Rock days
Rocktage (2003) is the first novel by the German writer Dana Bönisch . It's about a modern heriad of values that shifts the material from the Sturm und Drang epoch to 2001. The dreamy student Tobias Puck falls in love with the understanding Gwen, who has already decided on someone else.
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Tobias Puck, sometimes manic, sometimes depressed, is a student in Cologne. His parents have separated, his mother is currently preparing for a trip around the world with her new partner, Mr. Rösmann. Puck feeds almost exclusively on “limp fish fingers”, beer or the occasional light drug. Melancholy, lonely and aimlessly, he wanders through the “liver sausage-colored” city. He has just lost his job as a horoscope writer for the city magazine and has given up attending other university lectures. On good days, "rock days", his head is full of poetry and his ears are full of music, preferably from Ash and Radiohead , but also Weezer or Pulp and Stiller's friends of sports . On bad, “rubber glove days”, he feels “like in the wrong film”, like an extra who tries unsuccessfully to push the “scenes” away because he “cannot feel life”. His only conversation partners are the four tree frogs in his terrarium, which he takes care of with great devotion. In addition to a few fellow students, his buddy Mo and the love-hungry Lilli, a Turkish kiosk owner and his old primary school teacher - all marginal figures who only document how far one can talk past each other - there is also his imaginary companion Johann Wolfgang ( Goethe ), who at night rides the subway with him and offers occasional quotes from Werther .
When Puck one day, driven by "longing", goes to one of the superficial student parties again, he meets Gwen (dolyn), the girl with the " placebo eyes", whom he can no longer forget. He is hoping for a change in his dreary "extras life" from her. Shy text messages follow and they finally meet again. Tobias experiences days when the world is turning, real rock days. But soon it turns out: Gwen already has a boyfriend, Stefan, "the problem". He is interested in astronomy , but prefers to study business administration and, as Tobias is painfully shown at Gwen's birthday party, has lived with her for a long time.
With tickets to an Ash concert, Puck tries to win Gwen's heart after all. The music, especially the title “Only In Dreams” hits both of them like a clap of thunder and then makes them dance exuberantly as if on a trip through the night rain. But after one last passionate kiss at dawn, it's over. Gwen wakes up from her dream, remembers Stefan and withdraws from Puck: She thinks that Tobias doesn't love her, but only an idea of her. "And maybe also the fact that you can't have me." The dreamer was shocked to discover that Gwen was only part of the "backdrop" that froze life into the Truman show .
Puck can finally be de-registered, jerks aimlessly in his mother's car for a whole summer on the German highways, finally visits the huge bizarre rock festival in Weeze on a disused military airfield , sees his favorite band Ash one last time and hears from them that they too are exhausted and just want to “go home”. Then Tobias decides to drive across the border and work as a toilet cleaner in a motorway service station in Holland in order to earn the necessary fuel money for the onward journey to the North Sea. But even the sea does not offer him the “infinity” he is looking for, but also remains just a shallow, finite stage scenery.
Disappointed and sick with fever, Puck (with Goethe in the passenger seat) makes his way home. Winter is just around the corner, the outdoor pool in Cologne is already closed. The metal ladder that leads up to the ten-meter tower is ice cold. Nevertheless, Puck climbs up to the top springboard with bare feet - just as he once did with Gwen in early summer, shortly before they both fell into the pool in a love frenzy. He looks trembling into the black depths. He “was about to discover a secret. It started to snow. "
In a final, epilogue-like scene, a girl releases pucks to frogs in a meadow. Amazed at their newfound freedom, they hop off in all directions. Whether the girl is a new friend that Tobias finally found, so that his previous substitute communication with the mute animals is superfluous, or whether it is about Gwen, who takes care of Puck's estate in this way, as it were, remains open, but Werther's role model and the multitude of death symbols on the last pages of the novel speak in favor of the latter.
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- Dana Bönisch: Rock Days. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2003, ISBN 3-462-03326-3 .