Der Kaufmann

A very short story ("The Merchant") by this German-language writer. You can read the original here.

It is possible that some will sympathize with my plight, yet such is not my feeling. My small business so fills me with worry and concern that my temples and forehead ache. I do not even have the satisfaction of believing that this will improve, for my business is truly small. For hours in advance I am obliged to meet certain stipulations, possess a butler's memory, avoid terrible mistakes, and in one season calculate the fashions and tastes of the subsequent season. These are not, mind you, the tastes that would predominate among people like me, but among those inaccessible populations of the countryside.  

My money is in the possession of strangers; I might not know the true state of their financial affairs; and I cannot know the misfortune which could befall these people. How then could I defend them from it! Perhaps they have all become spendthrifts, regaling themselves at a party in a beer garden, whilst others, on their way to absconding to America, stop in for a short time.

Every workday evening now, when my shop is locked up, before my eyes flash hours during which I will not be able to see to my business's continuous demands. The very next morning, however, this anticipatory excitement dissipates like the receding tide. Yet it does not die out entirely and, without explicit purpose, takes part of me along with it.  

And yet such a mood does me no good. As my face and my hands are dirty and sweaty and my clothes stained and dusty, as my work cap sits on my head and my boots are scratched up by crate nails, I can only go home. And home I go as if atop a wave, the fingers of both hands clacking, and I glide on the hairy heads of children coming my way.

Yet the way home is short. I am almost immediately in my building. I open the elevator door and step inside.

Now I see suddenly that I am alone. Others forced to take the stairs grow somewhat tired and have to wait, their lungs pumping rapidly, until someone opens an apartment door for them. It is these people who have cause for annoyance and impatience. They come now into the hallway, where they hang up their hats, and only once they have crossed through their own glass doors and reached their own rooms are they truly alone.

I, however, am immediately alone here in the elevator. Bracing myself on my knees, I peer at the narrow mirror. As the elevator begins to lift itself upwards, I say:

"Be still, step back! Do you wish to go into the shadow of the trees, behind the window drapes, into the bower?"

I speak through my teeth and the landings glide by the frosted glass panes like tumbling water.

"Fly away. Your wings, which I have never seen, might take you to some provincial valley or to Paris, if it is thither that you so desire.

"Yet enjoy the vista from your windows as, from all three streets, the processions emerge. None will yield or give way to the others; all three will intersect and interweave; and, as you glimpse their final rows separating, so again shall you see empty space. Wave with your towels, be appalled, be touched, admire and laud the beautiful lady coming by.

"Go over the stream on those wooden bridges, nod to the bathing children, and revel in the hurrah of the thousand sailors on the distant ironclad.

"Pursue only the inconspicuous man, and once you have shoved him into a gateway, rob him, and then look back, each of you with your hands in your pockets, and behold how he sadly resumes his path into the alley on the left. 

"Spread atop their horses, the mounted police restrain the beasts and drive you back. Let those who would, I know, venture down empty alleys make those alleys unlucky. May they, I say, ride off slowly over the street corners and fly over the squares."     

Now I have to get out, leave the elevator, and ring the doorbell, and the girl opens the doors as I greet her.

Antiguas literaturas germánicas

Given the ingenuity and thoroughness of Northern European philologists, it seems odd that anyone might consider a Spanish study of ancient Germanic texts to be a relevant groundswell of information – but then again not every book is authored by this Argentine. The imagination and style necessary for great fiction comprise the acme of literary artistic talent. So it is a great pleasure when such a mind does us the favor of expressing his or her views on the content and history of texts often reserved for more obscure interpreters. If you are familiar with Borges’s oeuvre, you are aware that his learning is not only breathtaking, it is systematic, a fortress built on a million precisely positioned bricks that render the whole formidable, impenetrable and, with the exception of this poet, unparalleled in the history of modern letters. To create a story, or poem, or essay, one of these bricks is taken and examined as closely as one can without letting it slip into the woeful chasm of triviality. This one brick then reminds its builder of other bricks, some of which may sit next to the one he is examining, others of which might be located on the farthest end of his battlements. But only one base is required to build his structures, one beach-found pebble, one flickering amidst the “heaventree of stars” (a metaphor proposed in this novel) to re-imagine an entire realm of gods, of giants, of dwarfs, and their interaction with us mere humans. And the brick for this book is a runic drawing of something that terrified generations of coastal dwellers, a Viking longship.

