Remembering Joachim Lottmann: He hijacked the means of expression

Joachim Lottmann used real names and then still invented something freely (or in his opinion: appropriately) about the people so named. This is common knowledge, and almost all obituaries find it in need of explanation. However, as is often assumed, this is not a writing strategy, a rhetoric, or the joys of exaggeration and fiction as the privilege of the imaginative writer, although that sometimes helps as an explanation. But his fables were by no means limited to what he wrote; his everyday speech was the same.

He explained this with his “repetition disgust”; it was torturous for him to reproduce something as it actually was or as it had already been written down somewhere. It was necessary to describe every visit to a café, every change of tire and every crossing of a main road, but also every message that was somehow noticed, in such a way that they looked like scenes from a life-hungry novel. If this wasn't possible or if there was no one who wanted to hear it and could enjoy these descriptions, he became depressed.

One of his heroes was Antoine Doinel, the mischievous main character of five Truffaut films, who is often seen as his alter ego.

In order to tell my stories with Lottmann, I unfortunately have to clarify one of his most important forgeries. The constantly changing false dates of birth were sacred to him, and the oft-repeated celebration of his 60th birthday was a running joke. But he didn't die at the age of 70, as we read everywhere, but at the age of 74. When I became friends with him in 1975, he was already over 20 and lived in a commune that wasn't his first. He was my best friend for a few years.

But this spacious single-family home in Hamburg-Bramfeld was the place where his writing first had an impact. At least eight people lived at Seekamp all the time, and numerous permanent guests like the author of these lines came and went.

Political groups and cultural sects had an influence from outside; for a while the Hamburg section of Otto Muehl's AAO movement (Action Analytical Organization) wanted to take over the store, then again there was a strong influence from the anarcho scene around the legendary “black market”. Later, influential figures of the German New Wave such as Holger Hiller (Palais Schaumburg) and Marc Chung (Abwärts, Neuhäusern) lived there for a time.

Revolutionizing everyday life and living together was at the top of the agenda. There was a community book in which everyone could enter their ideas and observations. Lottmann hijacked this means of expression. To combat the complaints about washing-up appointments not being kept, he simply wrote his diary for everyone. It contained blatant judgments, pleas for arguments, manifestos and impressions of everyday life that was about to be revolutionized, which repeatedly lapped into something freely invented.

The other residents were prompted to retort, the level of arguments rose, and the washing up was finally forgotten. The dirty dishes are still in Bramfeld today.

Joint readings from the Commune Book became events. But there were also bitter disagreements. However, the common language was still the critical vocabulary of a late, refined 68. Lottmann drove a post-war DKW 3=6, the car was called “Marcuse”.

Two or three years later, Lottmann moved into an apartment on his own at Grindelhof, close to the university. This was an open house “if there ever was one”. The key was under the doormat. People on their way to or from college would stop by, hang out, forget about their seminars, and argue or fall in love.

Lottman wrote it all down as background for his amorous trials and tribulations and first attempts at a professional life beyond university. Everyone appeared in it and gathered together when the diary was read several times a week.

This publication of a restless self-reflection, which was partly grandiose and partly coldly evil, not only captivated the listeners with humor and speed, who saw themselves transformed into characters in a novel (that not always in a beneficial way, it almost didn't matter), but also massively spurred the author, who on the one hand wanted to entertain his people and on the other hand, like all diarists, wanted to continue to explore himself.

At times, double and triple-entry bookkeeping was necessary; in addition to the public one, a “secret” diary was kept and also a “boring” one, which was only supposed to be about becoming clear about something, even if it was the discomfort with the account balance. Of course, they were then presented publicly at some point. Long before the word existed, Lottman's diaries and commune books took seriously both parts of the word autofiction: the self and the (free) invention.

At first I was comfortable with the idea that repeating a well-known fact was an insult to reason. Banality was the greatest enemy in those times, as perhaps vulgarity is today. The passionate debate couldn't stop, it was as important as and also the beginning of the immediate transition to the other intense states: love, sex, drugs - the latter not for Lottmann, it gave him a headache. But he was wide awake and a virtuoso in his favorite discipline: “Creating situations!”

Sometime at the end of 1977, the six of us were once again cruising back and forth in an overloaded blue Beetle between moderately exciting parties in the Karoviertel and Eimsbüttel, Lottmann stopped early in the morning at a gas station, appeared to fill up, went in to pay and came back with his eyes wide open, a broad grin and the news that the RAF had just shot the head of the GSG9.

“I just read it in tomorrow’s Bild newspaper.” There he had his intensity, his heated discussion. It wasn't until hours later that someone asked why he hadn't brought the newspaper with him. In truth, Ulrich Wegner enjoyed his life until 2017.

The banality of the fact can only be fended off through special perspectives, sensibilities, atmosphere and ambivalence as long as there is another stabilizing consensus among those who engage in this defense of objectivity: a poetic group spirit, shared living spaces, languages ​​- or even the social agreement of the character of art.

This consensus can also be created temporarily through such a program: in the micro-areas of the circle of friends and their charisma. There was little in the community and in their projects to encourage them to embark on this adventure.

Of course, such a world quickly becomes narrow; If you expand it, you have to decide whether you want to be an imperialist or a flâneur when dealing with new people and others. Lottmann had a tendency to blame the narrowness that logically arises from the circle of friends who communicate with a lot of prerequisites not on the structure, but on the sentences, ideas and content of the other participants. Wasn't this the same opinion bullshit we knew from the system's official communication?

The justified affect against the structural stupidity of opinion turned into resentment against certain concrete opinions and habits - and, since he saw his own milieu above all, against “left-wing opinion shit”. Unfortunately, something snapped in the early to mid-80s, no matter how much he was able to cultivate his humorously quirky prose; In my opinion, it only extended to the beginning of his book-producing career (from 1987).

But the now published early novel from the public diary period (“Port Stanley has fallen”) already suffered from the lack of coherence of a plot that forcibly held together the confusingly flickering trendy bar lights. In the mid-80s we grew apart, then tried dating again in Cologne. Contact broke off around 1988.

The opposition to “leftist opinion shit” turned into either reactionary or made up bizarre nonsense positions. What he liked best - between novels - was to portray mainstream politicians, from Olaf Scholz to Sebastian Kurz. He always enjoyed working for the unsavory world of the Axel Springer publishing house, and when he was at Spiegel, then as a protégé of confused right-wingers like Matthias Matussek.

Brilliantly, he always found his way out of such worlds and briefly warmed up again in the left-wing queer milieu that he supposedly despised so much. He had the very special quality of never having been offended with Martin Kippenberger, who allegedly issued a fatwa against him and thus drove him out of Cologne (nonsense!). He never grumbled when his nonsensical program was pointed out to him.

And so it happened that about a year ago I was one of the people to whom he announced his death on the phone and asked for one last meeting - after all these decades.

This was very beautiful, his wife was very likeable and the “Boring Diary” that was soon created and distributed via Instagram and Facebook was not only incredible in its handling of his own demise, but now functioned in the same way as his socially controlled commune prose from 1975, aimed at a specific, devoted readership. It was the same spirit of optimism. Only now it was a departure towards death.