Snow in the Ardennes
The book Snow in the Ardennes is a work by the Rhenish writer and poet Jürgen Becker known as a journal novel .
Journal novel
The text is formally divided into three sections. Part I and III are denied by the nameless narrator. Both parts have their spatial centers in Germany West and Germany East. The place name Odenthal , which has been home to the narrator for decades, is avoided, but the visible and audible contact with Altenberg Cathedral is mentioned several times. Part II, which comprises 40 of a total of around 180 pages, is narrated by Jörn and is set on a small Greek island. Despite the tripartite division, the entire text, like life, is interwoven in many ways.
The diary-like notes consist of small reports, appear as short sentences and even as individual words. What they have in common is an extremely precise observation and a sensitive presentation. There is no dating, as it would be in a novel. The book was published in 2003 and the narrator mentions “the two missing twin towers that have now disappeared from the New York skyline.” (P. 75) In these days of horror, anger and sympathy that the narrator feels, Jürgen leaves Becker look over his shoulder and describe his preoccupation with a kind of daily chronicle. This “September he only wrote something down for the first ten days. After that, the pages will remain blank. ”(P. 77)
Otherwise the narrator apparently jumps arbitrarily between the places and times of his life. But only apparently, because a memory "is triggered in the present by a current event that can be completely insignificant, barely perceptible, perhaps by a smell, a moving shadow, a noise from close by." (P. 76)
In the first sentence of the book, the narrator finds a photo without looking for it. This photo by the famous photographer Robert Capa of American soldiers fighting in the winter of 1944 appears again at the beginning of the third part. Here the reader learns something about Becker's relationship with the Ardennes . And here he also learns something about the title of the book, because in the photo there is snow in the Ardennes. Then, in the last few sentences of the book, that photo comes up again. In the presence of the narrator, it is winter and he will travel when it starts to snow.
We keep talking about snow. Winter lasts longer on the heights of the Bergisches Land than in the Cologne Bay. Jürgen Becker also chose the family name Winter for his alter ego Jörn.
Jörn Winter, of all people, then tells in Part II of a trip to a warm, sun-drenched Greek island . There he only meets a few locals and abandoned villages. Central European affluent citizens have settled in their own isolated houses, not in the villages. One of the people staying there is the painter Achim, whom Jörn knows from Germany. He changed his name to Micha and tried to live his daydream of a different life. Here the narrator rejects this hoax and this (self) deception in a seldom rigorous manner.
In other places the narrator delicately holds the mirror up to the reader and lets him share in the wisdom of his 70 years of life.
"As long as that was ago, the rooms have retained a memory that opens up to the resident when he trusts his senses and his imaginations with full intensity."
"The motion detector is an installation of suspicion, and for a long time I stand leaning out in the window."
"For those who come home too, the motion detector is there at night, an installation that welcomes them."
“You know the route, you drive it every day as if you were sleeping. Then I notice the traffic sign that is in front of the first curve and indicates the risk of skidding. Is it always there? Probably. Algae and rust, traces of the weather, adorn the sign. I never noticed it. "
After the death of the cat who lived in the house for twenty years:
“There are few places in the area that don't remind you of Hannchen's presence. Whereby it is still too early for the memory, which must first be preceded by forgetting - rather the present can still be felt, the presence of a living being that has belonged to everyday life, to the taken for granted, to the habits of one's own life. "
Jürgen Becker, born in Cologne in 1932 , lived in Erfurt from 1939 to 1947 , i.e. during the consciously receptive years of his youth.
“With the miracle of unity, as Jörn said, the old pictures lit up again - only, they were really old pictures, cracked, faded, and often the memory was empty. No, said Jörn, there was nothing to get back of lost time, and what I thought I was visualizing, maybe it was lost imaginations. The old man who I am now basically starts all over again, and when he takes himself back to the little vacation boy and looks for old traces, he discovers, he first discovers the whole area, he sees what he has never seen before, he meets Traces that he really did not expect. "
"Do I want to know what's in there in the old, still unpacked boxes?"
Then a puzzling remark. Is that a picture of the mistakes that people make again and again, each for himself? Or for the hope that won't fade?
"At the bus stop that was in the open, the man who climbed out of the front of the bus got back on the back."
Book for the city
Snow in the Ardennes was the book for the city in Cologne and the region between the Eifel and Bergisches Land in 2009 .
literature
Jürgen Becker: Snow in the Ardennes . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-518-46130-3 , pp. 186 (special edition).
Web links
- A book for the city at the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger
- Review in the Frankfurter Rundschau
- Review in DIE ZEIT
- Review in the FAZ
- Review notes at Perlentaucher.de
