The first-person narrator takes this picture as inspiration for her novel: “I had become a kind of translator.

I was translating my family history and breaking tissue in the process.

I destroyed the ideas I initially had about everyone;

About Dora, who I like to think of as sophisticated and creative, about my father, whom I saw as it suits me.

Then I started filling in: Dora with the previously hidden parts of her character.

And my father gradually got a profile too. "

As he delves into the family members' résumés, Isa feels more and more violently that the entire war generation has been traumatized.

Grandmother Dora was a bright young woman in the twenties who did not want to do housekeeping but was attracted to contemporary art.

She attended the arts and crafts school in Essen, which later became the Folkwang school.

Together with her childhood friend Frantek, a miner's son, she wants to conquer a modern world.

In Essen, Dora meets her fellow student Maritz, who challenges her life and art in a bold and unconventional way.

A triangular friendship develops, they get to know Oskar Kokoschka and let themselves be carried away by Paul Hindemith's one-act play “Nusch-Nuschi”, which is performed in Essen.

What did the grandfather know?

The bright years of friendship darken when Dora learns that Maritz is expecting a child from her best friend Frantek. Dora leaves the art institute and takes a path she never wanted to go; she learned housekeeping and married a middle-class man who later became administrative director at IG Farben. Many years later, only during the war, the old friendship was re-established. Frantek is dead, he joined the opposition to Hitler and was murdered.

Dora is no longer the sophisticated, headstrong woman, she becomes a well-to-do mother and sends her eldest son to a Napola boarding school, an elite Nazi school. A second strand of memories begins here: Why was Isa's father sent to this school, what does he note about it in his diary as a boy, why was all this kept secret in the family? And what about the grandfather, who worked in a leading position at IG Farben, what did he know about the company's involvement with the Auschwitz killing machinery, how did his denazification process go? Instead of clarity, more and more threatening questions arise.

Isa discusses her research with a neighbor in the Lake Constance asylum. She reads books by other war children and wonders what motivated them to face their family stories? And what did they leave out? Her conclusion: “There were those who were obsessed with the facts. They pretended that every detail served the purpose of establishing the truth, and I was sure to be in danger of getting lost in details under which the victims' pain threatened to disappear. There were fantasists who, despite the obvious fantasy, presented their fictions as truths, without making it clear that storytelling and remembering always included falsification. There were the missionaries who cited sources to provide other research tools. There were the haughty Deuters who pretended that everything that had happened was'Fateful' - and thus evaded all responsibility. ”Isa admits to herself that she has something of all of this.

Her own life was uneventful other than relationship problems. The echo room of the family is needed to emotionally explore the relationships with the ancestors, to clarify why they were the way they were, and how a convincing and convincing existence of their own can be built on this for the next generation. Anja Hirsch knows how to condense time and family history in its highs and crashes without pathos or sentimentality in a lifelike and exciting way.