We begin with ancient Britain and conclude with ancient Germany, but in between we find the richest of all long-gone Germanic traditions: the Scandinavian. Students of that beautiful incantation, Old Norse, will not only be quick to point out that modern Icelandic is this tongue’s direct and close descendant, they will also invoke the primacy of this tradition as the most remarkable in Europe at the time. Now, as much as I am captivated by Norse mythology and most things Nordic, we must be fair in stating that Greek and Latin mythology, reinforced by the Christian credos that were spreading at the time of the composition of some of these epics, were primary sources for their structure, and to a lesser degree, their content. This notwithstanding, Borges reiterates one facet of this literary development that makes it unique:

In Iceland, the new Christian faith was not hostile to the old. In contrast to what occurred in Norway, Sweden, Germany, England, and Denmark, conversions here were bloodless. Those Norwegians who had settled in Iceland displayed the religious indifference of aristocrats; their descendants looked back upon the pagan faith with nostalgia, just like other old things lost over time. What happened to Germanic mythology was exactly what had happened earlier to the myths of the Greeks: no one believed in them anymore, but a firm knowledge of their stories was indispensable for learned persons.

There are other reasons for the survival of Norse traditions that in some countries have now been transformed into modern paganism, and no reason is more significant than the gods’ mortality. You will have heard about Ragnarök (Götterdämmerung in the Wagnerian cycle), which is traditionally rendered as “twilight of the Gods,” a German mistranslation akin to what Herder did with ellerkonge. Scholars of Scandinavian languages will tell you, however, that it really means the “fate of those who reign,” which could be gods, or lords, or run-of-the-Althing despots. It is this eschatological feature that separates the Norse tradition from the Greek and Latin, and makes it more palatable to the martyrdom of Christianity in which a God, only one in this case, knows his end in his beginning.

That Antiguas literaturas germánicas is primarily designed as a survey for Spanish speakers of a hitherto little-researched field for Latin Americans is a correct supposition. But Borges could not possibly have written something simply for pragmatic purposes.  We must consider, therefore, the investigation’s poetic value, and most relevant to his works are the kennings, the famed Scandinavian metaphors with which Borges is more than a little enamored, and which he lists with relish in the middle of his work. Among many others, he includes: “the battle ice,” “the wrath stick,” “the helmets’ fire,” “the helmets’ rodent,” “the blood branch,” “the wolf of wounds” (for “sword”); “the whale roof,” “the swan land,” “the waves’ path,” “the Viking field,” “the gulls’ meadow,” “the whale path,” “the islands’ chain” (for “sea”); and “the ravens’ delight,” “the raven beak’s reddener,” “the eagle gladdener,” “the helmet tree,” “the sword tree,” and “the swords’ dyer” (for “warrior”). Here was an endless font of poetry for a bilingual English-Spanish speaker who many feel wrote with a surfeit of adjectives placed before nouns.  Borges, his vision fading, slowly became so taken by these sagas that he began to believe they had all actually happened. He even confessed in an interview that, while he might not be a Christian in the strict sense of the word, he “believed in the Norse gods,” a response that did not surprise the interviewer and should not surprise us. The advent of Christianity did change something in the tone of these sagas. As Borges laments:

The saga, like all novelistic works, is nourished on the richness and complexity of its characters. The new faith resulted in banning this disinterested contemplation and shoved it out in favor of a dualistic world of virtues and vices, of punishments for some and rewards for others …. From these awful syntactical equivalences …. it should be noted that the movement from a ‘storm of arrows’ [for ‘battle’] to a ‘firebrand of a storm of arrows’ comprises the degeneration of the poetry of Iceland.

