day 3 – your favourite book

Now, this is definitely the toughest of all decisions on the list. First problem: What is the most important criterion for this decision? Shall I chose the book which I have read most often? Christine Nöstlinger‘s children’s and youths’ books would probably struggle for the top positions there. They would also be in top positions as far as their helpfulness is concerned. If, as A. L. Kennedy has claimed recently, the arts are “part of what gets us through the day, especially in the harshest of times”, then Nöstlinger’s words got me through most of my troublesome childhood and adolescence. My everlasting thanks for that. On the other hand, my childhood and youth days are long gone now. I have neither thought about nor touched any of her books in a long, long time. They seem to have lost their significance and it is a good thing that they have. Who would want permanent adolescence?

Should I perhaps honour my profession by chosing something aesthetically valuable or culturally significant by some common standard? Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, for instance? Should I choose something which has a particularly important political dimension, such as Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own? I feel that these aspects – valid and important as they are and however much I love both books – are too devoid of emotion to base my judgment of my favourite book on them.

So, how to define one’s favourite book? I think I should perhaps choose something which represents aspects of literature that I appreciate the most. Therefore, it must be a combination of interesting thoughts about culture and society, it must be humorous, and it must contain things which are important as far as my personal, everyday life is concerned and therefore… tada… the prize as my favourite book goes to Sven Regener‘s Herr Lehmann, translated into English as Berlin Blues. Before the publication of Herr Lehmann, Sven Regener had been notorious as the singer of the German band Element of Crime and if I had not been given the novel as a present – I cannot remember by whom – that alone would have been reason enough for me to avoid it.

I have a long-standing and deeply rooted aversion against all kinds of music with what I like to call singer-songwriter-appeal. The only exception from this rule which is kind of shameful to admit is the thing I have with Sheryl Crow or, recently with the fabulously talented and extremely beautiful Holly Golightly, no shame in that, of course. I simply demand of music that it kicks something and Element of Crime make the kind of music which kicks nothing but which sits down with you for a thoughtful exchange of arguments. Too little energy in that for my taste. Therefore, the provenance of Herr Lehmann would normally have been enough to put me off reading it.

But since I am very easily convinced by the power of facts, I often read books simply because they are there. So, if someone wanted to really annoy me, they would just have to give me a book as a present I will hate: I will read it anyway and be annoyed with it for a very long period of time. It is much more effective in order to wind me up than anything which anyone could say to me. Fortunately, it is quite unpredictable what kind of book I’m going to hate.

In the case of Herr Lehmann, however, I am glad that the book came to me, because it turned out one of my all-time favourite reads. As far as my criteria are concerned, I am still convinced that it is the book of what is called die Wende in Germany, i.e. the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent political development. As far as I am concerned, it is what literary critics in Germany have been demanding of German authors for decades now: THE novel about the fall of the Berlin Wall, if from a slightly twisted, because not so much concerned with world politics, perspective.

It portrays quite accurately how unimportant the event itself was to most people of my generation in Western Germany. Days before Schabowski more or less accidentally granted freedom of travel to the people of the GDR, nobody had thought that they would ever open their borders, let alone cease to exist as quickly as the GDR did. That it ceased to exist without serious consideration whether there were parts of it worth preserving is one of the big scandals in German postwar history and I attribute that scandal at least partly to the lack of interest in the Eastern German political situation in most of the Western German population. We knew that there was something called real existierender Sozialismus and we also knew that it meant severe restrictions to large parts of the East-German population, but we just did not care.

To say this is quite certainly an over-generalization of the state of Western German affairs in the late 80s, but I think that there is a deeper truth to it. Federal Republic Germans born after the erection of the Berlin Wall just grew up with the notion of two German states. We did not see the existence of the GDR as an irregularity, on the contrary: It was normal to us. We even accepted the awkward status of West Berlin as given, found it convenient even: You could relocate there if you wanted to evade military service, the sub-cultural scene was legendary, life was cheap, you could just exist in Berlin, if you had no idea what else to do with your life. Berlin was an island in the middle of Germany without what made life in Germany unbearable for rebellious youths: a sense of purpose, efficiency, and a plan. Germans are very fond of having a plan, in Berlin you did not need one if you did not have any without being a social outcast.

Herr Lehmann captures this kind of attitude to life quite accurately. It even manages to convey a sense of its danger: It juxtaposes Frank Lehmann, who is quite content living a life without ambition, with his best friend Karl who aspires to be a sculptor and suffers a breakdown when he has his first exhibition, because he cannot bear the notion of getting actual feedback on his work. The novel, via the psychiatrist who treats Karl, says that you can live a life without any notion of purpose if you have the stamina. One of the key scenes of the novel is the first encounter between Frank and his love interest, “the beautiful cook”, in which they argue about whether time passes more slowly or more quickly when you are drunk. This type of quasi-philosophical rambling is quite typical of the novel and what makes it so hilarious.

Towards the end, whan Frank turns 30 on the same day the Wall is open, everyone first finishes their drinks in the pub and then decide that they will go and see what is going on at the border crossings. The way I see it, this kind of self-absorbed attitude to what has retrospectively turned out to be a massive turning-point in European history is typical of reactions to die Wende. Besides, the novel also provides insights into urban everyday life in the 80s which are observed quite accurately and one of the best pub brawl scenes in German literature ever. What more can you ask?

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