For the schizophrenic first-person narrator of this massive yet feather-light novel, one of the favorite objects of the old, collapsed world is a brain model.
Franz Lindner, inmate of a sanatorium and nursing home like the greatest of our novel characters, keeps putting the model together anew, just as he creates more and more inner realities in the labyrinth of the self.
The Austrian writer Gerhard Roth, who died a few months ago and would have turned eighty this Friday, has another model for the brain to offer that has certainly not been used in any physiology course: namely bees, which he Filming and practice - one may say: enthusiastically - adored.
"The hives are reminiscent of the head, the honeycombs are reminiscent of the gray cells, the bees are perceptions and thoughts, and sexuality is incessant and invisible," he wrote in 2011 in a beautiful essay accompanying a new edition of Maurice Maeterlinck's classic bee book, which has not only been almost completely incorporated into the new narrative, but has also been significantly expanded.
That the world of bees, two hundred times older than that of Homo sapiens,
A hallmark of this author is his ability to explain symbols and metaphors himself.
The fact that this never comes across as obtrusive has to do with the fact that the pictorial area does not open up in the allegorical.
Gerhard Roth's literature is the most brainless head literature imaginable.
"Die Imker", although it was published posthumously, is not only the worthy conclusion of an impressive life's work of novel cycles, stories, plays, photo books and films, but perhaps the last great triumph of fantastic realism in the German language, which served as a literary counterpart to anti-psychiatry by Michel Foucault, Ronald D. Laing and Félix Guattari with medically skilled authors such as Roth or Ernst Augustin reached its peak in the second half of the twentieth century.
A yellow fog wipes out the people - almost all of them
Like all institutional novels, "The Beekeepers" can be read as the record of a psychosis, as the experience of a person "who makes the discovery that he is like a star".
This is explicitly indicated by the last lines, which refer to what was written as Lindner's legacy, found a few months after his death - as if the coincidence with the novel situation had been planned - and, like Kafka's work, actually intended to be "burned".
But that hardly weighs any more than the surreal, rousing inner plot, which testifies to an unleashed love of storytelling.
There are no longer any sick people locked away in sanatoriums, or rather: there is nothing else anymore.
Right at the beginning, an ominous yellow fog almost wipes out civilization.
Only those who were imprisoned at the time survived the end of the world:
The logic of the incident, in which gravity is also temporarily suspended, is more like that of a dream, but the consequences are no less massive: the protagonists, including fellow patients, doctors and Lindner's nephew Eugen, are lost between the active volcanoes of Styria his son Walter (they were visiting) through a damaged landscape that looks like it should look like after the nuclear attack.
However, there are no corpses in cars that have been involved in accidents or planes that have crashed, because all living beings, as those who escaped soon discover, dissolve at the moment of their death.
Only pieces of clothing are left of Eugen's relatives.