German Book Prize: Congratulations, Ursula Krechel!
Ursula Krechel at the book award ceremony
How nice that it has become Ursula Krechel. She was the only woman who was still on the shortlist of the German Book Prize. And quite apart from that, with "Landgericht" she has written the best novel of the "final round". So he starts: "He had arrived" - but the Jew Richard Kornitzer, who had to flee from the Nazis to Cuba, no longer arrives. The country to which he returns wants to forget. A survivor as he just bothers there, is muzzled. Krechel tells the story of Kornitzer, for whom there is a role model, a judge at the Mainz district court. And she tells a story of boundless ruthlessness and cold-bloodedness that is not over yet. That makes the relevance of this novel, which also absolutely convinced linguistically.
Anyone who can write like the hitherto much neglected top poet Ursula Krechel achieves the heart of his readers and his goal in spite of meticulous access to the files, for which "Landgericht" also takes plenty of time, to try their character to the readers Speaking to literary critic Denis Scheck, Ursula Krechel has told readers to bring her as close as if she could have been her neighbor. She succeeded. Incidentally, our readers also discovered that they also voted Ursula Krechel's novel at the ChroniquesDuVasteMonde.com book prize vote in first place.
These were the six shortlist titles: Ernst Augustin: "Robinson's Blue House" Wolfgang Herrndorf: "Sand" Ursula Krechel: "County Court" Clemens J. Setz: "Indigo" Stephan Thome: "Centrifugal Force" Ulf Erdmann Ziegler: "Nothing White"
Sample: Ursula Krechel "Regional Court" (Young and Young)
Over the lake He had arrived. Arrived, but where. The station was a terminus station, the Perrons unspectacular, a dozen tracks, but then he entered the concourse. It was a great artefact, a station cathedral, spanned by a coffered barrel vault, through the windows flooded a blue, flowing light, a new-born light after the long journey. The high walls were clad in dark marble, "Reichskanzleidunkel," he would ironically before his emigration this color tone for himself called, now he found him only stately and distinguished, indeed intimidating. But the marble had not just been put on the wall as a disguise, but had also been set down, stepped, so that the walls were rhythmically structured. The floor blank, behind the counters neatly uniformed men peering through a round window, in front of them snakes of people who were not so badly dressed. (He figured they were losers, beaten, and carried their heads sky-high.) He saw French security guards in the niches of the hall, who had a polite look on the driveway. The men wore olive uniforms and weapons. As he caught sight of the elegant hall, he could imagine no reason to intervene, and so it stayed that way. A silent, admonishing, certainty-inducing presence. He could feel the calming civilization, the timelessness of the concourse, he could see the high swinging doors, three meters high and covered with brass. With fine handwriting the word "pressing" had been engraved into the brass surface, about at breast height. Cathedral doors, doors that took the traveler's full attention, the railway station was important and important, and the individual traveler would arrive safely and punctually at his destination. Kornitzer's aim had remained in the distance for so long; he did not even devise a vague desire for longing, so that he found this contradiction extremely painful. His transitory existence had become certain. Everything was sublime and dignified in this hall, he looked around, he did not see his wife, to whom he had informed his arrival time. (Or did he miss her after ten years?) No, Claire was not there. To his surprise, however, he saw numerous day-trippers, who came with shoulder-worn skis from the nearby winter sports area, happily caressed, with tanned faces. He pushed open one of the high doors and was blinded. Here lay the lake, the big blue mirror, only a few steps to the quay, soft water sloshing up, no rippling of the surface. Of course, his arrival had been delayed by a good two hours, but this delay seemed like an overstrain, the joy of arriving and seeing his wife had been indefinitely expelled.Here was the lighthouse towering out of the water, here was the Bavarian lion, who guarded the harbor with calm gesture of domination, and there were the mountains, the distant and at the same time close mountains, a backdrop of white and gray and alpine pink, their boulders, her archaic power, immovable, incredibly beautiful. He heard his name calling.
Read on: Ursula Krechel "Landgericht" (Young and Young)
The reunion of a man and a woman who had not seen each other for so long, had to feel lost. The breathless stagnation, speechlessness, the eyes that seek the gaze of the other, clinging to the gaze, eyes that grow up, drink, sink and then turn away as if relieved, tired of the work of recognition, yes, it is you , you still are. The whole face, boring in the collar of his coat, but then quickly reaching up again, the trembling excitement that can not stand the other eyes, the eyes missed ten years. The bright, watery eyes of the man behind the nickel glasses and the green eyes of the woman, the pupils have a dark ring. It is the eyes that stage the reunion, but those who have to endure it, who have to withstand it, are changed, outdated people, about the same size, on an equal footing. They smile, they smile at each other, the skin around their eyes folds, no eyelashes twitch, nothing, nothing, just the look, the long-held look, the pupils are rigid. Then a hand comes loose, is it the hand of the man or the woman ?, in any case it is a courageous hand, or rather only the tip of the right middle finger, which proves courage and also instinct and over the high cheekbones of the lost married spouse moves. A familiar finger, a nervous excitement that is still carefully divorced from a feeling of excitement. It is rather the sensitive stretched skin over the cheekbone that reacts, which signals "alert" to the whole body. A union of the nerve cells, not of the couple, this lasts much, much longer, it is a sensation that shakes the whole network of nerves, a "it's you, yes, really, it's you".
The instinctive rediscovery of the beloved, familiar skin was a miracle that the Kornitzers talked about later, later, later, with each other, they could not tell their children. Not the "touched" part of the body (man or woman) sent the alarm to the whole body, it was the active "touching one", and after half a second it was not possible to tell who had touched and who had been touched. The still lonely, barely ten years spared the spouse hand moved, twitched, stroked, even embraced and did not want to let go. That was the arrival. This nerve cell signal provided a way for the whole human being. One way from the train station in the Lake Constance city to the inn on the harbor, which Kornitzer barely saw, sitting across from his wife and spooning a soup, the luggage scattered around him, stacked. Now he saw his wife more like an outline, she had become bony, her shoulders raised from the cold, he saw her big mouth, which she opened now, to shovel soup in and out, he saw her teeth, the golden icing on the cake. which had patched one of her canines on which she had once fallen, he saw her hands, which had become rougher and coarser since leaving Berlin. He hid his own hands in his lap. The soup had been spooned down quickly and objectively. He looked at his wife, layer by layer, trying to reconcile the present image with the image of the woman sitting across from him with the image he had made every so often. It did not succeed. Even the photo in his wallet, which he had stared at so often until he thought he knew it by heart - if that was possible with a picture - did not help him. Claire was somebody who was spooning soup and evidently was not afraid to face a stranger. For a moment he thought: What has she learned to fear that she is not afraid now? He neglected to ask: Claire, how did you feel? The question presupposed a greater intimacy, a question that needed time for a long, novelistic answer, and, above all, listening time, a calm, relaxed one: tell me. And she did not ask: Richard, how did you feel? He should have shrugged, a quick pace, a fast-forward and a slow return, and where to start ?, then his wife had finally scraped her soup plate out and clinked the spoon (maybe she was shaking?) On the china and asked: How many Days have you traveled?
(Excerpt from "Landgericht" by Ursula Krechel, Jung und Jung, August 2012)
