Interview Jochen Schimmang | The one correct word

Can a squirrel look into your soul? I guess it depends on the soul. Photo: unsplash/Kylli Kittus Wilhelm Genazino always took notes and typed a page after every trip into town. This was the game material for his books. How is it for you?

I don't go out to get suggestions. Sometimes when I get home I write something down. Sometimes, when I'm out and about, I think you should write this down later, and then I forget it. Yes, and then it wasn't that important. I don't see the world as material for writing. Writing is a natural form of existence for me. And that mixes with the other life without further ado. And that's why I often don't have a pen with me. Sometimes I get annoyed because I want to write something down while I'm out and about, but that's not a big deal.

Other books are also part of your writing; those by Jürgen Becker, Marcel Proust and Roland Barthes are consulted from time to time.

Yes, these are books that are close friends. Of course, you read a book differently every time, and that's the benefit you get from it. I don't review anymore, so I don't have to stay up to date, which is reflected in "Farewell to the course participants." I prefer to re-read things these days. I read with a pencil, and sometimes I ask myself: Why did you mark it or highlight it like that? As I said, these are books I'm close friends with and I'd just love to meet them again. And the meeting again is not a repeat of the last meeting, but something new. Okay, sometimes I'm disappointed too.

You read Proust very early on.

I started reading so-called adult literature shortly before my 14th birthday. The first was Camus, i.e. “The Plague”, “The Stranger”. In Leer, where I grew up, we had a very good city library and, above all, a great librarian. She also let me borrow books that were actually still in the poison cabinet for me. So “Ulysses” by James Joyce, for example. Because of the Molly Bloom monologue. Back then, I was self-taught in world literature and finally came across Proust. I don't know what it was, but I think it was perhaps the way I perceived the world and feelings. Even those that affected me. I thought, I can understand that, I know that too. I was in puberty then. So Proust is definitely something for pubescents, and you could put that as an advertising slogan on a book cover.

Jochen Schimmang, born in 1948, studied political science and philosophy at the Free University of Berlin and lives as a freelance writer and translator in Oldenburg. His debut, the autobiographical novel “The Beautiful Phoenix Bird,” was published in 1979. In 2021 he received the Italo Svevo Prize for his life's work.

Many people fail because you need to have a certain level of maturity and interest in the language.

I wanted to be a writer very early on and I was always initially interested or captivated by language. If not, I'll just put the book down. The language, to put it a bit bluntly, has to be right, that's the material we work with. Not the plot and above all not any message that you want to convey. You can do that. But then you should write a flyer or go on social media today. Language always came first for me, that was the case when I was ten and reading books for young people, and there are of course great differences there too. So I started reading Proust, one book after the other, and I wasn't disappointed when I read it, but rather the opposite. I read the “research” a total of three times and of course only understood many things after re-reading it. I certainly won't read them a fourth time, but the volumes aren't just sitting there, I look at them every now and then, and not just because of the famous Madeleine passage.

You started publishing in the 70s, at a time when the literary world was opening up quite quickly. You no longer had to have an academic degree to publish.

It was always clear to me that you didn't need any prerequisites or a degree or anything like that. I began to write more literaryally after I escaped my left-wing cadre group and was able to return to the things that really interested me. That was also a liberation, that's clear. But I soon knew where it was supposed to go, wrote smaller things and then sent them in. In order to assert yourself, I think you always need a good dose of megalomania at the beginning. So I sent my texts to the only publisher that was suitable for me at the time, namely Suhrkamp. I wanted to write a book and the editor Hans-Ulrich Müller-Schwefe also liked these texts that I had sent in. It was enough to establish and maintain contact. I then worked on my first novel [»The Beautiful Phoenix Bird«, editor's note). Red.] continued to write and whenever a part was finished, I sent it to Müller-Schwefe. He cut out an awful lot, for which I am very grateful. But we had a very good relationship from the beginning, it was our child together, this text.

That sounds like scrupulous work. Then, like Kafka, your sound isn't created in an inspired writing flow at best?

Absolutely not. I define literary writing like this - this is a bit very pointed - that you first have to find the right words and then string them together in the right order so that they become sentences. And that you then put the sentences in the correct order. Flaubert speaks of “le mot juste”, there is only one correct word that fits this place and I have to look for it.

Is this improvement, further work, and refinement enjoyable for you?

In fact, it's what I enjoy the most. Because at the beginning there is nothing there, and that is difficult. However, when there is a body of text, working on it is pleasant and sometimes really enjoyable. So I have to move a word again or find another expression to say what I actually meant, because I only now know what I want to write. That's actually what brings the most joy. When I'm working on the final draft, I usually sit at my desk longer than normal. When I write, it's actually over after two hours. Now it's also physically related. But in this phase I can really last four to five hours, with short breaks in between.

You're getting quite high at Suhrkamp. Eventually, however, there was a first dent in her career.

I published three books with Suhrkamp, ​​then Müller-Schwefe went to America for a year and I didn't get along with his successors. But that didn't just have to do with other people. I no longer knew what I actually wanted to tell; I was somehow stuck in my tracks by the success of “Phoenix”. Everyone demanded the sequel. But “Phoenix” is a developmental novel and covers a period of 15 years. You can't describe the last two years two years later and nothing happens. I was a bit paralyzed by it.

How did you overcome this phase?

