Lutz Seiler’s novel “kruso”: In the league of the enlightened – Tagesspiegel

09/06/2014 15:40 clock by Steffen Richter

Lutz Seiler in his great novel “kruso” of an unusual friendship Hiddensee – shortly before the end of the GDR.

Islands are unlikely structure. When entering an island, has lost the solid ground under their feet – Island of reality wavers. One of the most unlikely Islands but is likely to be Hiddensee. Hiddensee – hidden in the lake? Concealment in the extreme north of the GDR, an area of ​​total surveillance? With this unlikely place, the German Democratic mythology linked the radical form of Aussteigertums that within the limits between the Elbe and the Oder was possible. After Hiddensee, spared from traffic and dropped out of civilization, they drove in life crises, for contemplation and self-discovery. And to write poems – or at least to read that

this meant Hiddensee. Poetry as a way of life

Lutz Seiler has made this unlikely place the scene of a great novel.. Huge spaces of association be opened because: In addition to the topos of the Insular and the political and historical GDR baggage that drags exactly this island with it, calling the title “kruso” not only the entire Subgattung of Robinson Crusoe with shipwreck, utopia and religion, but Adventure readings of Defoe over Stevenson to Jack London. In addition, here is a Bildungsroman expires, negotiated the various forms of freedom and means to self-determination.

Edgar Bendler-, Seiler’s protagonist and perspective character escapes in the early summer of 1989 from a life him about a construction worker teaching and so mandatory had performed as disastrous army time to Germanic studies to Halle. The accidental death of his girlfriend was a trigger, you can learn later. The world of coal stoves and ash boxes he left behind when he first appeared on the Berlin Ostbahnhof, a transit area par excellence. His work on the poet Georg Trakl has Ed indeed left in hall, but the verses are the foundation of his “stocks” of internalized literature that pushes repeatedly between their own words.

Gasthof “Klausner “, behind which only the Dornbusch lighthouse, the last patch of DDR and the Baltic Sea comes, Ed hires as a dishwasher at, he will force season, a” Esskaa “. Here he met Alexander Krusowitsch. Kruso, black hair on white shirt, is the son of a Russian and a poet, sometimes bush dwellers, then the opposite of a savage. Kruso governor and king of the island, guru and organizer of a “League of Enlightened”. He gathered those who has spit the mainland, which bear a vague longing for an indefinite freedom in itself.