Ralf Rothmann

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Ralf Rothmann (2006)

Ralf Rothmann (born May 10, 1953 in Schleswig ) is a German writer . In his novels, stories and poems, a panorama of life from the time of the Second World War to the present day of the Federal Republic of Germany is drawn up. Rothmann has received numerous renowned literary prizes for his work.

life and work

Ralf Rothmann was born in Schleswig in northern Germany and lived on the Fahrenstedt estate near Böklund until he was five . The father, Walter Rothmann, born in Essen, and the mother Elisabeth, born in Isbahn, originally from Konitz near Danzig, worked there as milkers. After the birth of a brother, the family moved to Oberhausen in the Ruhr area, where they were looking for workers in the coal mining industry and where the earning potential was better.

The move from the rural idyll of Schleswig-Holstein to the sooty industrial landscape of the Ruhr area was a shock for the five-year-old (which is also addressed in some of Rothmann's works). The father worked as a coal miner in the Haniel colliery, the mother as a waitress in the train station restaurant. After elementary school and a short visit to the commercial school, Rothmann initially trained as a bricklayer. He worked in construction for a few years and then in various professions, e.g. B. as a cook and driver in a large kitchen and as a nurse in the university hospital in Essen. During this time he began to read intensively and wrote his first poems.  

In 1976 he moved to Berlin, initially to Schöneberg, where he met the first writers and artists in the bohemian and squatter scene around Winterfeldtplatz. While he was exploring the signature of the walled city and financing himself with odd jobs like printer or cook in a bar, the first volume of poetry was created, which was published in 1984 by a small West Berlin publisher. Rothmann also traveled extensively through the USA and South America (Mexico, Peru, Ecuador). He made his debut as a prose author in 1986 with the story Messers Schneide , his first novel was published in 1991. He then lived in Paris for a year. A large part of his work was created during long stays in Greece (Ithaka, Hydra, Thassos, Spetses), but also on the Baltic Sea (Glücksburg, Ahrenshoop, Travemünde). In 1994 Rothmann was writer in residence in Oberlin (Ohio, USA) and in the winter semester 1999/2000 poet in residence at the University of Essen. But Berlin always remained the center of his work. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, which he experienced in Kreuzberg, he moved to the former eastern part of the city, to Friedrichshagen am Müggelsee, and today he lives with his wife, a literary scholar, in the far north, in Berlin-Frohnau.

From the first novels Stier , Wäldernacht , Milch und Kohl and Junge Licht , which were still in the Ruhr area, Rothmann's novels are “autobiographical”, as he says. So it is not intellectual excursions, but personal experiences gained on trips and in various professions that are the reason for his literature. Life in Berlin is also reflected in volumes of short stories and novels like something Flieh mein Freund! , Heat , deer by the sea or fire does not burn . He also sits in the novel Die Frühling von 2015, translated into twenty-five languages ​​and critically compared in its intensity with “Nothing New in the West” by Remarque, and in the subsequent novel Der Gott that Sommers (2018) with the Generation of his parents apart, with their silence and secrecy in the darkest years of German history.

“The biographies of Ralf Rothmann's men agree with his own in many respects. 'My language only has gravity when I speak from my experience,' he says, dispelling any skepticism that you get an idea of ​​this author by talking about his characters. Like his heroes, Ralf Rothmann ran away from home early. Like Carl Karlsen from Stier , he broke off the bricklayer apprenticeship, the Maloche, the conversations about 'normal formats' and 'mixing ratios', gasoline consumption and death grants.
Ralf Rothmann grew up in a time when optimism and belief in progress counted a lot, but also broke up a lot. Like him, his characters come from proletarian, at best from petty bourgeois parents. "

- Susanne Messmer

And Hajo Steinert wrote in the “Literary World” (April 29, 2012): “Hardly any other author of his generation has mastered the narrative art of poetic realism as much as the award-winning Ralf Rothmann. Some readers are waiting for his books as fervently as fans were waiting for their favorite band's new record. "

plant

Ruhr area novels

The Ruhr novels ( Taurus , forests Eight , milk and coal , Young light ) Ralf Rothmann are closely related, not only with respect to time and place of the action. There are returnees who are sent back to the region after a long absence, there is the world of youth gangs and their rule violations and there are the children who grow up in the workers' settlements. Rothmann's storytelling differs significantly from the political writing concepts of the Dortmunder Gruppe 61 or the later work group Literature of the Working World .

