Elke Heidenreich: "Books, save me!"
© Credit: imago / PolingI was a child in the postwar period, when the mothers got hard through the war and the fathers were destroyed. The marriages kept up with anger, the apartments were cramped, the children annoying. I was the easy-to-care kid because I sat in the corner, shut up and read when they screamed. I read myself away. "Alice in Wonderland", "Dr. Dolittle and his Animals", "Pu the Bear", "Pinocchio", "The Wind in the Willows", "The Green School", "King of the Wind", oh so many wonderful books from the Protestant library - that was my world, in which the parents could not follow me. "You ruin your eyes" was the only comment, and, yes, I spoiled it. So what. I was a lot sick as a child. Reading does not heal a sick lung, but it distracts from the misery, three or four hours, and after that one is tired, asleep and already has a little more power.
The easy-care child became the difficult child in puberty: It had been reading its way too far from the world of its parents, landing on completely different shores in other worlds. Separation was inevitable after clashes - the first great pain, but also cured reading. The Russians! Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, what a world opened up! The Americans, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair, Margaret Mitchell, "Gone with the Wind," this great, very political Southern novel, far more than just the love story between Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler, and then the discovery of the Germans, Hesse, oh, the "Steppenwolf", this book of life!
It makes little sense to enumerate I've been fed on books. I read through every day and every night, days and nights, under the school desk in boring hours, in my room, in the tram, in waiting rooms, not a day without a book, without an adventure in my head, on the one hand I drifted farther and farther away from my world On the other hand, I gradually found my place in it. Poems helped - Gottfried Benn, Else Lasker-Schüler, Chris-tine Lavant, Mascha Kaléko, Rilke, the beloved Mörike - "Love, it is said, is tied to the stake / this noble head no longer has where it rests. .. "I wrote thick notebooks full of children's writing, ink, poetry for a few pages, even today I can memorize hundreds, in anxiety or horror situations I tell them inwardly, and it always helps, always. Men do not read poetry? With the great Rüdiger Safranski I once recited poems for a whole night at a bar table, surrounded by noise and people, always taking turns, in the end he won a house-high. He knew more. And we talked about what this marathon reading does to us, what these many poems in our bodies do to us.
They strengthen, strengthen, help, comfort, they are retrievable, eternal wisdom, cleverly formulated by artists who are greater than ourselves. Fear of death? Alas, so many have gone the way - "Death is great, we are His own, laughing mouths, when we mean in the midst of life, he dares to weep, in the midst of us". Anyone who recalls this (Rilke) is no longer afraid, nothing at all. Everything is said. I can not understand the world, I do not even understand my own life. But Hermann Hesse explains to me (as in the music of Wagner's "Tannhäuser") the dissociation of the artist in society, Christa Wolf writes about Kleist and the Günderrode, both of whom killed young, would they really have been unable to help? Hans Henny Jahnn describes the breaking of the "normal" life drastically. Dostoyevsky asks if guilt can be atoned for (not really!), And Goncharov warns of drowning in lethargy. Flaubert's Emma Bovary is obsessed with conceited passions (and bad novels!), Balzac dissects the woman of 30, and García Márquez makes me understand South America, even though I've never been there. Updike explains to me how petty bourgeois tick, and Marlen Haushofer, how much we have lost contact with nature and animals.
The right story at the right time is often really a linchpin in life
Virginia Woolf shows how fragile we are and how beautiful the single moment can be, and Dorothy Parker drowns in cynicism, where Katherine Mansfield still manages to remain merely ironic. What kind of worlds are opening up! And that should not help to understand better the incomprehensible world in which I live, to find my way around it better? Some books are and were food at some times, more important than eating and drinking. Eat, drink, breathe, it works like that, but getting the right story at the right time is often a pivotal point in life, a decision-making tool when things go wrong, a push in the right direction.Anyone who has read Jonathan Franzens "corrections" can not go home Christmas, if the family is not really one. The liar stops. Richard Ford: His short stories come off smoothly and are beneath the surface of the brutality that some people make us, while at the same time tearing the ground from under our feet. It helps to recognize such mechanisms. Books have always helped me. The bad in the (garbage) potty, the good in the head. I do not understand how to live without them. I never could.
Reading as therapy?
From a healing effect of the literature goes out the bibliotherapy. It is still not anchored in German-speaking countries as it is in the USA, but more and more therapists are also using the possibilities of reading as an adjunctive therapy or integrated into a creative psychotherapy. Whether detective novel or love story? which reading is individually suitable, finds an experienced therapist out in conversation. More information: Training is offered by the renowned Fritz Perls Institute (www.eag-fpi.com); Contacts are arranged by the German Society for Poetry and Bibliotherapy e.V. (www.dgpb.org); Literature: Hilarion G. Petzold / Use Orth (Hrsg.): Poetry and therapy. On the healing power of language (432 p., 29.80 euros, Edition Sirius)
