New novel by Heinz Strunk: Trapped in your own echo chamber

News from the Strunk template: The author Heinz Strunk reheats the disillusioned sensitivities of old white men book after book. He doesn't add any originality. Nevertheless, he is reliably nominated for the German Book Prize. How is that possible?

“What you say is yourself,” says a saying learned in kindergarten. Strunk, who recently found children's books to have a tendency to be under-challenging, therefore has reason to look into his own nose: the characters, motifs and locations of his new novel "Memories of Heidelberg" have all already been explored by the author in previous novels and short stories - "Jürgen" (2017), "It's always so nice with you" (2021) and the collection of short stories "The Yellow Elephant" (2023). been.

“Memories of Heidelberg”, appropriately named after a Peggy March hit from 1967 given the boom in political nostalgia, continues Strunk's “mushy apocalypse”: Isolde and Bertram (the author himself interprets this naming and other ideas in the novel using brackets), reduced to pragmatism in terms of communication after 18 years of marriage, carry out the final act of their sinking corporation on the gastro ship soulless Heidelberg boutique hotels.

Every evening they are served overpriced, pitiful food only after a long wait, and the couple are humiliated for no reason by the Italian owners: “What we have to put up with,” Bertram complains in the perfect manner of the persistently self-pitying middle-class man.

The shock is just as difficult to digest as in Strunk's exemplary short story "Croquettes" from "The Yellow Elephant": The couple's mood changed because the local Greek had actually run out of croquettes. Strunk's dramaturgical trick is repetition: food instead of sex - Bertram stores "his favorite snacks" called "Almond Intermezzo" - which already characterized the nameless protagonist in the novel "It's always so nice with you": The washed-up musician, in his mid-forties, struggled with his physical decline just like Bertram and compensated for his insecurity by cooking, eating and having sex with an anorexic young actress. In between, he also took a vacation in a run-down grand hotel.

With the novel, Strunk made it onto the longlist for the “German Book Prize” for the first time in 2021. Now he's nominated again with a facsimile of this body obsession. How is this “Strunk principle” explained, which makes readers, critics and even a book prize jury alike want to read essentially the same book over and over again?

Familiar plots with schematic characters provide Strunk with a feeling of reassuring security. The author writes predictably. For him, existential insecurity as well as feared or suffered social exclusion always and exclusively leads to the individual body: "At around 1.70 meters, Peter weighs probably 100 kilos [...] I imagine him waddling like a penguin towards his beloved in a discotheque, and when he finally arrives, she is long gone," it said in "Jürgen" back in 2017.

“Unattractive Willis” were already the object of amusement back then. “Of course it’s something physical, what else?!” says Bertram.

You won't find any discursive criticism of the system or society in Strunk's work. “Boy Saves Friend from Pond” was the only foray into this dimension and, perhaps for that reason, Strunk's most successful novel. This was followed by a lot of mass-compatible under-demanding, probably due to the commercial pressure for success with which the Strunk brand has been associated since “Meat is My Vegetable”. Using the literary questionable method tell, don’t show, Strunk controls the emotions and reception of his readers throughout the entire course of the novel: “Why does he use the pseudo-intellectual buzzword narrative?” And simplifies his own writing like a didactic children's book author.

Strunk justifies 150 of 170 pages without a plot - trapped in his own echo chamber - with the film reference “The Big Eat”. In it, four men move into a villa to eat themselves to death and it's never explained why they're doing this: "It's similar here. There's no reason at all, for nothing." Critics call this “Kafkaesque”.

Strunk uses template-like archetypes as a backdrop for Bertram's incessantly self-centered character speech: "No matter how much Bertram tries to stem the flood of thoughts, his overheated imagination cannot be curbed. How much has been fucked in the world, and how much do the 155,000 residents of Heidelberg alone fuck in a single weekend without him, Bertram, playing a major role in it."

The female supporting characters are - like all female characters from Strunk's pen (remember the once "stunningly beautiful", then just "wafer-thin" Vanessa or Inge, the "mushy apocalypse made of wobbly, tendons, veins, fat, cracks and probably a few bones" in "The Golden Glove" about the woman murderer Fritz Honka) - mere projection surfaces for Bertram's fantasies: "Antonella, you girl of all girls, you ultimate GIRL marinated in baby oil," Bertram comments on the young waitress on the gastro ship: "She rises very slowly from the stool and presents her bottom. Her mouth full of fruit, her hard, plump bottom poured into jeans. THE ASS ALONE. Everyone, really everyone thinks."

Heinz Strunk: “Memories of Heidelberg”. Rowohlt, Hamburg 2026. 176 pages, 23 euros

Isolde is also constantly sexualized by her husband through the male gaze - of course with a wink and self-irony, the only way in which contempt for women becomes socially acceptable or acceptable in a novel in times of #Metoo and political correctness: "The worst torture: lying next to someone you desire, but you are no longer allowed to touch her."

Isolde has declared – as befits a female character over the age of 27 conceived by a male author – her complete sexual withdrawal. And Bertram, the poor thing, suffers: “When he gets so fat that he can no longer see his thing, he will have forgotten that he has one.”

If Strunk were an author, the accusation of “navel-gazing” would be made at this point. If, on the other hand, as an author you belong to the dominant gender (that of the critics who like to praise authors like Heinz Strunk), navel-gazing suddenly becomes universal: something that “everyone understands”, a “jewel of contemporary German-language literature”.

Such gendered double standards are relatively easy to see through once you have recognized them, but they have a tradition and continue to have an impact: Denis Scheck's recent shitstorm about the "chatter from the ladies' toilet" and the responding anthology "The Ladies' Toilet" bear witness to this.

The author Anke Stelling asked the following questions in her essay “Disguising the Voice” in 2020: “Who is discussing whose migration, which literature actually plays a role and who gets the crisis instead of a role is what interests me.”

Stelling's questions remain relevant as long as such a trivial text by a loud-mouthed author is listed as one of the best 20 books of the most influential German-language book prize for the third time in a row.