Magical mystery
Magical Mystery or: The Return of Karl Schmidt is a novel by Sven Regener . It was published by Galiani Verlag in 2013 . The protagonist Karl Schmidt already appeared as a minor character in Regener's Lehmann novels.
action
Karl Schmidt, known as Charlie, spent the 1980s as an artist in West Berlin. Due to mental disorders and massive alcohol and drug consumption, he came to a psychiatric clinic on the day the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and later to a supervised shared apartment for drug addicts in Hamburg.
Five years later he happened to meet Raimund Schulte, a friend and former bandmate from Berlin, who, together with Ferdi, another ex-bandmate, has now made money through a techno record label. He offers Karl to work as a bus driver and tour manager on a joint tour of the DJs from his label Bumm Bumm Records - so that someone is there who definitely has to stay sober. Up until then Charlie was working as an assistant caretaker in a children's home and was about to take a four-week vacation in a convalescent home. With his roommates and his supervisor Werner, he pretends to be on vacation and instead goes to Berlin, from where he starts his touring job. During the tour, Charlie and the DJane Rosa develop a relationship. This seduces him to have sex, but does not want to get involved in a steady relationship with him.
The tour is characterized by bad planning and incidents. Charlie always has to help others out of difficult situations and also has to struggle with paranoia and the constant temptation of the ubiquitous drugs. Ultimately, Charlie decides not to return to the shared flat in Hamburg, but to rearrange his life in Berlin.
style
The novel consists of four parts, entitled "Altona", "Mitte", "Magical Mystery" and "Springtime". These in turn are divided into a total of 79 chapters.
Charlie is the first-person narrator of the novel. The plot is rendered very straightforward; the prehistory is only hinted at. Dialogues are mostly reproduced in direct speech , so that the characters can be clearly characterized by their linguistic style. The comedy of the book often emerges from these dialogues.
The author plays with the reader's expectation or hope that Frank Lehmann, the protagonist of his first three novels, will appear. Frank was Charlie's best friend and he remembers him several times. At the last concert of the tour he learns that Frank is also present, but misses the meeting with him, so that although Frank is talked about, he does not appear as the actual character in the plot of the novel.
filming
The novel was filmed in 2017 under the direction of Arne Feldhusen . The cinema premiere was on August 31, 2017.
literature
- Sven Regener: Magical Mystery or: The Return of Karl Schmidt. Kiepenheuer & Witsch , Cologne 2014, ISBN 978-3-462-04689-2 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Techno road trip with guinea pigs Film presentation by Walli Müller on August 24, 2017 on NDR. Retrieved October 26, 2017.
- ↑ Magical Mystery or: The return of Karl Schmidt Book Description on the publisher's page. Retrieved October 26, 2017.