Obituary for Joachim Lottmann | »What I see there is fantastic«

Antipode of Franz Kafka: Joachim Lottmann in Berlin Photo: Imago/Christian Thiel Joachim Lottmann and I walked through the park of the Vienna Heurigen Hospital. The department head had suggested writing a kind of reportage obituary in the Lottmann style. And so the inevitable happened: Strolling next to Lottmann, I suddenly found myself in one of his novels. Everything seemed real and yet strangely alienated.

To banish the confusing feeling, I tried to memorize the surroundings, the flowers, the bushes, the trees. But then it occurred to me that Joachim Lottmann was never a Joseph von Eichendorff or Adalbert Stifter. Why should a writer of the computer age bother to describe primroses and aspen trees when real life took place somewhere else, in bars, on car trips, in private homes. Even a charity gala with extremely embarrassing B and C celebrities was, from a pop literary perspective, more impressive than an Easter walk in the countryside - fack ju Göhte!

Instead of the sedate flora, we would devote ourselves to the dynamic fauna, i.e. the carnal. I would use the very last encounter with him to reveal half- and eighth-truths (to avoid the word fibs) that have been cultivated for decades. Now was the time for the truth and nothing but the truth! The interested reader would finally find out whether the woman who tore his heart to pieces in the magical pop year of 1982 ("Who broke my heart? You did! You did!", ABC) was called Judith, Kim or Kirstin or something completely different.

I would also tease, no, challenge him to reveal his true date of birth. I came across another year in the list of authors of the anthology “Rawums”. According to the information there, Munchausen brought light to the literary scene in 1954, which was still pitch black at the time. A number that irritated me because it was mentioned in his novels from 1956, 1958 and 1959. Should Joachim Lottmann end up being as old as his mortal enemy Rainald Goetz?

But before he got to the point where he opened up to me, the potential picture newspaper widow shaker, I first had to create a pleasant, harmless atmosphere for conversation. Since I hadn't had breakfast and my stomach was growling, I asked him whether the Wiener Schnitzel tasted better in Vienna than in his previous places of residence: Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg and "Bavarian Congo" (Straubing, Lower Bavaria).

Of course he smelled the roast. He, the close friend of the former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, had learned the crucial political lesson: questions are just smoke and mirrors. Before his first sentence had even ended, he had managed to move on from the schnitzel to his wife, the world-famous journalist Christa Zöchling, who was much more “delicious” than the flattened piece of veal. Yes, his wife, who had sought happiness as determinedly as Mr. Rossi (and temporarily found it again and again), had made him a happy person. Once and for all.

He was overwhelmed with gratitude and praise. That was what had always distinguished him: the unleashed affirmation of life. Even in the face of the inevitable. »I would love to continue living now that things have become so interesting. Maybe another 90 days. That would be a lot. 90 days – what I would experience there.«

Lottmann was serious about his Good Vibrations.

Unfavorable contemporaries had branded this positive quality - the torrential enthusiasm - as "Lottmann's praising to death" and even denounced it as an insidious irony. But now that he was dying and each of his episodes of the "Boring Diary" (can be read on Facebook and Instagram) was overflowing with euphoria and lust for life, even the most hardened cynics understood: Lottmann was serious about his Good Vibrations, had always been serious, even back in his debut work "May, June, July", with which he had invented pop literature in 1987.

That's why his books put you in such an outrageously good mood. Because life's adversities - there were enough reasons to become depressed - simply bounced off him. His novels reliably ended with a happy ending. Even if a terrorist attack took place shortly before the home straight, Lottmann still managed to turn the corner. The final sentence of his Corona novel “Dying was yesterday” was: “It can go on.”

In this way he became the antipode of Franz Kafka. Anyone who read Kafka needed a mood lifter on the first page. Joachim Lottmann, on the other hand, took to heart Monty Python’s credo “Always look on the bright side of life”. Life might be rubbish, but that was no reason to be sad. After all, you were the master of the bullshit. That's why Lottmann celebrated his 60th birthday six times. As he shared this, I realized that his date of birth didn't matter. Let the Wikipedia pedants be crazy about when he was born!

And whether the woman who had hit him to the core (“It’s cold outside – the night love died. On the night you murdered love,” ABC) was called Kim or Kirstin didn’t matter either. What is crucial is that the first novel (basically the debut before the official debut) in which he dealt with this traumatic experience in a major literary way has finally been published - 44 years later. Here too there was a happy ending, just in time.

More importantly, he was at peace with himself. »I only now realize that I have been an extraordinary person all along. I saw myself more as a loser. As someone who is running at the back and is about to be left behind. And now suddenly I see what I was like when I was 20, when I was 30, when I was 40. And what I see there is fantastic."

Of course he was right. As always. When we finally fell into each other's arms, I exclaimed pathetically: "Joachim Lottmann will live on!" He nodded and smiled, because he knew that his books would outshine death.

Joachim Lottmann closed his eyes forever on October 25th in Vienna.

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