On the eightieth anniversary of the author Hans Christoph Buch | EUROtoday

NIn his case, omen is definitely omen. Hans Christoph Buch can be even higher referred to as Hans Christoph Library, as a result of not solely is the variety of his publications legion, however this creator's literary ardour for different colleagues additionally exceeds the same old stage.

The two new books from our personal manufacturing, which have been revealed on the creator's eightieth birthday immediately, show this as soon as once more: “The Flight Around the Lamp” (extra of a quantity of tales, however with an essayistic foundation) and “From the Bear Cult to the Stalin Cult” (extra of a… Volume of essays, narratively primed) doc Buch's fascination with Anna Seghers, John Reed, Céline, Manfred Schmidt (not Arno, however the narrator of the “Nick Knatterton” comics), Georg Lukács, Wiktor Schklowski, Marcel Jouhandeau, Joseph Brodsky, Friedo Lamp – simply to call those that, as authors, got here beneath the spell (or have been banned) of the devastating ideologemes of the 20th century.

Buch was born in Wetzlar in 1944, and he values ​​his birthplace as a refuge for Goethe, who needed to escape there from Frankfurt in an effort to discover himself and literature. For Buch, probably the most well-traveled of the German writers of his technology, because the cliché but additionally actuality would have it, dwelling will not be a spot, however a topos: studying is his dwelling. That doesn't exclude his love for sure locations, comparable to Berlin, the place he has lived since 1964 when he's not touring. Or to Haiti, the place considered one of his grandfathers moved greater than 100 years in the past – and the place his grandson continues to go. He ought to be recognized to readers of the FAZ in addition to as a fiction reviewer by the reviews on this.

Haiti additionally offered him with the themes of two of his best-known books: the historiographical research “The Divorce of San Domingo,” revealed in 1976, and the novel “The Wedding of Port-au-Prince,” revealed eight years later and with a really humorous variation on the older ebook. Afterwards, Buch says, his writer Siegfried Unseld begged him to not write any extra about Haiti, and his colleague VS Naipaul, who had an analogous soul and matter, additionally confirmed this: “It doesn't sell.” But Buch is extra literary Persuasive as a result of he primarily talks about himself, even when he imagines himself within the footwear of his historic or literary informants.

Moving away from “seduced thinking”

He has this in widespread together with his good friend Hans Joachim Schädlich, to whom he says he owes the ultimate turning away from Marxist “seduced thinking” (Czesław Miłosz). Like Walter Höllerer, his entry into existence as a author after an invite to Group 47 as a nineteen-year-old was moderately disillusioning for Buch: “Ernst Bloch exposed you” – Buch likes to put in writing decidedly autobiographical texts within the second individual – “as a relic of late bourgeois decadence and consigned you to the trash heap of history. “Walter Jens and Marcel Reich-Ranicki agreed with him,” however he obtained help from Grass, Enzensberger and Höllerer. This dispute between colleagues about books and his books will accompany the person celebrating his birthday into his ninth decade.

“Write one or two more beautiful books and you'll be fine,” he says of a late love affair in “The Flight Around the Lamp” – in a type of typical texts for him that makes the true and the phantasmagoric inseparable (and subsequently for some so tough to digest) combine. It is exactly this aim that may drive him. Although: one or two books? That would definitely not have been the case for Hans Christoph Buch. And then we might have one thing from that.