Thus the violent and mystic images of the Vikings, above all for kinship and military terms, were replaced by the black-and-white simplicity of good versus evil. But much more than that, a whole world was submerged beneath frozen waters for the good of mankind, which had the remarkable foresight not to forget about it. Perhaps, for this reason, you will be stunned at the coherence of such an endeavor, of the revivification of the invaders, their hymns and dirges, their macabre prophecies and sayings. And in the end, through several centuries of asides and esoteric learning, we picture quite clearly Bede, Snorri Sturluson, and Otfried of Weissenburg under one bright Northern sky. That is, a “cloud house and the sister of the moon.”

Das Parfum

Many years ago an acquaintance with a cultivated taste for strong drinks recommended that I read this famous work, particularly effective, he insisted, after several of those concoctions. He also hyped the book as "mind-blowing" (likely betraying one of his own habits), but we are drifting far from our cove. In point of fact, Das Parfum had long been known to me; yet I had never bothered to move past my standard bookstore leaf-through because the story smacked far too much of that frightful misnomer called magical realism. You will hear about it if you are ever unfortunate enough to attend one of those catchy courses on world literature invariably taught by some hipster mediocrity who loves talking up colonialism, relativism, and other impish idolatries, and if you go in for that sort of stuff, there's little that can be done to help you. To be frank, there is nothing magical or real about these works. They are fairy tales, true enough; but instead of revelling in the childish wonder that allows a fairy tale to operate at once as entertainment and allegory, magical realism quickly devolves into socio-political twaddle. It becomes the triumph of native lore over the cold, hard statistics being compiled by the cold, hard conquerors, often understood, in turn, as the New World in its nativeness and the Old World in its demands. Thankfully, our story unfolds exclusively in Old Europe, if demanding enough to remind us why so many of its inhabitants once sought out another realm.

Our senses will revolve around a small, crooked, and ostensibly effete Frenchman by the name of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a frog in both name and appearance. Grenouille is introduced as are many an anti-hero: by the plight of his orphanhood, the hopelessness of his indigence, and his wretched physical condition of his mortal shape. After harrowing, wicked experiences as a parentless urchin who could barely fend for himself, he labors as a tanner for Grimal (a French homophone for "grey evil"), a man known for working children to death – the newly industrial eighteenth century boasted an unkindness all its own – and he survives simply because we will him to do so. We, his readers, know that he cannot die before he has accomplished what God – a term that when mentioned to him much later on provokes "such a blank look that one would think he had heard the word for the first time" – has determined he must do. He must live on because he has a gift that might seem, in that age antecedent to proper sewer systems and hygiene, particularly overwhelming: an unrivaled sense of smell. And soon he masters "all the odors of Paris," which like any city of that period greatly resembled a cistern of unending filth.   

Grenouille goes along with his plight for the lack of any better options, his indifference to his physical well-being making him almost the ideal galley slave. Soon, however, he learns of another career path, and its discovery is precipitated by fate one festive night:

He was just about to leave the boring fireworks performance to head home along the Galerie du Louvre when the wind brought something to him, something tiny and hardly noticeable, a crumb, an atom of a scent, no, something smaller still: the notion or hint of a scent rather than an actual smell, and yet at the same time it was most certainly the hint of something that he had never smelled before .... For the first time it was not only his greedy character revived by some insult that hurt, but also, as it were, his heart. It seemed strange to him that this scent could be the key to the ordering of all other scents – and if you didn't understand this point, you could not say you understood anything about scents. And he, Grenouille, would have wasted his life if he did not manage to possess it. 

