A village is to be demolished, there are no longer any residents who offer resistance.

Only in a ruin lies a man in the agony between life and death, one who cannot die, as the saying goes, tearing scraps of wallpaper from the wall with his left hand in order to scribble on them with his right hand.

What he writes is illegible for others, but the onlookers from the area, who keep invading the abandoned village, know about the scraps: "Anyone who picks them up is lost."

Tilman Spreckelsen

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Reinhard Jirgl's novel "Hundsnächte", published by Hanser in 1997, is set on the former death strip between East and West Germany, whose history is to be made invisible with a cycle path planned here.

The last obstacle is the undead, who tells his story without thinking about the recipient, but who pulls the environment around.

In any case, a member of the demolition brigade who approaches the ruins of the writer is transformed after just a brief glance inside.

The novel develops into a proliferating tangle of interconnected stories set against the backdrop of the recent past, as if to undo what the demolition brigades are trying to plunder.

The fact that texts are resistant, that they can develop a life of their own, is inscribed in Jirgl's work.

The author, who was born in East Berlin in 1953, says he sometimes has to intervene in order to finish his novels at some point.

But that is only half the truth.

Because novels like “Farewell to the Enemies”, “The Atlantic Wall” or most recently “The fire above, the mountain below” are not only characterized by a high level of musicality, but also by discipline in the search for the right expression for the intended Representation on the lexical as well as the orthographic level.

He allows his characters dignity and mystery

In a text from 2002 about Arno Schmidt's novel "Die Umsiedler", Jirgl draws parallels between Schmidt and his time to his own person and the present: "After every historical upheaval", it says, "whether war or 'reunification', conventionalism triumphs .

In it, language is used solely for communication;

Anything expressive, creative in language that refers to an autonomous ego is to be rejected.

No wonder that Arno Schmidt's completely new forms of prose were misjudged as mannered and pessimistic, slandered as elitist and pornographic.” Much of this can be transferred to Jirgl's texts and their reception, including what the essay about Schmidt omits: The great admiration of a Part of the reading public especially for Schmidt's language and that of his interpreter.

This admiration applies to great novels such as "The Unfinished" (2003), which describes in sadness and anger the consequences of being expelled from their homeland for a Sudeten German family, or the novel "Oben das Feuer, unten der Berg" about coming together of the actually ideologically conflicting powerful over the heads of the ruled.

The author isn't afraid to expose the shabbiest sides of many characters, but he doesn't completely expose them, instead leaving them dignity and mystery, precisely as he likes to let the narrative point of view wander seamlessly through them and on.

It would be unexpected luck

Jirgl, who lived with his grandmother in Salzwedel, close to the zone border, until 1964, then grew up in East Berlin, studied electronics and finally worked as a technician at the Volksbühne.

He was not allowed to publish in the GDR, his debut appeared in 1990. The author, who does not make it easy for his readers and then rewards them richly, who likes to emphasize in conversations his marginality within the literary scene and the desire to be left alone praised by critics and awarded important prizes by juries - including the Büchner Prize, which he received in 2010.

In his acceptance speech, he spoke of the award as "an indication that what I have written so far has not been in vain".

Seven years later, nothing was left of this trust in an understanding readership.

It's hard to imagine that he doesn't write anymore.

In 2019 he reported back briefly: his archive and his manuscripts went to the literature archive in Marbach.

It would be unexpected luck if new texts from there eventually found their way into the public domain.

Reinhard Jirgl celebrates his seventieth birthday this Monday.