“I had no contact whatsoever with people who wrote, although I always wrote for the drawer and longed for this contact. But the only contact that would have been possible would have been with writers from the world of work. But I didn't want to do any work-related literature, nor did I want to deal with it. I wanted to overcome the world of work because I found it to be narrow, oppressive and ultimately also depressing. "

- Ralf Rothmann in an interview with Friday

Rothmann describes the world of the little people on the Ruhr from an outsider position, from the perspective of children, dropouts, and artists. If he describes the working world of miners very knowledgeably, his portrayal quickly takes on a mythical touch. The forest night , the darkness of the forests preserved in the coal, appears more like the mysterious counterworld of the fathers, as their children may have imagined. Rothmann's novels are strongly autobiographical, from the experiences of childhood in the Ruhr as well as from the distance of the freelance author, who again reflects formative events from a distance in Berlin.

“The novels 'Stier', 'Wäldernacht' and 'Milch und Kohl' portray the situation of people between the colliery, the sports field and the chip shop with autobiographical echoes. Rothmann's style is close to life, again and again he takes up the rude and sometimes funny language of the common people. He likes to quote puns from the middle of life. Meticulously describes everyday scenes from the milieus, captures the mood of the 'street'. "

- 3sat : Kulturzeit from May 14, 2003

bull

The theme of the novel is the youth culture of the 1970s in the Ruhr area. With rock music, drugs, wild parties and the first flat shares, a small scene of outsiders is looking for new paths in life. It tells the story of Berlin's Kai Carlsen, his memory of the Ruhr area. In the world of miners' settlements, Kai Carlsen becomes a bricklayer, but at the same time searches for great love, for alternative lifestyles.

With the figure of Eckhart Eberwein, Rothmann is commemorating those who created the first meeting places for subculture on the Ruhr, organized concerts and celebrated wild parties. The former civil engineer runs the Blow up disco in Essen , Kai Carlsen begins to work for him, and eventually even moves in with Eberwein.

The wild scene is getting into ever more severe problems, especially through drugs, and personal catastrophes are looming. Kai Carlsen escapes into a job as a nursing assistant and further qualifies himself there by learning how to use a complex machine for "blood washing". An art-loving Colombian and nurse Marleen help him survive in the world of serious illness and daily death.

Despite all the catastrophes, the rock scene is portrayed as a world that opened up new perspectives for the young Carlsen, as liberation from the dull stench of the parents' generation. In this respect, Taurus is an educational novel . For the narrator Kai Carlsen, the time of the wild 70s represents the longing for a different life and, despite all negative developments, appears as a time of departure.

Forest night

The novel Wäldernacht portrays the Ruhr area from the perspective of the outsider. The artist Jan Marrée returns to his hometown between Bottrop and Oberhausen at the invitation of an art patron. He remembers his youth with rockers, concerts and first love adventures. He meets the aged characters of his youth. The defining figure is “Racko”, who as a pimp and dealer tries to continue living his dream of a different life with violence.

The title refers to the sunken forests of prehistoric times, which lie in the depths of the Ruhr area as hard coal. At the same time he alludes to literary sources, the term already appears in the Torquato Tasso (6th song) and in the Hyperion :

"Dear! It was a time when my chest also basked in great hopes, when the joy of immortality struck me in every pulse, as I walk among wonderful designs, as in a far forest night, as I am happy, like the fish of the ocean, in my boundless future went on forever. "

- Holderlin : Hyperion on the Bellarmine

Milk and coal

The novel Milk and Coal turns once more to the Ruhr area of ​​the 1960s. After describing the Berlin world of the 90s from the perspective of a young person, Rothmann is drawn back to the Ruhr area, to the narrow-minded world of workers and their families. This world is observed and described from the perspective of a worker's son. It is the observation of failure. Adults' dreams of an ideal world are shattered by financial worries, pneumonia and excessive alcohol. As in flee, my friend! the mother breaks out of the family order. But it is not the Berlin woman's great escape into drugs and long journeys, but rather the small escape to a dance café, to an Italian lover.