Where that scent leads Grenouille is hardly a secret; but what he does when he finds it, foreshadowing the hideous rituals of the novel's last act, need not be revealed on these pages. The faintest whiff and the slightest possible distinction between odors are as clear to Grenouille as a species of bird to the ornithologist or a book in an endless library to the omnilegent. Since Grenouille is creative, self-serving, and wicked in his devotion to his pursuits, he dreams of what all evil genius dreams: neverending, globe-spanning fame. To attain such an end he secures, with repeated displays of his unearthly talents, an apprenticeship with one of Paris's erstwhile great parfumiers, a bloated bourgeois pig called Baldini. Baldini eases slowly into his Salieri role – one more than suspects that the Italian surnames bespeak a fearful symmetry – with Grenouille's unstoppable genius becoming more a source of income than of envy, and soon Baldini is again the most renowned parfumier in all of Paris. But Grenouille's fame will be different than all other glories ever achieved:

He knew now that he had the power to do more. He knew that he could improve that scent. He knew he would able to create a scent that was not only human but superhuman, the scent of an angel, so indescribably good and life-affirming that he who smelled it became bewitched, and simply had to love him, Grenouille, the bearer of that scent, with all his heart.

The comparison to Mozart ends there, thanks in no small part to Grenouille's self-assessment as, well, "completely and utterly evil" (subsequent events do not in the least deter us from this initial evaluation). It would be enough for a good man with Grenouille's abilities to make the most sensational jasmine, honeysuckle, and lilac perfumes the world could ever know. If money or comfort motivated our crooked friend, that would indeed apply – but some devils have little interest in the currencies of men.

Das Parfum is, very much to Süskind's credit, not the kind of novel ordinarily subsumed by my shelves. Its themes, while not quite commercial, are familiar in that way that pastiches of ideas and galleries of oft-used secondary characters for a few brief, ignorant moments seem fresh (this is a book that could not possibly be filmed, and yet it has been). Apart from our olfactory freak, no one is really accorded much originality, even if their stereotypes are parodic and therefore mostly efficacious. Nevertheless, the work's style and self-confidence remain mystifyingly engrossing, perhaps because as foul as Grenouille is, his passion is to an art to which we, shallow beasts, will always be subject. There are numerous unsettling passages, including the sacrifice of animals (why modern letters is so focused on these slaughters is still a puzzle; perhaps because we are to be tacitly equated to such beasts), but most of the cruelty is implied, most of the mayhem offstage, and most of our worries unfounded. Yet in one startling passage towards the culmination of our plot, not our story, something occurs that we somehow sense will not. Moreover, we expect something else to occur – something much more in line with the typical topicality of the magical realism charlatans – and are relieved when it does not take place. And in the end, what does take place? Is the description of that public square as real as it seems to old Grenouille? As real, I suppose, as those Parisian catacombs. 

Short Speech of a Landless Journeyman

The following speech against German reunification was given by this late author on February 2, 1990. “Landless journeymen” (Vaterlandslose Gesellen, usually as a plural) was one of the ways in which the last Kaiser would refer to anyone of the political left, as well as a general term for cosmopolitan businessmen who fancy personal profit over their country’s needs.  The speech is included in this book.

As I was coming from Göttingen shortly before Christmas, and just as I had wanted to change trains to Lübeck at Hamburg’s central train station, a young man came up to me. He stopped me dead in my tracks, called me a traitor, and left me with this word echoing. Then, after I had casually purchased a newspaper, he came up to me again, now not with mild threats but openly proclaiming that the time had come to get rid of people like me. I shook off this annoyance while still on the platform and proceeded to Lübeck wrapped in my thoughts. “Traitor!” A word that, coupled with “landless journeyman,” was truly part of German history. Was the truculent young man not right after all? Can a fatherland for whose benefit one is to get rid of people like myself not remain something stolen from me? This is indeed the case. Not only do I fear a simplified Germany as the composite of two Germanys, I also reject a unified state and would be relieved – be it owing to German prudence or to the objection of our neighbors – if it never came to pass.

