DIE GERMANISTIN: Riveting Forays into German-Language Literature by Guest Germanistin Sarah Escritt. Berlin, the Banat and criss-crossing stories. Exercises in listening in BLURRED by IRIS WOLF and CAFÉ OF THE INVISIBLES by JUDITH KUCKART
Recently published in English by Moth Books, in a luminous translation by Ruth Martin, Iris Wolff’s Blurred tells the story of four generations in the life of a German-speaking family from Romania. Over the century the family is scattered by economics, choice and exigency: the book opens in the Banat and closes in South Germany, taking in Transylvania and the East Friesian Islands, and monarchy, communism and capitalism along the way. In each of the seven chapters a different family member comes to the fore; each chapter opens a door into a new world, exquisitely drawn and complete in itself, which at the same time gives us a new perspective on the whole. Life brings challenges and there are passages of great brutality, yet at the same time this is a beautiful book. At its heart is a village on a windy plain in the Banat, the house of its German pastor, and Samuel, the pastor’s son.
The Banat being home to a mix of nationalities, Samuel grows up immersed in the sounds of different dialects, languages and ways of seeing the world. The first word he speaks is in Romanian, and despite his father’s coaching he insists on reciting numbers in the musicality of Slovakian. Samuel’s mother, Florentine, understands his instinctive resistance to rules and categorisations that seem arbitrary to him. She feels the same about language itself, experiencing it as a barrier as much as a connection between herself and her perception of the world. Florentine wonders what Samuel will remember later about this village: probably, she thinks, things that she doesn’t notice and can’t even see. When she sits on the back steps watching her garden, it is to the gaps between the vines, peach and quince trees that she pays attention. The intransigent division represented by the iron curtain will for a time define and determine Samuel’s life but this is a book that reminds us that divisions may be much more subtle. They may be embedded in the words and stories that tell us where to look.
It would take more than a lifetime to tell the story of a life, and anyway, where would you begin? So reflects Rieke, the youngest volunteer at a telephone crisis line in Judith Kuckart’s brilliantly choreographed Café of the Invisibles.
Over an Easter weekend we follow the criss-crossing paths of seven volunteers: in the kitchen during lonely shifts at the crisis line offices in an unglamorous Berlin suburb, over Easter lunch on Karl-Marx-Allee, in the depot of the GDR museum where two of them rehearse an impromptu fashion show, on an impulsive trip to a lake east of Berlin. From these splinters of time, we piece together tentative portraits of the seven; they, meanwhile, assemble official tick-box profiles and, as a team, share private shorthand descriptions of their invisible callers: ‘the man who loves operettas,’ ‘the actor with the plastic bag.’ But, as von Schrey, the oldest volunteer observes, you only see what you already know.
The volunteers have learnt during training, and continually remind themselves, that every moment has an invisible biography and every situation a history that continues to reverberate in a million ways in the present. How to capture and communicate this complexity? Von Schrey is an advocate for Beethoven. Wanda is collecting discarded objects from the GDR and plans a catwalk or exhibition like no other. Marianne would like Wanda to photograph her in such a way as to make visible her childhood memory of reaching from her pram towards the leaves of a pear tree. The novel ends as it begins: tomorrow the narrator will start again. There is always more to say.
In their multi-perspectival, interweaving stories Iris Wolff and Judith Kuckart advocate for story-telling, whilst at the same time reminding us that words are always approximations and no story ever definitive. We need to keep listening to stories – even familiar ones are different every time. I urge you to read and re-read these two wonderful books.
By Sarah Escritt
BLURRED by Iris Wolff, translated by Ruth Martin, published by Moth Books, 2025
CAFÉ DER UNISCHTBAREN (‘Cafe of the Invisibles’) by Judith Kuckart, published by Dumont Verlag, February 2022
Sarah Escritt enjoys engaging with German writing, through reading, reviewing, translating and interviewing.
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