DIE GERMANISTIN: Riveting Forays into German-Language Literature by Guest Germanistin Sarah Escritt. Travelling through Germany with IRINA LIEBMANN and INGO SCHULZE
During holiday season I have been exploring Germany virtually, east to the Oder, south to the Danube and west to the Rhine and the Ruhr. This is thanks to two writers, Irina Liebmann and Ingo Schulze, both originally from East Germany.
In her dancing prose poem, Letzten Sommer in Deutschland: Eine romantische Reise – Last summer in Germany: A romantic journey – Liebmann spends a summer driving through a shifting, shimmering tapestry of Germany seven years after the Wall fell. She sets off from West Berlin early one July morning when the streets are fragrant with lime blossom and reaches the banks of the Rhine when the blackberries are ripe.
Further north and a quarter century later, Ingo Schulze spent six winter months in the Ruhr Valley, courtesy of the Brost Foundation, who invite writers in rotation to the area. His delightful scrapbook – of sketches, conversations, football match reports, theatre and concert reviews and more – is entitled, Zu Gast im Westen – A Guest in the West.
As she travels, Liebmann’s impressions change as quickly as the reflections of the clouds on the Oder River, and Schulze thinks that even if he spent six years in Mülheim his account would still feel partial and incomplete. So these are not works that set out to represent an authoritatively East German perspective on Germany; instead, as Liebmann and Schulze begin to decipher the archaeology and geography of the towns they visit, personal memories surface unbidden, reframing the view. Visiting Hoyerswerda with initial reluctance, Liebmann looks out of the window of one of the flats and suddenly sees the view that was pictured in her 1950s school textbook, an illustration of an optimistic future, now past; and the residents say that yes, they have been happy, truly so. Liebmann has illustrated this book with her own photographs: sideways glances and silent commentary. In Zschopau, near the Czech border, she gives us a view of a Fiat car dealership, squeezed into a cobbled square and seen from the walk up to the castle.
In the Ruhr Valley, meanwhile, Schulze finds it hard to comprehend that mining has caused the ground level in some areas to sink by 15 metres. Instantly recognisable to him, on the other hand, is the experience of de-industrialisation, to the extent that when asked about his impressions of the Ruhr Valley he finds himself talking about East Germany, as if he has misunderstood the question. It dawns on him that there is something else that he recognises: not so much the – in the West, retrospective – romanticisation of the figure of the worker, but rather the creeping sense of mismatch between official rhetoric and complex realities. Curious about these realities, Schulze fills his pages with the voices of the very many people who show him their own versions of the Ruhr Valley: a heating engineer, a senior police officer, head teachers, bookshop owners and football fans, to list a few. He concludes with a visit to a primary school where children with little knowledge of German are taught through the music of Ligeti and Schönberg. Schulze regrets that he has forgotten his Baedeker when he visits the Krupp villa in Essen. I’d certainly prefer to take Schulze’s book with me rather than a travel guide when I visit Mülheim in real life, as I now hope to do.
By Sarah Escritt
ZU GAST IM WESTEN (‘A Guest in the West’) by Ingo Schulze, published by Wallstein Verlag, February 2024
LETZEN SOMMER IN DEUTSCHLAND: EINE ROMANTISCHE REISE (‘Last Summer in Germany: A romantic journey’) by Irina Liebmann, published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1997
Sarah Escritt enjoys engaging with German writing, through reading, reviewing, translating and interviewing.
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