Of course, I am well aware that my stance currently unleashes debate if not aggression, which doesn’t only make me think of the young man at Hamburg’s central train station. Much subtler and tidier work is being done by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung with those people who categorically refer to themselves as left-wing intellectuals. It is not enough for their editors that communism is bankrupt; democratic socialism, including Dubček’s dream of socialism with a human face, is also finished. One thing that capitalists and communists have always had in common is the preventive condemnation of a Third Way. That’s why any reference to the now-contested autonomy of the GDR and its citizens is immediately greeted with emigration and resettlement figures. The self-confidence that they developed despite suffering under oppression for forty years, and which ultimately became revolutionary, is now written in fine print. So we are supposed to get the impression that in Leipzig and Dresden, in Rostock and East Berlin, it is not the people of the GDR who have triumphed but the whole gamut of Western capitalism. And the pillaging has already begun. Hardly had one ideology lost its hold before another ideology stepped in as if it had always been there. If necessary, market economy instruments of torture are flashed. Who doesn’t feel it gets nothing. Not even bananas.

No, I do not want an improper, crowing, attack-battened fatherland like that, even if nothing is at my disposal to ward off mockery apart from my own thoughts. I already fear that reunification, regardless of what name it chooses to camouflage itself, is inevitable. The strong Deutschmark will see to that; the mountainous printed editions of Springer’s media empire, now in collaboration with Rudolf Augstein’s Monday morning meanderings, will see to that; and German forgetfulness will see to that. In the end, we’ll number about eighty million. Once again we will be one, we will be strong. And even when we try to speak softly, we will be heard in the loudest tones. Finally, because enough is never enough, we will manage with our tough Deutschmark and recognition of Poland’s western border to subjugate economically a good chunk of Silesia, a good chunk of Pomerania, and, in textbook German fashion, once again isolate ourselves and strike fear in the hearts of others. I am already betraying this fatherland. My fatherland would have to be more varied, brighter, more neighborly, wiser from the damage done, and much more palatable to Europe.

Nightmare versus dream. What is preventing us from helping the German Democratic Republic and its citizens by means of just and long overdue burden sharing, so that the GDR might strengthen itself economically and democratically and its citizens might make less of an effort to remain at home? Why must the German Federation, whose neighbors could come to accept us, always keep adding titles to its name, from espousing a vague Paulskirche concept as a federal state to assuming the form of a large federal republic? Are comprehensive unity, greater land area, conglomerated economic power then all desired components of growth? Isn’t all this once again too much? Since the mid-1960s, I have given speeches and written essays against reunification and spoken out in favor of a confederation. Here again I will answer the German question. I’ll sum it up in not ten, but five points:

First: A German confederation abolishes the postwar relationship of the two German states as foreign countries. It also removes a worthless border separating Europe while still taking into consideration the concerns and fears of its neighbors by constitutionally doing without the need to reunify the two states.

Second: A confederation of both German states would not do any harm to either postwar German history or the history of either of the two states. In fact, it would enable something new: independent commonality. And a confederation is sufficiently sovereign to meet all federal obligations as well as those of mutual European security.

Third: A confederation of both German states is more suited to the process of European unification than an overweight unified state, all the more since a unified Europe will be a confederation and will have to overcome traditional national statehood.

Fourth: A confederation of both German states starts us on the path to a different and desirably new understanding of ourselves. It bears a collective responsibility to German history as a nation of culture. This understanding of nation was taken up by the failed Paulskirche convention, and is to be seen as an expanded concept of culture joining the variety of German culture without a need to declare German national unity.

And Fifth: A confederation of both German states, as a resolution to a conflict between states of a nation of culture, would give impetus to the worldwide resolution of different yet comparable conflicts, be it in Korea, Ireland, Cyprus, or the Near East, anywhere, in fact, where national state action has set aggressive borders or where it seeks to widen them. Resolution of the German question through confederation could serve as an example.