In the FAZ, Thomas Wirtz interprets Rothmann's humorous dance instructions on the twist as a metaphor for the frenzied standstill of time: "Twist is the lively allegory of the early sixties: a standstill with shaking body unrest, a loyalty to location with unsuccessful attempts to break out in the hip area."

Young light

The novel Junge Licht describes the summer vacation of the twelve-year-old miner's son Julian and, in a second narrative level, his father's work underground. The world of miners and their children around 1960 appears essentially from the boy's perspective. Rothmann received the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize for the novel in 2004 , which is awarded by Deutschlandradio and the city of Braunschweig .

Berlin novels

Flee my friend!

The novel Flee, my friend! plays in Berlin. The narrator and central figure is the 20-year-old Louis Blaul, known as "Lolly". As the son of the 1968 generation, he grew up with his grandparents. His mother Mary met his father Martin at an anti-nuclear demonstration. The mother is anything but political, rather esoteric and funky. Caught as a drug courier, she spent Lolly's childhood in prison and psychiatric hospital and has little interest in the family afterwards. The father as a counter figure has established himself with his own advertising agency, which is why the family is sarcastically called “uncle sales”. The core theme of the novel is Lolly's first great love for a chubby woman, whom he finds very erotic. At the same time he is ashamed of her appearance.

The novel comes in the flippant language of the Berlin youth and tries hard to get bon motes and small, funny episodes from everyday life in Berlin.

heat

Contents in the wording of the blurb: Since the death of his partner, who threw him completely off course, the cameraman Simon deLoo has been working as an assistant cook and driver in a large kitchen in Berlin-Kreuzberg . One day he thinks he recognizes the silhouette of his dead wife in a young Polish bag lady. He provides her with their clothes, leaves her the empty apartment - but Lucilla eludes him: She is on the run from her past and does not want to get involved with him at first ...

A central concern of the novel is the portrayal of the world of the common people, the pubs, the large kitchens, the street. The wit of the failed also fascinates Rothmann in the novel Heat. Christoph Bartmann writes in his review for the Süddeutsche Zeitung:

“Hardly any other author has the gift of noting the mangy, comical and mean language of subproletarian everyday life. The Ruhr area used to be the scene of these explorations, now it is Berlin (where Rothmann has lived for a long time). But this neorealist chronicler of life on the ground in the cities is not a writer of the world of work or of what is left of it. Rather, it seems as if he needs the vulgar linguistic microcosm, which he can describe like nobody else, just to implant his silence in it. "

- The mysticism of the industrial kitchen, flowing in silence: Ralf Rothmann's novel “Heat”. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. March 17, 2003

With the narrator figure of the driver, Rothmann succeeds in connecting very different social worlds. The world of bums to whom his work colleague secretly sends meals, the slaughterhouse and its brutality, the cheap and dirty Berlin brothels as well as the frustrated luxury world of the nouveau riche.

With his new love Lucilla, the narrator turns his back on Berlin and discovers the world of rural Poland, the romantic lakes and nature with her. But this world is already ailing, behind the facade hides tough real estate speculation. Rothmann shows the collapse of this dream in one picture, the cruelly detailed description of the destruction of a nest by a hawk.

“Heat, Ralf Rothmann's new novel, takes place for a winter, a summer and an autumn in the nineties, the 20th century. Transcendental longing glows even in the deepest snow. Rothmann, born in 1953, a trained bricklayer, is increasingly working as a Christologist in the almost godforsaken landscape of contemporary literature. A social romantic who archives the milieus in order to mythologize them.

