Encounter with the author Jochen Schimmang: Paperback Writer

Jochen Schimmang picks me up from the train station and, with subtle irony, acts as a tour guide through his Oldenburg. He can't show me much, it's not far from his apartment in the picturesque former craftsmen's quarter a little above the horse market. At least we pass the beautiful Casablanca art house cinema. When he accompanies me back to the train later, we get caught in a cloudburst and stand under the cinema awnings. The friendly projectionist finally gives us shelter.

Schimmang tells me that he also enjoyed living in Berlin, Bochum and Cologne, but he now actually feels “at home” here. In one of his books, a little digression might be needed to dim the resonant homeland pathos.

A stair lift in the hallway. His wife Sabine, who we know from his books, comes towards me in a wheelchair and greets me with sparkling eyes. She's the more fun-loving one in this marriage, it comes to mind. The idea is about as presumptuous as the idea of ​​visiting a writer at the place where he works in order to possibly get even closer to his work.

Jochen Schimmang: “The injured don’t jump off the dime”. Stories. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 2026. 204 pages, 24 euros

But Schimmang has known the literary world long enough, he willingly plays along and avoids any potential embarrassment with joviality and warmth. “This is my study, bedroom and library,” he explains as he offers me a seat.

In his new book of autobiographical stories, “The Injured Don't Jump from the Ten,” he talks about his first reading of Proust when he was fourteen. He has now read the “research” three times. "I wanted to be a writer very early on and I was always first captivated by the language. If not, then I just put the book down. The language, to put it a little bluntly, has to be right, that's the material we work with. Not the plot and, above all, not some message that you want to convey. You can do that. But then you should write a flyer or go on social media today. Language has always been the first priority for me."

This early school is definitely noticeable in his own prose. Schimmang tells the story tentatively, deliberatively, looks at the phenomena from several sides and waits to see what they trigger in his imagination. "Yes, that was certainly also conveyed by Proust," he admits, "but this method of sneaking around things and taking 33 detours also comes from Lars Gustafsson. Gustafsson was a very important author for me purely in terms of development, in terms of know-how. I learned from him how many different ways you can tell stories. Today it's clear anyway, we all know this hybrid form, every novel is half an essay. Nobody tells stories in a completely naive way anymore a story, but the author is also his own commentator.”

In the story “Unverhoffte Sehnsucht” he returns once again to his beginnings as a writer, to Bochum in the mid-1970s, to which he had fled to escape his Berlin K-group and to take part in real life again. Schimmang begins a second degree in psychology, but soon stops going and instead devotes himself seriously to writing.

"In order to assert yourself, I think you always need a good portion 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 was simply incredibly lucky, I had no intermediary, no agent, they didn't exist back then, and no experienced author as an advocate. I actually recommended myself by using the first two verses of 'Paperback Writer' by the Beatles as a cover letter I didn't write anything else about it.

And I was lucky that the editor, Hans-Ulrich Müller-Schwefe, was also relatively new to the publishing house and still wanted to make discoveries and probably looked at manuscripts much more thoroughly than he did later. At some point it becomes too much. I visited him in his shack for the first time in 1975 or 76. Two people fit in there, him and me. He is also quite a delicate figure. Otherwise, books and manuscripts were piled up to the ceiling. You had to be afraid that it would collapse on you.”

A productive partnership developed with Müller-Schwefe, which resulted in Schimmang's debut novel “The Beautiful Phoenix Bird”. "Whenever a part was finished, I sent it to him. He cut out a lot, for which I am very grateful to him. That was our child together, that text." “The Beautiful Phoenix Bird” is a fantastic debut. The reviews are extremely positive and the novel sells 30,000 copies. Contemporary German literature has obviously been waiting for Jochen Schimmang.

But such print runs tend to remain the exception. His language-conscious, self-reflective literature is more likely to appeal to a select, smaller audience, the happy few, so to speak. In the Anglo-Saxon world there is the term “writer's writer”.

“I never believed that I was a very audience-friendly author,” he admits. "But I'm hearing more and more now, and this might be of interest to regular readers, that I have a very specific sound that is so distinctive that you can recognize it after a few sentences - and that a fair number of readers obviously love that sound."

“The Best We Had” (2009), his large, nostalgic novel about the loss of the Rhenish Republic, was still a private bestseller and certainly did not detract from the fledgling business relationship with Edition Nautilus. After stints at Suhrkamp, ​​the Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt and Schöffling, he has finally found his publishing home with the Hamburg women.

Another story from the new book “Requiem for a Solitaire” is dedicated to the little-known essayist Christian Linder. "He wasn't an outsider. He did a lot, especially for radio, and definitely had his place in the company. But he didn't do the same thing as the others. He never really wrote a review with the usual bits and pieces. I know that from my own experience ad nauseam. They were always completely different approaches with which he approached authors and also books."

Schimmang carefully approaches his almost-friend, who died in 2024, by using his own method of biographical scavenger hunt on him. Linder believes: “A writer is someone who suffers in an exemplary manner from not being able to tell his life.” Therefore he has to camouflage it in literary terms, and the interpreter is required to solve this mystery.

Schimmang's "Conjectures about Christian" read so suggestively - there is the absent father, whom the mother hides from the son because he is not good enough, and the son who has to fill this gap - that I finally ask myself whether he is presenting an exemplary analysis here, a kind of encouragement to examine his person and his work in the same way.

Should we unravel Schimmang's riddles hidden in his work? "Well, I don't know exactly. If there was, I probably wouldn't be happy if someone found out, I would probably like to keep hiding it. But I don't know if I have it. Of course, when I wrote this requiem for Christian, I was called to think about it. Let's put it this way: I don't want to tell you the results so far." I thought so, especially since it would spoil the fun of searching for clues.

One of the leitmotifs in Schimmang's work is disappearance, the impulse to steal away from the world in order to be able to observe it more closely from hiding than when actively participating. The last story, “Homecoming of a Bather,” is about the final disappearance. The protagonist takes the train to Ostend, enjoys the journey there, the stay and at the end, at peace with himself, goes into the water. It's a strangely happy suicide.

In his Bochum reminiscence, Schimmang quotes Wolfgang Hildesheimer's novel "The Paradise of False Birds": "The best off are those who were never born. But that only happens two or three times in a thousand cases."

Is the impulse to disappear perhaps a kind of existential self-protection? Someone who deliberately goes to the edge anticipates possible injuries and thereby regains some control. They didn't put me there, I did it myself. This could mean much more than Schimmang's position in the literary world.

His autobiographical stories from the two volumes “Off-Road Walks” and “The Injured Don't Jump from the Ten” feed just such speculation. But they are also just another way of reading, one more fun that can be had with this work. You could also say that a book that opens up the world to me, and at best even interferes with my life, already has everything it needs. I no longer need to know what the author says and thinks about it.

No problem for Schimmang. “It is always up to the reader how he or she approaches literature. Their role is completely underestimated anyway.” Not from him, though.