A few additional comments: the German unified state only existed in its enlarged size for seventy-five years: as a German Reich under Prussian dominion; as the doomed Weimar Republic; and, up until its unconditional surrender, as the Greater German Reich. We should be conscious – our neighbors are quite conscious – of how much suffering this unified state has caused and the level of misfortune it has brought upon itself and others. The genocide that can be made relative in no way and is summarized in the word Auschwitz remains on the conscience of this unified state. Never had Germans, in all their history until that point, fallen into such ill repute. They were neither better nor worse than other peoples. Complex-saturated megalomania did not lead Germans to make use of this opportunity as a nation of culture within a federal state, but to thrust upon themselves with all force the title of unified Reich. This was the early prerequisite for Auschwitz. Latent, as well as common anti-Semitism then became the basis of its power. The German unified state abetted the National Socialist racist ideology by providing a repulsively suitable foundation. Nothing will get past this acknowledgement. Whoever thinks of Germany now and looks for answers to the German question must think of Auschwitz as well. The site of horror as an example for the lingering trauma excludes the possibility of a future unified German state. Should it, as I fear, nevertheless be attempted, it will be doomed to failure from the onset.

More than twenty years ago here in Tutzing the phrase “transformation through rapprochement” was coined; a long since controversial but ultimately verified formula. Rapprochement is now part of everyday politics. The German Democratic Republic was transformed thanks to the revolutionary will of its people; but as its citizens look on – half in admiration, half in condescension – the Federal Republic of Germany has yet to be transformed. “We don’t want,” they say to their Eastern counterparts, “to tell you what to do, but…” And interference is now common. Help, real help will only come under West German conditions. Property sure enough, but please no property of the people. The western ideology of capitalism which seeks to obliterate every other ideological ismus speaks up like a pistol held to the head: either a market economy or…

And who wouldn’t raise his hand here and give in to the blessings of the strong, whose impropriety is so clearly made relative by its success? I fear that we Germans will also turn down a second chance at self-determination. Being a nation of culture with confederated variety is obviously too little for us. And “rapprochement through transformation” is, if only because of its exorbitance, simply asking too much. But the German question cannot be answered in Marks and Pfennigs.

What did the young man at Hamburg’s central train station say? Right he was. As the case may be, I am counted among the landless journeymen.

A Distancing from Prose

An essay (“Entfernung von der Prosa”) on this novel by this German author.  You can find the original in this collection.

Many might think that, owing to his strict upbringing, it would be painful for an author to let go of his figures and personages, to let them "take shape"; yet this is pain I do not feel. On the contrary, as soon as the manuscript printed black on white is left to the imagination of others, I am amazed to see that the stage dimensions render the novel more alien than is normal to an author. Had someone asked me how I would imagine a character from the novel – tall or short, blond or dark – I would not have been able to say; of his nose, his mouth, his clothes I wouldn't have even had the slightest inkling. During stage testing for The Clown, the protagonist Reinbacher appeared once in the guise of Saint-Just from Danton's Death. He was trying out for both plays at the same time, and strangely enough I found the Saint-Just outfit (green jabot, black boots) perfectly suitable for the role; I would have had no objections to letting him play Hans Schnier in such an outfit. As far as I'm concerned he could also appear as a sort of "Hans in clover," although his story hardly ends "in clover." It might even be possible to have all the characters come out all at the same time in costumes from different plays. The Father in a Lessing role, Marie like the Marie from Woyzeck, the Mother as the queen, a lady of the court, a brothel madam, or Mary Magdalene. As far as I'm concerned they could also all come out in street clothes, maybe getting out of a bus, streetcar or automobile. I do not feel like I am their lord and master who has predetermined what they would wear; I can't even be sure of their dialogues. An actor should not have to say those things that "do not roll off the tongue." 

