Reinhard Jirgl

Mutter Vater Roman is Reinhard Jirgl’s first published novel, and in a way it also is one of his more recent ones. The author gives a sketch of the convoluted publication history in an afterword: After several years or working on it, the novel was shelved by GDR authorities for not conforming to the Marxist view of history (hardly a surprise to anyone who has read more than ten pages of anything by this author); it was finally published during the final year of the GDR, but without any publicity and with a tiny number of copies which soon disappeared without a trace (and today are sold for astronomical sums). The novel I have read and am writing about here is the re-issue from 2012 which was revised by the author – a revision which is only mentioned in the book’s imprint and not in Jirgl’s afterword, so that there is no way to tell how far those revisions intruded on the original version.

This version of Mutter Vater Roman, then, is not the original, but the original as viewed through the lens of the matured author, a strange bastard of uncertain parenthood and as such it touches on some central thematic concerns of the novel – as if the publishing history had become part of the novel itself, reality folded into fiction, or maybe fiction prescribing reality. Which, judging from the two novels by him I have read so far, seems to be a motif which also pops up quite frequently with this author who certainly deserves to be counted among Germany’s foremost postmodern novelists.

Whatever revisions Reinhard Jirgl might have made, he did not attempt to erase the traces of Mutter Vater Roman being an early effort – most noticeably, the reader will find hardly any trace of the idiosyncratic orthography which is usually the first thing anyone notices about this author. In general, this novel seems less refined, much more raw than Jirgl’s later efforts (well, the one of them which I have read so far), which is not always a bad thing – while the way Jirgl treats his shifting narrative viewpoints here does appear somewhat awkward compared to the mind-boggling complexities of Abschied von den Feinden, the prose here is even closer to the language of German expressionism than in the late novel, and a richness of imagery surpassing that of the later novel, and which may be undisciplined and unruly but is also intense and powerful in its impact on the reader. And finally, maybe most surprising of at – there are actual traces of humour in Mutter Vater Roman. Admitted, it is of the grim satire variety and not what anyone would call cheerful, but still worth remarking upon considering how far removed from anything comical Abschied von den Feinden is.

This, on the other hand, is something that has not changed from the earlier to the later novel, and is maybe even more of a hallmark of Reinhard Jirgl’s writing than the orthography – its relentless negativity, its unremitting bleakness which elevates misanthropy to an entirely new level, a level all Jirgl’s own. Jirgl’s world is in the state of permanent doomsday, no matter whether he is writing about the end of Nazi Germany and the first years of the German Democratic Republic or whether he goes back several centuries to the time of the Thirty Years War – his excursions into the past are not really historical because underneath his apocalyptic gaze there has been no change at all between then and now. This is of course emphatically not how Marxists view history, so Jirgl can’t have been surprised when GDR censors refused to publish his novels. But it’s also not a world view which would sit comfortable with late Capitalism, which shares at least that much with Communism that both assume things to be steadily improving, history moving towards a goal of commonly shared happiness. In Jirgl, there is no promise of happiness that is not almost instantly destroyed, perverted or used to oppress the people it was supposed to make happy – no man-created system will be able to raise man above his own infamy and his drive towards self-destruction.

But Mutter Vater Roman is a novel, not a treatise, which takes us once again back to the language as the reason for why it succeeds as a novel, and succeeds so admirably. One hesitates to call a writing beautiful that finds nothing but destruction and decay wherever it directs its gaze, that burrows into phenomena, digging deeper and deeper, throwing up fragments of images and parts of metaphors, until it uncovers the violence at the heart of things, then drags it out, still quivering and bleeding, to hold it forth in a gruesome display, accompanied by continuous maniacal cackling. But it is writing that has an impact, even if that impact consists of leaving the reader as if he had been put through a wringer, reeling and panting – reading Mutter Vater Roman is not (like all of Reinhard Jirgl’s novels) a pleasant experience, but an experience it is, and one which might furnish the reader with a richer, more nuanced and refined sensorium for what is wrong with this world.… (altro)

On first sight, Abschied von den Feinden reads like a collaboration between Arno Schmidt and Wolfgang Hilbig - from the former, it takes the idiosyncratic orthography, where numbers replace the indefinite article and ampersands replace the “und”, from the latter it takes the intense and poetic descriptions of East Germany as a kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland, a vast desolation only broken up by the occasional broken ruin, and from both it takes the strong influence of German expressionist writing and the relentless will not to make any compromises to its artistic vision by bowing to the clay-footed idol of Accessibility.

