Drunk on the footpath in front of the inn, in flip-flops on the street, in the forest or in the garage in order to take his own life: the former NVA officers whom Jan sees in his hometown in Upper Lusatia after reunification come to the young man man like hero before.

Like heroes that the famous son of the neighboring town, Georg Baselitz, painted in his famous series from the 1960s: those returning from the war, the lost, the destroyed.

Fridtjof Küchemann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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"It seemed as if the moment that the paintings showed was the moment in which the figures, the environment, the landscape could be seen as a whole for the last time," writes Lukas Rietzschel: "One shock and everything would fall apart. The writer, who was born in Upper Lusatia in 1994, seems to dedicate his entire second novel to this last moment before falling apart: his one protagonist, Jan, works in a hospital that, many years after reunification, is slowly being closed and is being recaptured by nature . Not only the prefabricated building from GDR times, but also the shopping center outside, built to keep people in the area after reunification, has now been abandoned. What holds the place, what holds society together?

The other, Günter Kern, fights for justice in East Germany in the 1980s for his son, who is in a coma after a hit-and-run accident, and threatens to lose his mind to a neighborhood lawyer, to his boss, to his lover. His brother Georg was expelled from the art school in East Berlin at the end of the 1950s – “too untalented, too lazy, I have no idea,” as he explained to Günter – and moved to the western part of the city. Eventually he became famous as a painter who borrowed his artist surname from the second part of his birthplace and turned his motifs upside down.

"I still remember how Vati and all the other men from Deutschbaselitz got out of the war," Rietzschel told Georg when Günter visited him in West Berlin, a few days before the Wall was built: "It must be possible to break away from an ideology solve it without sliding into the next one.” Back in Lusatia, Günter also plans his escape, gets discouraged, stays with his parents. He was denied his studies because of his “insufficient political and ideological maturity”, he became a driving instructor, and later in life he was surrounded by Stasi spies. In the year of reunification, he drove his first car, a Western model, into a tree and died.

It is Günter's son Thorsten, with whom the life path of Lukas Rietzschel's other main character Jan crosses decades later. Physiotherapy in the hospital, a few allusions, a box with documents that Jan initially doesn’t understand and to which his father reacts surprisingly allergically, an attack: the author gradually develops what biographically connects the two. What Rietzschel shows in them - in Thorsten as a child of the GDR, Jan as a child of the reunification period and also in Günter as a child of the post-war period - what he unfolds in many scenes, changing from era to era, from character to character, almost gives the novel oppressive weight: “Buildings can be taken down and built up, memories cannot. pain not. Whether actually felt or imagined. pain like stonespassed on from hand to hand in a human chain in order to knock them off and possibly use them again.” Jan sees the astronauts who give the novel its title in his parents: while they were “floating in a kind of vacuum, the world had already turned a dozen times” .

In a novel in which almost every character struggles with the compulsions, traps and hardenings of their lives, the author takes an astonishing degree of liberty: Lukas Rietzschel borrows names and biographical set pieces that have sound and association space in this country, and invents dialogues and letters. "If the novel takes up or even touches on what is or was in reality, it must be a coincidence," Lukas Rietzschel puts his book at the beginning. He does, however, add his thanks to a real Günter Kern, also the brother of a famous painter named Baselitz: “He gave me insights into files, letters and life and watched and tolerated how I arranged, rewritten and dramatized them according to my ideas .”

In other approaches to characters who actually live or have lived, writers discreetly choose - like Theresia Enzensberger in her novel Blaupause - the perspective of a fictional or undocumented person in the story, or they give their characters their own names - like Siegfried Lenz in his "German lesson" - and leave it up to the readership to establish the connection to real people. Lukas Rietzschel leaves his readership with the question of how document and poetry can be distinguished in his novel. "Whether actually felt or imagined": The memories and the pain that the writer sees Steinen passing on in a human chain, so that they can be tapped off and possibly reused, he has enriched with a few invented boulders.

Lukas Rietzschel: "Astronauts"

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Novel.

dtv, Munich 2021. 288 p., hardcover, €22.