Whatever their director tells them to say is an entirely different matter. I would only interfere when asked or when a fragment of a sentence or monologue simply hurt my sensibilities or, in my judgment, those of the actor because it – as we usually found out in tandem – was no longer correct. When the novel came out seven years ago, its coherence was very different from what it is today. The problems, the subject matter, the constellation of characters, the self-fulfilling process of casting out a human being – all of this has not lost a drachma of relevance; only a handful of political and societal details now differs from how things were in 1962 when the book was composed. The novel took shape as we in the Federal Republic of Germany were still officially and publicly prepared not only to confuse denomination with religion – no, a terror of denomination was carried out that yielded high political costs. Here is neither the right time nor place to question expressly and emphatically the C in CDU/ CSU: the party itself is doing so as we speak – well, at least the first party is. And the time may come when this awkward letter is discarded like that part of a pair of antlers which has been of great service in many a campaign to curry favor with voters.

What is important for me is that many political and societal sidelights still possess some kind of "historical" value in the sense that someone could say: "So that's how it was in 1962" – one hundred and fifty years ago. This historical ballast does not encompass everything and it would not be hard to do without it completely; if it were a picture, one might say it needed to be dusted off a bit. Because of this the problems and subject matter have gained in relevance: the casting out of a human being who, unknown to all parties involved, bears Religion as a form of leprosy in itself. Instead of a guitar he could have had a rattle in his hand and it may have been nothing more than a carnival rattle, which was originally a instrument used to warn and protect, an early version of a bomb siren: careful! Here is a person who has no bacteriological hand grenades with him, but instead a bug that unleashes rules and concepts of social order, mentally and physically.  

One could talk at length about "misunderstandings" and the misunderstandings to which the novel was subjected. I admit that I prefer "misunderstandings" when someone claims to understand something that I myself do not completely "understand." A writer who does not permit any kind of understanding of what he has just spent one hundred pages talking about I consider lost and rather hopeless. It may be that the form "work of art" is dying out; this novel, in my view, did not belong to that traditional category in which a secret formula existed, perhaps something akin to –+––+, which would make it impossible for the author to clarify in black and white what he had just constructed. Nothing is more embarrassing than to be asked how I meant this or that, or how this or that could be taken. I simply do not know; and if I ever knew I have long since forgotten the detail because many of the contexts and intricacies of the novel have escaped me: conversations, expressions, considerations, thoughts, witticisms, perhaps a newspaper article or a word that I heard on the radio or saw on television; an apple hanging from a tree, a bird that I saw sitting on a branch, a song, a couple of sounds, and more conversations. Of course a "work of art" arises within and from such coherence, but also from sudden "ideas," the majority of which are rejected. Yet no one, not even the author, can reconstruct these contexts. They could be fragments from a film (perhaps even quite kitschy at that), or borrowings – I could not say for sure. I would require a very calibrated computer with an enormous array of detection tools if I wished to commit myself to statements on these contexts. 

One context that I do remember and will give away, however, is the occasion of its composition. With some friends I once published a journal called Labyrinth; before having to give up the journal we were embroiled in incessant debates about the "deceptive" aspect of all art concealed in every artist. Naturally, all these discussions led to the myth of the labyrinth itself which we reinterpreted in conversation to make Theseus into Christ and Ariadne into Mary, and the labyrinth the world in which the Minotaur prowled. For sure, these discussions were the occasion for the writing of the novel; they comprised a single detail of the contexts, but certainly the most important; and perhaps the novel was an attempt to continue the journal in another way. With the revelation of such a context a possible interpretation arises that is almost too clear. What is certain is that many people got upset for nothing over the novel because they were not meant at all, they were merely the material for a modern-day labyrinth, foundation stones that although used were ultimately discarded. But here I wish to console the official and organizational representatives of visible German Catholicism: your trouble is not in vain. It is very useful, even for a writer.

I am happy to have had the opportunity to thank my friends with whom I created the Labyrinth: the late Werner von Trott zu Solz, Walter Warnach and HAP Grieshaber. Maybe even they did not notice that something of their work was continued here which in another form had failed.

Seven years later the material and themes are still dear to me, only the nursery in which the seeds were sown has become alien. With the result that I can almost talk about it as if I were an outsider.