Books
April 27, 2024

Karen Duve: Braking the emotions

Karen Duve with bulldog bully

If you want to visit Karen Duve to talk to her about her new novel, you have to pay a taxi driver a lot of money for the journey to seclusion called "Brunsbüttel". Without the engine, nothing works here. Brunsbüttel, Dithmarschen district, about 100 kilometers from Hamburg and primarily known for a nuclear power plant, which brings its operator from time to time "notifiable events". Otherwise, what makes the north German province just: a lot of sky and flat land, as far as the eye can see. It is lonely here, so lonely that it requires a stable character to live there. Karen Duve's character must therefore be as hard as the concrete walls of the neighboring nuclear power plant, after all, she does not even live in the center, but in a disused train station near Brunsbüttel.

From writers who retreat into deserted deserts, one expects reflexively that they are somehow "difficult", brittle and uncommunicative. And if you read Karen Duve's novels, the bitter "Regenroman" from 1999, the melodramatic "This is not a love song" from 2002 or the current book "Taxi" with its sullen protagonists, you could quickly believe in Brunsbüttel to a rather depressive personality meet, the bad mood chews on the Unbill the world like a bulldog on an old shoe.

Three Bulldogs are waiting for us at Karen Duve

In fact, even three bulldogs await us: a real named Bully, who shares the Schleswig-Holstein loneliness with Karen Duve, and two of white stone sitting on the right and left of the gate pillars to the driveway. As a contrast to their deeply drawn lips, they carry magical crowns on their beefy skulls like two enchanted princesses. Even before one welcomes the writer in a good mood, so it is clear: If Karen Duve ever despairs of the wickedness of people, she will not do it without slapping herself dead.

Karen Duve in the taxi

It is precisely this mixture of melancholy and comedy that is the secret of her novels' success. When asked if she finds her books funny or tragic, the 46-year-old replies, "Both." Her language is merciless and dry, a few words are enough to get her to the point, in "Taxi" two pages are enough to clearly outline the life situation of her protagonist Alex. She has broken off her training as an insurance clerk and now has to come up with something before her parents come up with "some slow death in an office" for her.

Karen Duve likes to write about things she knows about.

"I still hoped that something would happen by itself, something big and special, without me having to act on my own or being forced to make decisions that I would regret for the rest of my life." To bridge the gap before life, Alex looks for a reasonably well paid job - and finds the road. "I answered an ad that did not just look for taxi drivers, but also taxi drivers. In 1984 it was not common in job advertisements to add a female ending to any job. One only did it if one wanted to imply that practically everyone was taken. "

Boom, you are already stuck with Alex behind the wheel of their radio and drives with her through the night, without stopping, until the novel's pages go out. Karen Duve likes to write books about things of which she has a hunch, and she has more than just the life of the clock meter: before she could get her station as a bestselling author, she was the "two-twoddler of the Wandsbek funk"., For 13 years, she drove a hamburger cab fare in the classic RAL 1015 color, light ivory beige, or as Karen Duve would say: a color like pale pus. Such an experience can not be researched, you have to experience it.

The topic has left her in her head for a long time. The story was too important to her and the traps she could have tapped in were too big. "I wanted to prevent that I slip into the anecdote and a story to the other row, without real excitement, or that I sit up to the own myth that taxi driving is just something adventurous." At that moment, Bully spits out parts of his stomach contents, choking loudly, next to the plush baroque armchair the author sits in during the conversation. Karen Duve affectionately calls the four-toed guy "my puppy" and "Mr. Bully!" if she is strict. While she calmly takes a rag to mop up the mishap, the English bulldog is now slurling devoutly on the puddle again.

Who is blessed with such roommates, will probably never be tempted to sit up his own myth or to let stories slide into false pathos. Which does not mean that reality should not flash from time to time in their novels. For example, she has bequeathed to her protagonist her cab radio abbreviation and put her in a world in which people become pithily foolhardy numbers ("Thanks, Zwodoppelvier"). Alex, who always just wants to drive and not want to talk at all, constantly has to deal with the row of tired faces that are her colleagues and that she regularly meets at the taxi station in the Hanseatic city.