I continued to write diligently, things that were never made public. Finally, I don't know why, maybe it has something to do with what I was reading at the time, I discovered that my actual form is the narrative. And I wrote two or three stories back then that were relatively easy for me. My girlfriend at the time gave me an article from the “Süddeutsche” about a new publisher, the Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, and I sent something there and said I had five or six other stories in my head that I could write relatively quickly. That was enough for a contract. I had previously fallen out of the business a bit and sometimes had difficulty calling myself a writer. I could now say that again with a clear conscience. Not only because I had the contract, but also because in a relatively short space of time I delivered one story after another for the volume “The Pleasure of the Kings,” which I still like very much today. It was a new start, also because what's in this book is quite variable. These are very different stories.

There you found your tone, which of course has changed again over the years and decades. The things you do today, such as your “terrain walks,” are definitely more analytical. And your new stories are more autobiographical, which brings us to the current volume, "The injured don't jump from the tenner."

I expected very little from this new book, I must say. But it is probably the case that it was very well received by some booksellers. I am very pleased. I never expected that.

Disappearances are a recurring theme in the book. The last story is about the final disappearance, about suicide. Have you ever seriously considered suicide?

No, not yet. But this comes up every now and then as a thought game. There can be situations in which you may not be feeling bad, but you are simply fed up with life. And then that should have been it. If you are as relatively healthy as I am at 78, then you suspect that death may not come on its own so quickly. My mother turned 103.

Several of your new stories are about missed opportunities. The reason for the autobiographical portraits of Christian Linder, Jürgen Becker and your father is a certain sadness that you did not get as close to them as you could have. Is literature compensation for you?

It probably is, but that would have to be diagnosed from the outside. But I'm also not afraid that I'll lose the ability to write if such an occasion is missing. I also did psychoanalysis for three and a half years, in the classic way on the couch. I described this in “The Best We Had,” the practice in the basement with a small garden that is a little higher up. There was often a squirrel in this garden. Later I asked myself who was actually analyzing me, the squirrel or my analyst, who was very good. The reason why I did it doesn't matter, there are always different ones. In any case, I wasn't afraid that I would no longer be able to write if the analysis was successful. On the contrary, I believe that the analysis itself is very literature-oriented. I was quite productive during my analysis time.

It's a foolish idea anyway, that there always has to be a deficiency that becomes the reason for great literature. It can also be the opposite, great joy for example.

Or this impulse: Look at what beautiful things I do. This has always been the case for me. I said to myself, I would like to do this now and be able to show it off afterwards.

Every author has his or her idiosyncrasies; hers is the word about “devouring” a book.

Yes, because I believe that when you devour books you no longer understand the most important thing, namely the language. By the way, I do that to some extent, but then the reading is plot-defined, and for me it's always about the language. It is the material we work with and it must be treated very carefully. Once you've done that, the book is no longer suitable for devouring.

Does it hurt you if people deny you that? I remember a review by Wolfram Schütte, who criticized the language of the first volume of “Geländewege” as not being original enough.

You shake your head sometimes, but that doesn't hurt me. Oliver Pfohlmann, whom I respect very much, complained to the “Laboratory Sleepers” at the end that there wasn’t enough Corona in the whole book. But of course that's exactly what I wanted to avoid. I didn't want to write a Corona book, it was about completely different things, especially about sleeping. No, that doesn't hurt me, Schütte just somehow didn't see something. It's a shame, of course, because I always found Wolfram Schütte's reviews in the "Frankfurter Rundschau" incredibly cool in the 70s. Endless sentences and parentheses and more, I really enjoyed reading that back then.

Music doesn't appear in her books as often as a reference point like literature and art, it seems to me. But now I read in your new book that you were “Sounds” readers.

Of course, I didn't necessarily understand some of the debates that took place there, including later in the Spex. I also didn't bother to understand Diedrich Diederichsen from beginning to end. But music still plays an enormous role for me as a memory space. I grew up with the Beatles. George Harrison is five years older than me. My brother, who is also still alive, is two weeks older than Paul McCartney. They were my bigger brothers. Without putting any special thought into it, music has almost always played a very important role in my everyday life.

No. When I write, it has to be quiet. By the way, I also have to be sober. But I've been that way for years now. I drink alcohol maybe 50 days a year and then just a glass of wine with a meal or a beer to quench my thirst. I have to be sober. And it has to be quiet. If it's not quiet, I just have to stuff the famous balls from the Wellnoise company into my ears. And I have to be fit. So I have to be healthy too. When I'm sick I can't write, so I don't even try.

Roland Barthes is one of your sources, and he allows the body to have a certain life of its own in the production of literature.

Christian Linder, citing Roland Barthes, says that the body writes the books. Barthes is actually a kind of household saint for me. I read it again and again. I've just read his Japanese book "The Empire of Signs" again. But there are only certain things that interest me about him. All these hard-hitting structuralist stories don't interest me and in the end he wasn't interested anymore either. Roland Barthes is, so to speak, the sworn enemy of doxa, i.e. dogma. This is particularly noticeable in the later books.

Naturally. He really wanted to write a novel, but he probably never would have been able to write it even if he hadn't had a fatal accident. Because the novel he wanted to write, that is my thesis, already existed and that was “In Search of Lost Time.” What really fascinates me is an essay in an anthology on Proust in which he writes that you don't have to read the entire "research." If something bores you, you can skip it; volumes five and six, for example, would have bored you quite a bit. I wouldn't see it that way, we read differently, but I mean this basic attitude towards a text. I no longer force myself to finish reading a book that I don't like. That's why I stopped reviewing. Books that you review should be read to the end. No matter how difficult it is, of course you take revenge.

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