The good news is downplayed: "Brigitte Kronauer's legacy, which her husband gave to the German Literature Archive, is relatively small for one of the most important authors of the past decades," said yesterday at the annual press conference of the Marbach institution, which was delighted with it.
There are numerous personal photos in the Kronauer estate, as well as early prose and documents collected by the author on the reception of her work and letters from colleagues;
but she did not attach particular importance to the transmission of preliminary stages to her novels, of sketches, drafts and proofreading.
With apparently one exception.
According to the DLA, the estate contains extensive preparatory work for the “cultural history of misunderstandings” published jointly by Kronauer, Eckhard Henscheid and Gerhard Henschel in 1997.
To avoid a misunderstanding: Brigitte Kronauer's share in this almost six hundred-page book was also relatively small.
Only five of the texts contained therein are marked with their abbreviation compared to thirty-two, the Henschel, and no less than ninety-six that name Henscheid as the author - the latter spread among other things about such prominently misleading topics as Hitler, Freud, Wagner or Christianity.
Kronauer's contributions, on the other hand, were about less spectacular things: "false signals and neighboring deceptions", "Maria like milk and blood",
But above all Kronauer's shortest entry, namely just over one page, has it all.
As part of the only lemma contested by the three of them, "In Schwereigener Sache", he deals with one of their literary characters: the pharmacist Willi Wings from the 1994 novel "Das Taschentuch".
Kronauer quotes characterizations of her hero from the reviews of this work and leaves the resulting conglomerate of the most contradictory assessments without any comment of her own – evidence of ambivalence.
In the same way, the melancholy reported lack of scope of the estate by the DLA must be assessed: as a characteristic of a writer who used to put everything, absolutely everything, into her books.
Of course they know that in Marbach.
So why the relativizing murmur when announcing the growth?
Well, one has just read Kronauer, her remarks on “False Signals and Neighboring Misdirections”, which read: “Instead of falling for random signals or misclassifying them, one can use them on the active side, psychologically the more interesting variant, use it wisely for other purposes in a deceptive way.” One might lure research by promising that there isn't that much to research.