The last film-ready shots of this development novel of a satisfied Job show the hero in the final stage of his bliss, as a bum healed to death, "relaxed in pain and well in the end". His passing is accompanied by puzzling noises and sudden darkness. At the beginning of the novel, an ambulance drives through the picture in the background with the interior lighting switched off, "Was there a dead man?" At the end, it is assumed that DeLoo met himself in this scene as the other he will become. "

- Markus Clauer : Review, In: DIE ZEIT. 13/2003

The "grandiose failure", the almost mythological trait of its failing heroes, earned Rothmann the reputation of a Christian writer. Rothmann received the Evangelical Book Prize for milk and coal . Although confessions are not available from the author, he does not reject the Christian-meditative trait of his writing:

"'The pathetic failure of the characters is just a superficial failure for me," says Ralf Rothmann, and:' Is there anyone who has failed more grandly than Jesus? '"

- Susanne Messmer

The novel Heat also reflects the topic of the Bildungsroman in a typically Rothmannian way. Like other heroes of the modern age, DeLoo's life story does not end with successful integration into society. Typical of Rothmann's heroes is a meditative trait of refusal.

“Simon deLoo, the speechless cameraman, refuses to gain a foothold until the end. At first sight he works in large kitchens because he cannot cope with the death of his girlfriend. Actually he only wants one thing: nowhere to participate. "

- Susanne Messmer

Fire doesn't burn

Berlin, almost twenty years after the fall of the wall. Kreuzberg has become faceless. Wolf is also getting on in years and his love for Alina is fading. A few years earlier, the relationship between the middle-aged author and the young bookseller seemed to last forever. Meanwhile, Wolf's thoughts revolve more around the fear of one's own aging. The move to the Müggelsee should be the solution. But when Charlotte suddenly appears, a lover from the past, the idyll on the green outskirts of the city quickly becomes fragile again. The erotic affair with the professor, disguised as excursions with his Labrador Webster, did not go unnoticed by Alina for long. But to Wolf's surprise, she not only accepts the relationship, she even encourages him to ...

“His new novel is a tender, passionate love story, but it is also the breathtaking combination of eros and metaphysics, sensuality and the supernatural. "Feuer does not burn" is a novel by writers, but it is also the search for moments of harmony between literature and beauty, writing and the divine. Ultimately, it is always about the search for redemption: through the sharpened vision through the power of writing, through the perception and sensation heightened through poetry. This is how you can read Rothmann's novel. But you don't have to. "Fire does not burn" also works without "pocket metaphysics" and a false bottom. On the one hand, through Rothmann's always self-deprecating view of the world as it is and how one would occasionally wish it. On the other hand, through the fascinating range of his language: the unbelievably diverse pitches from sensual tenderness to coarse eroticism, from subtle reflection to the most powerful sayings. "

- German love eros East-West. Michaela Schmitz in: Deutschlandfunk April 19, 2009

War and post-war

Die in spring

The god of that summer

The last weeks of the Second World War are also described in “The God of that Summer” (2018), as in “Die im Frühling” (2015). While the previous novel recounted the experiences of the two (forcibly recruited) SS soldiers Walter Urban and Fiete Caroli during the last major Wehrmacht offensive in Hungary, the so-called home front now forms the background: twelve-year-old Luisa Norff lives with her older sister Sibylle and the mother on an estate owned by his brother-in-law, Vinzent, a high-ranking SS officer, on the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal (today's Kiel Canal). The father, who runs a military casino in Kiel, only visits the family occasionally and then brings food with him, but also - and this is far more important for Luisa - books again and again. Through the girl's shrewd gaze, the reader learns how the individual family members deal with the threat from low-level planes, refugee misery, delusion, silence and the omnipresent denunciation: There is irony and sarcasm on the father's side, silent resignation and dullness on the other the mother, and the nineteen-year-old Sibyl, who seems to suffer most from the privations of the war, speaks openly what is clear to everyone. “Everyone here has a radio and knows it's over, right? That the American will soon be crossing the Rhine, the Russian is standing in front of Berlin and the miracle weapon is just gossip. Every soldier who still has to go into the field dies for nothing and again for nothing, and the sooner they drive your Hitler and his beasts to the devil, the better for us! ”(Page 74) With their desperate hedonism and their openness bordering on prostitution for the male sex she provokes her stepsister Gudrun, daughter of the mother from her first marriage and loyal leader of the Nazi women's union, because her husband Vinzent is one of her lovers - which will one day become Billie's fate.

