The list of his literary admirers is long: Siegfried Lenz couldn't resist him. Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann have also erected a literary memorial to him, although the “Buddenbrooks” limit themselves to eating him on Christmas Eve, while the talented Hans Giebenrath prefers to fish him in “Unterm Rad”. Even authors like John von Düffel and Max Scharnigg cannot ignore him in their texts. And if he had lived in the Urft river, then Norbert Scheuer would certainly not have just let the fly rod zoom through the air for trout in his novel “Überm Rauschen” (which is actually a fishing novel). As so often before New Year's Eve, the talk is of carp.
Fishing itself is a literary motif that continues to appear again and again, just think of the novel “Die Forelle” by the Austrian Leander Fischer - you might still remember his fly fishing reading at the 2019 Bachmann competition But of all the fish that I have come across in German-language literature, it is above all the carp that seem to be the most attractive. There are more beautiful and more attractive fish - the grayling, for example, which carries its large, proud, flag-like dorsal fin like a mohawk, or the rudd that occurs almost everywhere: red-finned and shiny gold. And of course there are fish that are tastier than carp. I am thinking of the pink tender meat of a wild salmon or the sublime feeling that arises when the white,In the truest sense of the word, butter-soft meat from a self-caught pikeperch melts on my tongue. The carp can't quite keep up with this - but it doesn't even need to. Who remembers a pikeperch in German-language literature? Salmon or grayling? Even. So there must be something about the carp. Only what?
You don't have to be an angler to write about fish
Perhaps it is helpful to first fathom the nature of an angler, because it is not uncommon, see Hesse, Lenz or Scharnigg, that someone who writes about fish is also a passionate angler himself. To have fillet on your plate at the end of the day, you sometimes have to take a lot. Often unappetizing baits like maggots and worms have to be skewered. Sometimes entire wheelbarrows full of equipment need to be pushed to remote places. And there are fish, the carp is one of them that prefers to bite at night - getting up at the wrong time and going to sleep at the wrong time is also part of the job of an angler. Finally, there is the unknown variable called weather: 36 degrees in the shade, thunderstorms, heavy rain, bitter minus degrees. Just when I think of the freezing temperatures andThe fact that I traditionally go to the river and fish on the night of January 1st to 2nd stirs what you might call the schizophrenia of fishing: Something inside me says that I shouldn't do that under any circumstances (How often have I lay in bed with a cold after such frosty nights...). Something completely different says at the same time, with the conjuring voice of a hypnotist: You are going to go fishing! And of course I'll be standing by the river, even at minus ten degrees.in the conjuring voice of a hypnotist: You are going to go fishing! And of course I'll be standing by the river, even at minus ten degrees.in the conjuring voice of a hypnotist: You are going to go fishing! And of course I'll be standing by the river, even at minus ten degrees.