The dictionary, street opinion and search engine all know what a “crime” is: the chosen, possibly also somewhat searched expression for the violation of a law, a commandment or a regulation.
When the poet and translator Hans Wollschläger calls something "this offense" in a letter dated December 25, 1989 to his "friend and teacher" Michael Schneider, indicating a feeling of guilt that rumbles within him because he has left the household of his recently deceased mother one might think: that's how language lovers write, quickly at hand with a pathos that exaggerates an everyday sadness to the point of sin.
Dietmar Dath
Editor in the Feuilleton.
Follow I follow
But Wollschläger uses a double meaning, where he, as a son, who sells the inheritance instead of keeping it, becomes unfaithful to it and sighs that one must accept "this offense as well as one's own in the past".
Passing away means here: disappearing, also from memory.
What is meant is therefore the greatest threat to all conceivable values of writing, which not only chooses new or rare words for sometimes familiar, sometimes surprising sensations and ideas, but also makes unfamiliar ones out of familiar ones, so that one pays attention and does not forget what one is reading.
A writer's letters are primarily printed when one suspects the existence of an audience that expects these private writings to provide a key to the author's already public ones.
Hans Wollschläger wrote only one novel, "Herzgewächse oder der Fall Adams";
the manuscript wandered through the editorships for a long time and finally appeared in 1988. In 1994 he wrote in a letter that he called the text "my central book", which "the other books (including the future ones) only encircle like satellites".
It tells the story of the thinker Michael Adams, who was driven out of Germany by Hitler's rule, who returned to Bamberg from exile in 1945 and there became Doctor Faustus in a pact with the devil that wanted to draw him into a publishing business.
Criticism and literary history usually measure "Herzgewächse" against the work of Wollschläger's teacher and idol Arno Schmidt.
Anyone who only sees the influence that is reflected in Wollschläger's central fiction easily overlooks the fact that an epigone who carries on a gesture, a way of speaking, perhaps wants something completely different from the innovator whom he follows by adapting his language to his own (because that's what Wollschläger did: it sounds really completely different, just similarly decidedly unfamiliar), namely not dissolving the gesture of the distinctive turns and embossing that moved him himself as a special legacy, but preserving it, but bundling it up again where necessary or something else fan out.
When he was not writing but reading, Wollschläger was often worried that the literary, business and everyday language surrounding him was becoming increasingly jittery, paler, stupid and “without a trace” (Wollschläger to Marcel Reich-Ranicki 1993).
The internet lavishly throws around evidence that this fear was justified, one should share the words, not file them, so their purpose is very different from Wollschläger's intention, as explained in a self-explanatory letter, "to build a soul sphere out of words , in which love for the object can unfold, sympathy, knowledge, and those words that can no longer be written begin to resonate, in which the object itself speaks endlessly".
All his activities wanted to correspond to this intention, as translator of Joyce and Chandler, as editor of the misunderstood,
His correspondence with Arno Schmidt, published in 2018, already shows this outline, although it is more about the narrowly defined objects of common interest than about one of the two in silhouette, i.e. May, Edgar Allan Poe, the difficulties with the publishers.
A second volume of letters, with texts exclusively by Wollschläger from the years 1988 to 2007 (the end mark thus marks Wollschläger's year of death), has now been published by Wallstein and, in addition to the described active side of the letter writer, working for a literary ideal, also shows his efforts to To keep the horrors of literary life at bay, as a defense, as he writes, "of a small state that must not mess with the great powers".
Letters as a paratext, as an accessory to a work that, apart from the central text, never really took shape, while said accessory was carefully designed by Wollschläger as recognizable as only the accessory of a colleague, Heiner Müller, who was fundamentally different from him in every respect in the period in question , whose twelve-volume work edition alone contains three volumes of "Conversations".
There is just that, the type of the writer who is forced to talk about what will never be finished, the main thing, so that ramparts and walls made of additional material protect and support it, this main thing, from and against the offense.