Time is getting faster

This novel by Peter Kurzeck, the third from his estate, the eighth part of his major project “The Old Century”, is bathed in a gloomy light, especially in comparison to the so wonderfully sun-drenched predecessor volume “The Last Summer and the Summer Before”.

The darkness of the post-war period, that of the mid-1960s, seems to dominate here. Kurzeck begins with a train journey from Frankfurt to Gießen, using the train station in Frankfurt and then the one in Gießen, where you arrive and “nothing is right”.

This Gießen train station had seemed black to him since his childhood: “From the imperial era. A train station of ungainly sooty black rock. With a tower. A tower with four moonlike station clocks. And how black, serious and urgent this tower kept looking at me.”

But it is not just the train station with its gloom, later he also speaks of “twilight gray”, “that wet, cold, gray working day morning”, of the “completely gray world”, of landscapes of ruins and black markets.

“Evening” was nominated for the German Book Prize

As is so often the case with this writer, the I that is being told comes almost suddenly, times and spaces are sometimes seamlessly joined together. Yes, Kurzeck also wonders who always speaks of him in the third person.

On the level of the present, it is the year 1982. Kurzeck, or rather: his narrator is with his girlfriend Sibylle and daughter Carina visiting Jürgen and Pascale in Frankfurt-Eschersheim, with the couple who are friends who plan to emigrate to Barjac in southern France and settle there to run a cafe. And Kurzeck tells and tells how it is his way to cheat the time, “you know, the time”: “The time is getting faster. And takes everything.”

When he died in 2013, Peter Kurzeck had lost his fight against time and was no longer able to complete “The Old Century”. “Vorabend”, the fifth volume of this twelve-volume autobiographical-poetic cycle, was the last to be published during his lifetime.

With over a thousand pages, Kurzeck had hardly gotten this book under control; nevertheless, after many years on the fringes of the literary scene and being an eternal insider tip, the publication of “Vorabend” in 2011 earned him fame and honor: the novel was not only nominated for the German Book Prize, calls for the Büchner Prize were also heard loudly.

“And where my house?” is to a certain extent an excerpt from “Evening”. According to his faithful editor Rudi Deuble in the afterword, Kurzeck has removed chapters 37 to 40 from the “Evening” manuscript and put them back together with numerous other notes for this eighth “The Old Century” volume. Of the four completed chapters of the novel, it is above all the first three that reveal the genesis, with Gießen as the geographic centre.

Kurzeck describes the station as it appeared to him as a child and in his mid-twenties; he remembers walking through the ruins with his mother when he was five years old, it’s 1948; and he fades even further back to Staufenberg, where he fled from Tachau in Bohemia with his sister and mother when he was three years old. The father also returns later from the war, reading “Faust”.

What Kurzeck does here in terms of memory work is once again grandiose, with all the certainly fictitious enrichments, all in his well-known short-winded prose sound with the many elliptical sentences, the popistic enumerations, the rhythmic redundancies.

Hardly anyone from contemporary German-language literature is able to revive certain times and regions so densely and concisely, that is unique. Time has certainly lost many a duel against Kurzeck.

A lot is about the foreign soldiers of the US Army

When he and his mother then linger in Gießen in 1948 on “a neat little square” “where most of the houses are missing” and look around to see who else is sitting on the benches, Kurzeck arrives practically without a transition to what is probably the central theme for ” And where is my house?”, which he sometimes called the “LSC book”: to the soldiers who populated Giessen at that time.

And to those who were still in town in the mid-1960s, working for the US Army’s Labor Service Companies, for their civilian labor companies. Kurzeck worked for them “ten long incomprehensible years”, from 1961 to 1971.

His focus is primarily on those members of the US Army who, like himself, come from Eastern Europe. They are former forced laborers and prisoners of war who initially lead a nice life after the end of the war compared to the time before, but lose their prospects over the years.

The title “And where my house?”, a quote from the first stanza of the Czech national anthem, refers to the difficult situation of this group of people, who were counted among the “displaced persons”.

The accuracy with which everyday life in the barracks is described here and what happens to these “peripheral figures with their own peculiarities” in the future sometimes has something tough about it. But again it is commendable that Kurzeck devoted himself to this unknown chapter of post-war history at all.

The notes and documents that Deuble gave to “And where my house” bear witness to the fact that he is giving up and turning back to his own memories from childhood and youth. Many of them are small, wonderful pieces of prose in which the whole Kurzeck is. “Are the plum trees still there?” is a question at the very end. “At the level crossing at the gas station, how they bloom. That’s how you felt the future as a child.” And it’s over again, this future, time always wins in the end. The work of Peter Kurzeck, however, will remain for quite a while.