People who own cats often cannot help envy their animals.

How it is lying around and purring and being lazy and filling its stomach, that looks like a good life.

Unfortunately, as a cat, you cannot choose which household you incarnate your nine lives into, and if you are unlucky you end up as a scruffy stray in a city full of other scruffy strays, for example in Rome.

Andrea Diener

Editor in the features section.

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This is the fate of the castle guide Jam McDamn zu Kenilworth, an employee of the tourist office with a penchant for hair-raising ghost stories. It can't be hair-raising enough for him, and the old walls provide an effective backdrop for his "stories of envious wizards or bewitched beasts". However, one evening when McDamn after a gentle, inexplicable complaint and descends into the old Norman dungeon, he is confronted with the accursed Nicholas von Kenilworth, a weak and faded castle ghost who has not frightened anyone for a long time and the moment comes to haunt them uses. The result: Jam McDamn finds himself as an enchanted cat in Rome, and his amber-colored cat Minnie as a girl in India.And that's only the first chapter of thirteen.

Enlightened fairy tales

Now McDamn and Minnie have to make friends with their new shape, but especially with the people around them who more or less sympathize with shaggy strays or destitute hungry girls with amber hair.

And finally they have to find their way back to Kenilworth, because that is the only way the ban can be lifted.

The eponymous “Reunion in Kenilworth” also comes about, because fairy tales always have a happy ending, but of course differently than planned.

Anyone reading this fairy tale should be a more skilled reader so as not to get lost in the sentences that can sometimes be as labyrinthine as Kenilworth Castle with its countless ballrooms and refectories. If you read it yourself, you have a narrative tone in your ear that barely progresses due to sheer wit and slyness, but progress is not the point here. It's more about coming home and lingering, always where there is something good to eat.

After many volumes of poetry, Peter Rühmkorf experimented with narrative prose and finally discovered the fairy tale for himself. The result was the short novel "Goodbye in Kenilworth", which appeared in 1980 for the first time. The current new edition of the cat fairy tale, however, was illustrated by Line Hoven: a fine picture scraped in cardboard for each chapter. One cannot think of a better accompaniment for this story.

Three years later he wrote thirteen more "Enlightened Fairy Tales". The fact that his story about the Kenilworth cats can be described as enlightened is mainly due to what happens after the actual end of the story. Because this high-spirited narrator, who claims to be “possessed by the Holy Spirit of the Enlightenment” on the one hand, but bowing down to the occult on the other hand, finally enters his story or the inn “To the two cats” himself. There he meets the two characters, about whom he has already reported for 180 pages. And when the amber-colored creature begins to spread its story, the proverbial cat bites its tail, and the narrator has no choice but tothan to settle the exorbitantly high bill in the end. We readers are better off, we can be there for just twenty euros.

Peter Rühmkorf: “Goodbye in Kenilworth”.

A cat fairy tale in thirteen chapters.

With illustrations by Line Hoven.

Verlag Schöffling & Co., Frankfurt am Main 2021. 192 pp., Ill., Hardcover, € 20.