2023-08-20 11:33:03
Years ago, Frankfurt’s Bahnhofsviertel was a neglected oasis of decline and depravity. On my way to the IG Metall headquarters on Wilhelm-Leuschner-Strasse, I sometimes made a detour through “his neighborhood”. I imagined meeting him one day. He would approach me, wearing his long black coat and a peaked cap. You could tell from the marbled skin on his face that he was used to being outside in all weathers.
There were dozens of brothels here, and even during the day the street was crowded with men walking about like hunters looking for easy prey. On the corner there was a shoemaker and a little further some furriers. A number of foreign banks are located here today. Whether that is progress remains to be seen.
Did you describe yourself as a ‘stray’ in one of your writings at the time because you were often out and about here? Or can you tell me the difference between a flaneur and a stray?
Typically, a stray is someone who has no fixed abode and wanders aimlessly from place to place. Oh well; I already had a permanent place of residence. But I liked the remote, somewhat shady milieu. If you like, it was resistance to normality, respectable philistinism.
But it was often pure boredom that drove me here. The fascinating thing about boredom is that you get absorbed in things without wanting to or even realizing it. You get into a kind of ‘permanent daydream’. The daydream is a way of getting through adverse circumstances relatively unmolested. As soon as we grow up and are no longer allowed to ‘play’, we have to find a substitute: fantasy. So the daydream is also a surrogate for the loss of gambling; at the same time, however, a bridge for the emergence of ‘symbols’ with which we compensate for the loss. One involuntarily relates what is observed to oneself; to your own biography or whatever. In this way, the ‘external and internal perspective’ merge seamlessly at some point.
Wouldn’t a term like ‘flaneur’ also have come into question for you? The flâneur is regarded as the ‘literary figure’ of modernity par excellence, and there is a whole range of famous role models such as Baudelaire, Benjamin or Franz Hesel, in whose company you might have felt quite comfortable?
I was anything but a ‘literary character’ at the time, drifting through the crowd, going with the flow, pausing every now and then to look at things and events around me. The flaneur derives his reflections from this: that he ‘literarizes’ his observations. He is an ‘intellectual guy’ through and through. I lacked both: I was neither a writer nor an intellectual, but more of a drifter. My subject became the ‘mediocrity of normal people’, their diffuse moods, their malaise, their homelessness. If you like, I wanted to portray the ‘misery of modern man’ as precisely as possible, without any formal frills.
The stray finds a certain charm even in the ‘inhospitable city’. To a certain extent he keeps pace with the damage to his surroundings or, generally speaking: the environment. And while the flâneur is now out of date, the stray can be seen as its contemporary successor. He’s up to date, so to speak. I felt true ‘shudders of unease’ at the devastation wrought by the so-called city planners. At the time, I found this ‘anarchic temptation’ attractive. Of course, it was also an attempt to escape the demands of everyday life. I once referred to this flight into the niches of existence as my ‘life savings’. By that I meant renouncing everything superfluous, such as luxury and property, everything that most people strive for throughout their lives.
What finally prompted you to write about your perceptions? When did you start doing this? Was there a specific event that pushed you to write?
no way. You shouldn’t think of a writer as someone who sits down in front of a blank sheet of paper and waits for ideas. For me everything happened casually. Even as a child, the smallest things could inspire me to fantastic flights of fancy. That was probably because I was alone a lot and had to fill my time with something. Later I had a girlfriend for a while that I didn’t know what to do with. To entertain them, I wrote down small incidents that I had noticed in everyday life and told them about them. I kept the notes in secret. I was all the more dependent on making a reasonably coherent story out of the few notes. I later began to write down these stories and sent them to the editors of local newspapers. To my surprise, some of my posts actually got printed. Eventually I was offered an editor’s job, and I wrote about all sorts of things, not realizing that one day it would come in handy.
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You are known for the fact that many of your stories begin with the perception of small and minute things or occurrences. It could be a broken shoe or an umbrella. It’s mostly things that others overlook and that usually go unnoticed. With you, they set in motion a ‘fantasy and narrative stream’ that repeatedly leads to surprising twists and turns. With you, they become poetic objects with which you enter into a secret alliance. Can one say that your poetry is ‘world-rejecting’ and because of that ‘world-enhancing’?
Yes, you can say that. The prerequisite, however, is that I try to step out of the ‘linear order of time’, at least temporarily. Strictly speaking, we live in two different ‘time-course forms’: the first could be called ‘objective time’, the everyday, inexorable, uniform, mathematical sequence of time units. You have to break away from this. I need to immerse myself in a different ‘experience of time’. To really notice an ordinary thing, I have to stop and look at it for a long time. Only then does the ‘sensory perception’ become an ‘aesthetic view’. Aesthetic viewing is always associated with ‘lingering’; ideally, this leads to an experience of happiness, as if everything around me also stood still for a moment.
Can these moments be brought about consciously or do they just happen to you by accident?
Strictly speaking, the discovery of the poetic in the casual does not go back to a specific search, but rather it is brought about, invented, a special perception of things by the viewer and his interpretation. One involuntarily relates what is observed to oneself; to your own biography or whatever. In this way, the ‘external and internal perspective’ merge seamlessly at some point. This harmony makes the poet a hermeneutic and epiphanic. Poets are sometimes ‘phantasts’ and behave like children discovering the magic in things. In these lies the magic, in the poets the ‘expectation of magic’, if you will.
In your Frankfurt poetry lecture ‘The Animation of the Blind Spot’ you dealt with the phenomenon of ‘epiphany’ using the example of Proust, Joyce and above all Virginia Woolf. What exactly do you mean by an ‘epiphany’?
An epiphany is what accidentally but compellingly occurs to us when we look at something longer than necessary, realizing the objects’ appealing character. An epiphany is something that makes sense to us and moves us, but which we would have forgotten a day later if we hadn’t kept it to ourselves. Our assimilation gaze connects us with many foreign moments and unconsciously reassembles them with the results of other, earlier gazes. This creates a ‘symbiosis’ of the outside and the inside. Because everything that we look at again and again and longer than necessary begins one day to speak to us and within us. One could speak of an ‘aesthetics of the moment’.
Of course, these perceptions must also be expressed in the ‘stylistic’. I make a note of the segments copied from everyday life and later try to specify them in as sparse and straightforward a form as possible; according to the subject of the presentation. Any embellishment would be out of place. Look around. Is this reality you see here worth being aesthetically exaggerated in any way? I look for a kind of ‘hidden meaning’ in insignificant or even remote things, or as Chekhov said: ‘The dramas that take place on a small scale’. That could be the credo of my writing. What else should I be doing besides writing? So I just keep going. The real writers are the ones who keep starting from scratch. I really don’t understand why people even take note of my lyrics. You know what you read there. But your example shows me that every now and then there is someone who is interested in it.
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