Petra Hammesfahr: The stories have to go
Petra Hammesfahr
"My son always says, write a romance novel, but they do not interest me, I consider them lying, because in the end there is always peace, joy, pancake." So best-selling author Petra Hammesfahr prefers to bring the unfathomable into her novels. Murder, homicide, abduction instead of peace, joy, pancakes. Usually it is normal people who are suddenly confronted with evil and their seemingly healthy world is crumbling. There is, for example, the mother whose daughter disappears from one day to the next and suddenly has to question her whole life ("The Mother"). Or the unemployed woman who, for want of money, gets involved in a deadly game ("the lie"). Or the commissioner, who becomes a murderer out of jealousy ("Merkel's daughter").
Petra Hammesfahr has a very close relationship to her characters. She talks about Kommissar Klinkhammer, Cora Bender and Vera Zardiss as others talk about their friends and acquaintances. And she gets goose bumps when she describes what is happening to her protagonist, even though she is alone responsible for their suffering: "When 'Merkel's daughter' came out of the set and I should control the change, I had to cry so that I could not see the letters anymore, so my husband had to step in. "
Petra Hammesfahr can immediately enumerate some other passages from her novels, which she could never recite in a reading - out of fear to burst into tears. And yet sends the 53-year-old again and again people to ruin and has visibly fun. More than 25 thrillers have been published since 1991, including bestsellers such as "The Doll's Grave", "The Sinner", "The Silent Mr. Grenady" or "The Last Victim". The petite woman had to fight hard for this success. Petra Hammesfahr had to accept 159 cancellations before her first text was printed: a short story in "Playboy". That was in 1989 and Petra Hammesfahr was 39 years old.
Even as a small child, she had a great talent for storytelling: "Once I said that the neighbors would lock up their maid in the basement, which was really annoying." Later at school, she strolled arm in arm with her friend over the playground and told one novel after another. Where she took all this, she does not know. Anyway, she always said she had read it all. And no one has ever trumped and wondered how a person could read so much.
Petra Hammesfahr's mother did not share her passion at all. She considered reading a waste of time. One day she even burned a book that Petra had borrowed from the school library. "Then I had to pretend that I had lost it because nobody would have believed that my mother had burned the book." The father was more understanding of the daughter and even gave her a typewriter. But that did not help anything. "Do something sensible," said the mother. The "reasonable" was an apprenticeship as a retail merchant, Petra Hammesfahr took the age of 13, in the supermarket. Today the mother is proud of her daughter. Nevertheless, she does not read her books, but claims that she would have done everything differently if she had known where the daughter's storytelling would take her.
However, Petra Hammesfahr had to free herself from her retail saleswoman's existence. The words of the young man whom she met in 1966 must therefore have sounded very promising: "If you marry me, you can do what you want." Being free at last - that was so important to her that she married this man, even though she knew he was an alcoholic. "When I was 17, I felt I could change it, I thought I could turn the world off my back and then I fell with the world on the nose." Suddenly she sat there with two daughters and an unemployed man. She has worked to feed the family: cleaning the mornings, doing homework during the day, and evening waiters. "When I weighed only 84 pounds, my doctor told me to get a divorce." During all this time Petra Hammesfahr has been holding on to her passion, the writing. "Because we had no money for paper, I kept my stories on the backsides of receipts and invoices, and then I wrote to publishers: give me some paper, then I'll write for you, of course nobody has agreed to that."
Petra Hammesfahr has benefited from these difficulties. If she did not know the "life at the grassroots", she says today, she could not write about it either. And something positive she can win this time. Because she had little paper available, she had to remember a lot of her stories.That benefits her today when she revises her books. Whole pages she can scroll through in her head when she is in bed, and then she realizes that she wants to change something here and insert something there.