There are Udo-Dreidoppelsieben and Udo-Zwonullfünf - Taximörder, which has been called so since he drove a suicide candidate to the Hamburg Köhlbrandbrücke - and Rüdiger, who looks like a "spent fourteen year old", considers women to be inadequate and does not miss any opportunity to let go of hatred tirades , And then there's Dietrich, who immediately falls in love with Alex; whom she kisses out of courtesy and does not leave her listlessness. Everyone in this club of crumpled faces and leather jackets has their own reasons for going by taxi. One thing the troupe agrees with is: Passengers are "dirt hedgehogs" who always carry big bills and perform in the backseat like the kings of the world.

"Passengers often said to me, 'I do not want to do their job, either,'" says Karen Duve cheerfully. "And I've always thought, 'Taxi driving would be such a great job if you did not exist!'" Anyone who has read the novel will never be able to get back in a taxi without the need for any subliminal hostility through a lush one Tipping to mitigate. Karen Duve, however, is more concerned with the politeness, "which you also bring to your shopkeeper or your dentist". She believes that behind the basic assumption that she has bought not only a transport but also a free ticket for bad behavior with her money, there is a much more serious topic: "The way someone treats service providers is a litmus test for the character. In this non-existent willingness to empathize with others lies the germ of genuine malice, "says the author.

Often she has imagined how such people would react if they were in real positions of power, for example in war. Who would be decent, who would enjoy torturing others? Taxi drivers have plenty of time to think about the wickedness of things. And they can get a full picture of the state of the society they drive, after all, sooner or later, the whole world will be sitting in their back seat. In "Taxi" Alex takes over the shifts between six o'clock and six o'clock in the morning: "Driving at night and sleeping during the day, I promised myself more adventures." She also has that from her creator, who could not approach the night work as carefree today as she used to. "Back then, I had such an immortality feeling, I just thought, I'm coming through, there were times when I was scared, but also many, in which I should have been scared."

To follow a tattooed two-meter guy into a dark corner just because he did not pay for his eight-mark eighty would not be possible for Miss Duve today. Of course, Alex lets her live through such situations anyway. Especially the moments in which a conversation suddenly slips off and one realizes: This guest is ticking differently than other people, where it can be done quickly. Can not she draw today from this infinite pool of stories and characters? Only from the impressions of the beginning, says Karen Duve. If everything is so concise and you yourself from the emotional roller coaster of a shift: First you pick up the funeral group, then jeering Reeperbahn visitors, then a small divorce child, which always has to go back and forth between mom and dad.

Every feeling ends in an emergency stop, a real whiplash for the soul. "At some point I closed up and fell into a kind of autism." At the end of the shift, she could not say for sure who she had driven, not even where.

At some point, it was all about the money. The fun was gone, and the feeling of freedom, when it heated at night through the empty streets, wore off. "People got on my nerves terribly and should stay off the fur, I did not want to see anyone else, but I could not do anything else and that's why I kept going." Karen Duve tells these things with unruffled cheerfulness - from the safe distance of a woman who has discovered in time that she can do more than just drive a car.

Alex also develops a veritable Dagobert-Duck mentality and is increasingly misanthropic. She has every reason to do so, because the people in Duke's novels are rarely truly endearing and tend to care for their disorders at the expense of others. They generally do not like people, the author says and laughs so warmly that she wants to agree with her immediately. "But I always make exceptions and I really like single individuals." If you have talked to Karen Duve for some time, you have the feeling that apart from some basic data, she does not have much in common with her characters, as it may seem from the outside. Nevertheless, she is asked every new book if her stories are not all autobiographical. She does not mind that, she says, after all, it is her own fault, because they always interlink the worlds of their books. "This creates a fake authenticity, but I think that's just fine." Behind this cool, rough facade, you can finally live undisturbed on the old train station near Brunsbüttel. Maybe that's why she rarely smiles on photos.

While Alex is heading for the big bang, Karen Duve has literally "sneaked out" of the taxi. In 1990 she got her first literary prize and hoped that she would not have to be "two-foursome" anymore. It then took six years for the recognition of her literary qualities to pay the rent. There is a press kit that says she eventually decided to live only on writing. "You can not decide that for yourself, it's something completely different," says Karen Duve. "Otherwise I would have opted for it much earlier." Would her books have the humor of despair that only arises when life pounds one's life now and then? Such questions are lost in the endless north German vastness. Bully is also only interested in parking his big ass on the sofa. "You're going to fly out of here right now, Mr. Bully!" Says Karen Duve gently, and rain falls on the enchanted princesses at the gate.