Origin (Botho Strauss)
In origin it is an autobiographical text by the German writer Botho Strauss in the year, 2014.
content
The author remembers his father Eduard Strauss in origin . As a chemist with a doctorate and a licensed pharmacist, he wrote expert opinions for the pharmaceutical industry. What connects both is writing, even if in the case of the father not that of literature. Other memories are those of childhood in the small town of Ems an der Lahn, the school days, but also the beginnings in the theater. The only dating in the text describes the occasion and time of the memory , the father's centenary birthday on April 9, 1990, the day on which the parental home is closed.
The texts, organized in two parts and overall in shorter paragraphs, also reflect the operations of this memory, its compression, which paradoxically manifests itself in blackouts and holes: “Black holes in memory are in truth not gaps, but areas of its highest mass compression. All external matter rushes inside, rushes out of sober time. ”This physical comparison is reminiscent of Strauss' essay Beginness , as its side piece Origin can be read. In the end it becomes clear that the memory needs a tangible materiality, because it is the father’s notes that remain and a stone that served him as a paperweight . Ultimately, this stone preserves the possibility of memory.
expenditure
- Botho Strauss: Origin . Carl Hanser, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-446-24676-8 .
- Botho Strauss: Origin . Read by Burghart Klaußner . Audiobook Hamburg, Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-89903-920-7 .
Web links
- Helga Arend: The return of the author. The poet Botho Strauss writes about his homeland and his "origin". In: Literaturkritik.de . November 2014, accessed June 3, 2020 .