Luckily Petra Hammesfahr heard about her doctor in 1974 and divorced. This cleared the way - first for private happiness and later for professional success. Petra Hammesfahr had a lot to catch up after her difficult first marriage. "I was 24, went to discos, and lived right, that was my teenage phase." During this time, she met the man who was to become her second husband. Recently, the two silver wedding celebrated, the common son is 24.
In her second marriage Petra Hammesfahr was allowed to do what she wanted from the beginning: Tell stories. Her husband got the old typewriter from her parents and she was ready to go.
But while she had found her happiness very quickly, her professional success took a long time to come. There was simply no publisher who wanted to publish their novels - until "Playboy" in 1989 reprinted the story "Sally's Guardian Angel" and paved the way for her. Two years later, the long-awaited first hardcover appeared: "The Secret of the Doll". With "The quiet Mr. Grenady" came 1993 the first respecting success. But in the mid-1990s, the world of Petra Hammesfahr threatened to collapse again. Not only that she had to look for a new publisher, because the cooperation no longer worked. In a TV series project, to which she had delivered several scripts, she was booted. Suddenly it was said that they had opted for other authors. A devastating message for Petra Hammesfahr - and financially a disaster. Since then she no longer works as a scriptwriter. "There are too many to talk to and everyone knows better - in the end, there is nothing left of what I want - Rowohlt's the copywriter talking to me, and I can talk that out."
Despite the setbacks Petra Hammesfahr has continued to go, has found a new publisher and landed there in 1999 immediately two bestsellers: "The Sinner" and "The Doll's Graves". More should follow with "The Mother", "The Last Sacrifice" and "The Lie". That she is Germany's most successful crime novelist today has nothing to do with great ambition or courage. "I'm obsessed with what I do and what else should I have done, continue to label cans?"
Yes, she is obsessed with writing and her novels. Can barely switch off. It happens to her that she drives by on the way to the supermarket. Ten to twelve hours a day she sits at her novels, seven days a week. She knows that you can only succeed if you do not do the writing on the side. On average, Petra Hammesfahr needs two years for a novel. When she starts, it's like she's retelling a movie she's already seen. Nevertheless, it happens that she rewrites the novel over and over again, that the characters get again completely new facets. "If I send something to my editor on Friday so she can read it over the weekend, my version on Monday looks very different again."
In the end, in any case, there are always books that are characterized by their great realism. That's what their readers appreciate so much. Petra Hammesfahr has her novel "The Mystery of the Doll" settled in a fictional house in the real place Grottenherten. The inhabitants then told her that they knew exactly where Steiner's house was. Such reactions pleased Petra Hammesfahr. And she also took it as a compliment that people could not read the "doll grave", a novel about a disabled man, because they themselves have disabled people in the family and the writing went too close. At that time, Petra Hammesfahr also received a letter from the Landschaftsverband Rheinland, which is responsible for housing disabled people in the region. It said: "Please give us the correct name and address of the man, he is entitled to promotion." "They actually took my story at face value, and then I said, 'Do not worry, I'm writing the sequel'."
Petra Hammesfahr has spent her entire life in the Rhineland, even if one hardly notes that of her language. Sometimes her home town was Titz, sometimes Kirch-Grottenherten, sometimes Kerpen, but never Berlin, Munich or Hamburg. That's why her books are also preferred in the province because she only writes about places she knows. And so she sits on her sofa in her Kerpener terraced house, which would make even a wonderful setting for one of her stories, and amused that she has the town of Sindorf a serial killer said.
Someone once said to Petra Hammesfahr that if she did not write, her skull would eventually burst, because the stories have to come out. And she herself guesses, "I might already be in psychiatry if I was not a writer."
But fortunately she writes yes - and how. She is currently in the final phase of her new novel, which will be published by Wunderlich in 2005. In it there will be a few pretty side blows on the film industry - as a small personal revenge. "I'm so terribly mean, I know, but I can not help it," says Petra Hammesfahr and smiles her mischievous smile. No, we will certainly never get to read a romance novel about this woman.
