Judith Hermann made her debut with a collection of stories entitled “Sommerhus, later” in the year 2000. She perfectly captured the feeling of life that prevailed in the inner city districts of the German capital in the nineties. Young people in occupied run-down blocks of flats. Conversations in cafes, where you can barely make out the person you’re talking to through the cigarette smoke. Conversations of the kind that never end, but only continue as the afternoon turns to evening. That atmosphere there was what Judith Hermann was able to recreate, and suddenly a completely new tone had been struck in German post-war literature. BRAKE DEBUT: “Sommerhus, later” came in 1998 and established Judith Hermann as an overnight star, largely because …SIGNIFICANT: …the critic legend Marcel Reich-Ranicki boasted about her in his TV program “Das Literarisches Quartett” . Best-selling lectures In “We should have told each other everything” we are going back there. Both to these young people, and to the summer house. But this time Hermann does it in a different way. She gives us the behind-the-scenes of the authorship. She takes us to the actual summer house, and some of the real people who have, in various ways, served as models for the stories she has told. The starting point for the book was an invitation from the Goethe University in Frankfurt to hold the so-called Frankfurter Poetikvorlesung. Not just anyone gets that invitation. What I think is unusual is that these lectures, where the author has to say something about how she writes, become a bestseller. It happened this time. Meeting the psychiatrist at the night kiosk The book begins late at night outside what Berliners call “Späti”, nicely translated by Sverre Dahl as “night kiosk”. Judith and a fellow writer are looking for cigarettes. There she then meets her psychiatrist of many years, to whom she previously only lay on a sofa and talked to. And already here the narrative begins to vibrate. It is as if what we hear is almost crying out for interpretation. Who is this psychiatrist in this context? Is he a symbol of the reader? As a silent listener who takes in what the author chooses to tell? Because even lying on the sofa, isn’t it the case that the author tells “everything”? What does the author choose to tell? What does she choose to hide? Growing up west of the wall And so it continues into one poignant and telling scene after another. Instead of telling about how she writes, she shows it. It becomes immediately moving when she tells about growing up with her mother, father and grandmother west of the wall, in the district of Neukölln. The father is depressed, and spends several years in a psychiatric institution. The mother is the one who earns the money, but has little time left over for her daughter. “Sometimes I had the impression that I had only imagined my mother,” writes Hermann. Beat that sentence, literature spring 2023! A Doll’s House with Secrets What is interesting to say the least here is that Hermann writes single scenes that consistently point in two directions. The starting point is personal, but the personal points towards the artistic, aesthetic. An example of this is the dollhouse, which her father built for her. With secret rooms. We can partly interpret this as a picture of how things were in this family. But this is just as much about what literature is. A story is a dollhouse with hidden rooms. The reader populates the rooms with his experience. Inserts his own figures in the rooms. Watching the Holocaust on TV Behind these familial depictions of mood, we also see the contours of a larger picture. This happens, among other things, when she and her father go over to her grandmother’s to watch the TV series “Holocaust”, which was shown on TV in Germany (and in Norway) in 1979. The big conversation about Germany’s historical guilt in two world wars has German authors used many pages on. Judith Hermann needs no more than a few paragraphs, and then we see the divided city she grew up in, with walls and watchtowers before us. Populated by people, many of whom were in close relations with those who had cheered Hitler on during the war. As a counterpart to the family Hermann grew up in, there is the self-chosen family she finds as a young adult. A group of friends, in Judith Hermann’s case. Who find together a few summers at the summer house she has inherited on the coast of northern Germany. Before they too disappear, and then the author is left alone with a son who is on his way out of the nest. Pulling away the veil In this autobiographical narrative, she thus pulls away the fictional veil. She too. Like so many others these days. She is one of many who strive towards what I, for lack of better terms, would call the diary-like. Per Petterson did not get to write a novel, and wrote the journal “Mitt Abruzzo”. When I read that book I felt that something was missing. I missed the novels. In his latest Italia novels, Hanne Ørstavik has almost forced a kind of understanding that this behind-the-scenes film, yes, now this is the film itself. And now Judith Hermann is coming with a behind-the-scenes film, which in some ways surpasses the film itself. She has written the story of her life both figuratively and literally. news reviews Photo: Pelikanen Title: “We should have told each other everything” Original title: “Wir hähten uns alles gesagt” Author: Judith Hermann Translator: Sverre Dahl Genre: Novel Publisher: Pelikanen Number of pages: 167 Date: 16/05/2023 Hi! I’m reading and reviews literature in news. Please also read my review of “Kairos” by Jenny Erpenbeck, “Details” by Ia Genberg, or Franz Kafka’s “The Process” translated by Jon Fosse.
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“We should have told each other everything” by Judith Hermann – Reviews and recommendations
