German Book Prize for Frank Witzel: The old Federal Republic as asylum – SPIEGEL ONLINE

The jury could make it easily and can award Jenny Erpenbeck’s refugee novel, which is thematically, the book of the hour. But if she has not. She has done the complete opposite and “The Invention of the Red Army Faction by a manic-depressive teenager in the summer of 1969″ awarded the German Book Prize -. And therefore named the most unusual and demanding winning novel in the history of this prestigious prize

Seriously nobody had previously brought to the narrator Frank Witzel, who had previously published a few books in the left Hamburger Nautilus Publishing and then for many years worked on this monumental work, in which the literary often very fertile trait of artistic megalomania has coagulated into a wild Text convolute , With a frightened boy as a hero who seeks to escape the confines of his origins curiously using threatening bipolar division of the world: here the West, authoritarian structures and Nazi functionaries infected; there the GDR department store arsonists and the terrorist guerrillas.

A history of mentalities West Germany

In the narrative with an enormous effort, which hardly ever arises a linear’ll discuss action river, historical panorama produced a mentality history of West Germany told that recalls that here was followed by the first decades of a young country on the bösestmögliche era. The Moder is still there, and as a collective unconscious, he settles in the mind of an adolescent, because there is no discontinuity of experience. No thing is simply done that way.

Witzel describes in “The Invention of the Red Army Faction by a manic-depressive teenager in the summer of 1969″ the old West Germany as asylum and reflected in her adolescence problems of his hero, who the father is suffering, unhappy loves who opens stoned in Sängerheim in Wiesbaden-Biebrich, and then to the sanatorium must – but the gloom may flee mainly to imaginary acts of violence and the Beatles.

A Rebel Yell, the acting out in his own way the disastrous conflicts between generations and worldviews. In meandering dialogues that leads his later adult-I with an unspecified imported investigators, the extremely self-Tribunal many leftists who own Verblasenheiten had to admit to himself and suffered from loss of pain. Witzel “invention” is a bad trip, his hero a distant relative Bernward Vesper, whose novel essay “The Trip” as ciphertext red seventies applies.

An important historical document

Tell us something new about the book Witzel RAF terrorist? Certainly not. But as a contemporary witness, it is just as valuable as Lutz Seiler dropouts novel “kruso” which illuminated the final years of the GDR. In Witzel Roman would not have all the philosophical treatises hand; here and there from somewhere tending digressions, however, outweighed by the sparkling imagery.

The jury’s verdict is a clear message. Do not surf on the wave of the zeitgeist and resisted the temptation to measure the relevance of literature primarily by content standards. She opted for a artfully arranged, truly literary novel that re-installs the literature as a sphere with the challenge of language complexes and yes, even the hardships.

Another winning title would have been safe for the masses. In this category, the jury has not even admitted. We must and we should praise them for it.