Luisa sees a lot, but doesn't understand everything; This is also what happened on the occasion of Vincent's 40th birthday: There is a big festival, food is served that is difficult to get anywhere in the empire, and despite the apocalyptic mood, the celebration is almost orgiastic: “Enjoy this war,” says one of the high-ranking SS guests, "peace will be terrible." (Page 155) At this festival, the drunken Sibylle, who is swarmed by horny and power-hungry men, suddenly disappears, and Luisa, too, experiences exactly what she is about, like most women At that time, she feared most: She was raped - but not, as always feared, by a Russian, but by her brother-in-law Vincent. Shortly thereafter, she fell seriously ill with typhus and had to stay in bed for a long time, and when she was healthy again, her sister Sybille no longer lived on the estate and no one wanted to provide any further information about her whereabouts. And yet the reader already suspects the monstrous thing when Luisa discovers a clump of hair from a neighboring wig maker, of which she “the memory of the hands” (page 13) says that it belongs to her sister.

The events are contrasted by short excerpts from a fictional chronicle of the Thirty Years' War, recorded by a scribe named Bredelin Merxheim. The scenes of the most terrible slaughter are located on the old "ox path", on which the estate is about 300 years later. The words of Bredelin Merxheim form, so to speak, a historical reverberation room, an echo from a distant time, in which the chronicler and his friend want to move a chapel in memory of those who were violated and killed from the other side of the lake to their village. That doesn't succeed, she goes under, but: “May the God disdain our closeness this summer - can he go further than the thought that is meant for him? (...) Our endeavors were pure, therefore perfect, and could not have been more truthful, and thus everything succeeded (...): The little church, it is in its place! ”(Page 240/241) - As a testimony to the past and As a result of geological changes, it is precisely this chapel that the National Socialists used as part of the fence around a prison camp and that Luisa helped to rebuild in 1945, when she tiredly stated “I have experienced everything” (page 254).

The imagery of the book, the symbolism of which elegantly disappears behind an everyday point of view, and the humanity beyond religious dogmatics make this novel so rich and interesting. Christoph Schröder gives an important indication of the author's style when he writes: "Ralf Rothmann is a writer who is driven not by reflection, but by mere narration and the evocation of strong, meaningful images." ( Deutschlandfunk, May 20, 2018) And Maik Brüggemeyer writes in Rolling Stone (June 2018 edition): "A piece of history that not only reflects the Thirty Years' War, but also the fate of the families who are fleeing wars today and are without a home."

Awards

Catalog raisonné

Film adaptations

The story The Pride of the East from the short story volume Rehe am Meer (2006) was filmed by dffb graduate Christoph Wermke in 2011 with the same film title in cooperation with the RBB . For the short film of 26 minutes published in 2012, Wermke not only directed, but also wrote the script. The jury's justification for the rating particularly valuable said: the film is "a coherent and atmospheric short fiction film that is as poetic as its title."

In 2016, director Adolf Winkelmann staged “Young Light” about the state of the Ruhr area in the post-war period from the perspective of the 12-year-old working-class son Julian Collien. Nils and Till Beckmann wrote the script together with Adolf Winkelmann. The cinema release in Germany was on May 12, 2016. The film received the main prize at the Recklinghausen Church Film Festival in March 2016.