This probably makes Jirgl sound more derivative than he is, but altough he never attempts to hide his influences, but to the contrary places himself firmly in a tradition of German experimental novelists, he does contribute something unique to that tradition himself, a very distinct voice – which has garnered him a lot of critical acclaim (most notably so far, the Georg Büchner prize – Germany’s most important literary award - in 2010) and almost complete indifference from the wider reading audience (it might not be the most precise indicator but surely it has some significance that on Goodreads his eleven novels do not have a single review at the time that I am writing this and only 32 ratings between them).

One thing that is very characteristic for Jirgl’s oeuvre is his unremitting bleakness – his novels are even more depressing than those of Hilbig (whose characters tend to have at least some human warmth to cling to), sometimes (another comparison!) Jirgl’s novels in their continued doom and gloom are almost reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, just in German and more avant-garde. More importantly, however, Jirgl does things with narrative structure and the narrator you’ll find neither in Schmidt or Hilbig. The former, like most classical Modernists is really a realist at heart and his formal experiments mainly try to achieve a better literary grasp on reality – as a result his narrators are usual firmly grounded and very certain of their identity (as is the reader). Things shift somewhat with Hilbig, whose characters have to grapple with a reality-deforming totalitarian system, and as a result in his novels, “official” reality always threatens to usurp perceived reality, and his characters suffer from the rift between what the regime tells them they should be and what they feel they are (a rift that they very often attempt to close by excessive consumption of alcohol).

What happens in the novels of Reinhard Jirgl, however, is – a result, one assumes of a postmodern esthetic as well as the total derailment of any firm concept of subject and individuality by both the final stages of East German communism and latter day West German capitalism – that the narrator loses all fixed mooring points and that trying to pinpoint him down is to enter a mirror cabinet of endless reflections where any certitude slips away behind just the next corner. Abschied von den Feinden, that much at least one can state with some confidence, is the story of two brothers who grew up with foster parents in East Germany after their father fled to West Germany and their mother was placed (much against her will) in an insane asylum. The older brother had an affair (one hesitates to say that love had anything to do with it) with a woman, leaving her behind when he, too, escaped the GDR. After which, the younger brother develops an obsession (one hesitates even more to call this love) for the same woman. Things don’t end well. That’s not much of a plot, but it does give the reader some basic narrative to hold on to – or rather, to piece together to hold on to, because Jirgl does not tell his story chronologically but scuttles back and forth between past and present, weaving a complex pattern of a tale that covers several decades of (mostly East-) German history.

While the pure plot, such as it is, is relatively easy to figure out, things get considerably more complicated where the precise nature of the novels’ narrators is concerned, and Jirgl does his best to draw the reader into a series of mirroring labyrinthine intricacies where it is pretty much impossible not to lose one’s way. It is clear that the story is told by one of the brothers, but it never becomes quite clear whether it’s the older or the younger one. It also is clear that the narrating brother does not narrate the story in his own voice, but it remains impenetrable whether one brother assuming the voice of the second brother, or whether one brother is assuming the voice of the second brother assuming the voice of the other, first brother. In other words, the reader never gets to find out whether the older brother is narrating in the voice of the younger brother, or whether the younger brother is narrating in the voice of the older brother using the voice of the younger brother. Or maybe vice versa. Or (you probably guessed it by now) possibly all of the above. And as if that was not enough to make any reader go dizzy, there is also another narrator – a collective “we”, the voice of the inhabitants of the East-German village where the brothers grew up (and where several strands of the narrative are threaded together again). And they seem to be telling their story to one of the brothers – again, impossible to tell which one as he apparently fell off a cliff and now has his whole face bandaged (and seems to be temporarily blind, too).

It’s almost a bit too much, and with the novel’s almost total lack of humour, Abschied von den Feinden runs a continual risk of becoming involuntarily funny. But even though it sometimes appears as if the balls might be slipping his grasp, Jirgl does manage to pull off his literary juggling act. There also is a lot of allegorical potential in the relationship between the two brothers (something the novel’s title alludes to as well, I think), which could have easily become very heavy-handed and reduced all the carefully constructed ambivalence into a fable about East and West German relationships – and again, Jirgl manages to strike just the right balance, to keep the allegorical sub-text alive and present without letting it overwhelm and swallow the narrative. Abschied von den Feinden, then, is by no means a pleasant read, but it is an electrifying one, gripping the reader who might not want to be gripped at all. This is in no small part due to Reinhard Jirgl’s writing, which in the end is the novel’s most remarkable and outstanding feature – even while what he describes is always desolate and often disgusting, his landscapes bleak beyond hope, his characters either violent or numbed, cruel or apathetic, he describes his dark vistas with such unrelenting vividness that it is almost impossible to avert one’s eyes, and readers who follow Jirgl’s panoramic desolation will find themselves haunted by its after-images for a long time afterwards.… (altro)