Theater production

The novel Milk and Coal was performed as a play at the RuhrTriennale in 2003. The world premiere took place on June 18, 2003 in the Jahrhunderthalle Bochum in collaboration with the theater group ZT Hollandia from Eindhoven. The directors were Johan Simons and Paul Koek, the dramaturge was Gerard Mortier, and the actor Jeroen Willems was involved in the conception. The musical arrangement was done by Paul Koek and Anke Brouwer: Accompanied by a chamber music ensemble under the direction of Edward Gardner, Verdi arias were sung by Elzbieta Szmytka, Carol Wilson (soprano), Dagmar Peckova (mezzo-soprano) and Hector Sandoval (tenor), in the course of action. The set consisted of 16 tons of briquettes.

further reading

  • Franz-Josef Deiters : Dust that pays a visit. To remind yourself of the writing in Ralf Rothmann's “Milk and Coal”. In: Limbus. Australian Yearbook of German literary and cultural studies. 1, 2008, ISBN 978-3-7930-9541-5 , pp. 67-84.
  • Andreas Erb: Ralf Rothmann. In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (ed.): Critical Lexicon of Contemporary Literature. (Loseblattsammlung) Edition Text and Criticism, Munich. (Update 2006)
  • Christian Goldammer: Initiation in the novels of Ralf Rothmann. (= Epistemata. 701). Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-8260-4336-9 .
  • Dieter Heimböckel, Melanie Kuffer: We also had good years . Home and identity in Ralf Rothmann's novel “Milk and Coal”. In: Michael Szurawitzki, Christopher Schmidt (Ed.): Interdisciplinary German studies at the intersection of cultures. Festschrift for Dagmar Neuendorff on his 60th birthday. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2008, pp. 361–369.
  • Anja Maria Richter: The Study of Silence. Contemporary German-language literature in the field of tension between Gnosticism, philosophy and mysticism - Heinrich Böll, Botho Strauss, Peter Handke, Ralf Rothmann. Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 978-3-631-60162-4 .
  • Oliver Ruf: Milieu - Threshold - Memories. On the liminality of the Ruhr area in Ralf Rothmann's contemporary novels. In: Jan-Pieter Barbian, Hanneliese Palm (Ed.): The discovery of the Ruhr area in literature. Klartext Verlag , Essen 2009, pp. 261–279.
  • Hubert Winkels (Ed.): Ralf Rothmann meets Wilhelm Raabe. The Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize - the event and the consequences. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-89244-956-2 .
  • Henning Ziebritzki : Happy ears, light writing. To Ralf Rothmann's narrative . In: Accents . Zeitschrift für Literatur 4 (2014), pp. 304-313.

Web links

Commons : Ralf Rothmann  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual references, footnotes

  1. ↑ a b c Susanne Messmer: fallen saints. A portrait by Ralf Rothmann. In: taz. No. 7120, pp. 13-14 (of August 2, 2003)
  2. ↑ freitag.de
  3. ↑ Torquato Tasso. Liberated Jerusalem. on: projekt-gutenberg.org
  4. ↑ (FAZ, quoted from buecher.de )
  5. ^ Homepage of the Suhrkamp-Verlag , accessed on June 30, 2015.
  6. ↑ Review by Michaela Schmitz Feuer brennt nicht , Book of the Week on Deutschlandfunk from April 19, 2009.
  7. ^ Walter Hasenclever Prize of the City of Aachen to Ralf Rothmann , boersenblatt.net of October 19, 2010, accessed August 31, 2017
  8. ↑ The Catholic Church honors Ralf Rothmann: "Meister der Antihelden" , Börsenblatt-Magazin for the German book trade from October 20, 2014, accessed October 21, 2014.
  9. ↑ Gerty Spies Literature Prize to Ralf Rothmann , boersenblatt.net from August 18, 2017, accessed August 31, 2017
  10. ↑ Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung No. 168 of July 21, 2018, p. 23
  11. ↑ hr-info book check ( memento from February 6, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) April 26, 2012 "Shakespeare's chickens", review by Sylvia Schwab
  12. ^ New novel by Ralf Rothmann: Hitler's Last Brigade. Review of Die Frühling by Thomas Andre on Spiegel Online , June 18, 2015.
  13. ↑ The Pride of the East , FBW press release, accessed August 13, 2017
personal data
SURNAME Rothmann, Ralf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 10, 1953
PLACE OF BIRTH Schleswig