2024-04-11 08:45:41
We’re sitting in the basement. Speakeasy bars during alcohol prohibition in the USA between 1920 and 1923 must have looked and smelled something like this. You can still smoke here, but you have to pay cash. Could be a great setting for a novel by Dennis Lehane, the god of late mafia novels. But it’s Andreas Pflueger’s local bar. His desk is in the backyard and three floors above. Pflueger wears a suit and is bald.
Before he talks about the books of his life, he tells us that thriller authors didn’t really influence him, the man who some celebrate as John Le Carré’s legitimate German heir. And what it’s like in the shark tank of German film production. Pflueger, born in Bad Langensalza in 1957 and raised in Saarbrücken, knows the area better than anyone. After a good 20 Sunday evening TV thrillers, he and Murmel Clausen invented the now cult-revered “crime scene” from Weimar.
Then Pflueger gave up and – like many of his colleagues in the mid-2010s – switched to novels. And since then it has saved many of Suhrkamp’s records: the highly successful trilogy about the blind but martial arts-trained agent Jenny Aron was published there in 2016. Pflueger received almost every German crime thriller award for his spy thriller “How to Die”.
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Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Andreas Pflueger’s youth drawing in his “Tom Sawyer”
Source: Andreas Pflueger
Tom and Huck came into my life when I was eight or nine years old and had started reading everything I could get my hands on. Of course Huck was my hero, a marauder, a tramp, someone like no other in my Saarland village; a well-protected childhood. At that time I was already writing short stories that I sold to relatives for 50 pfennigs per copy. Who kidnapped the neighbor’s cat? Such things. Writing as a profession, the idea was no stranger to me from an early age. When I was in my late 20s, I had a seven-year career as a Berlin taxi driver and still had no success as an author. Basically, I was a complete failure. “Write what you know.” If you’re at the bottom, you should definitely look up Mark Twain. I wrote a taxi radio play – “All taxis are gray at night”. It was bought by the SFB and premiered as a musical in the Grips Theater in 1990. Since then, I have never had to earn money from anything other than writing.
Max Frisch: Homo Faber
I read this when I was 15, shortly after my Hesse phase, and it was the first book that drew me in just through its language. I quickly devoured everything by Frisch, and when I was 17, I hitchhiked to Berzona, Switzerland, where I found my way to the house of my writer god. His silver Jaguar was at the door. I rang the bell, but he didn’t answer. When I was in my mid-20s I received a benevolent rejection of a text from Rowohlt, which said: You have talent, but don’t try to write like Max Frisch. I found my own language when I was 30, everyone has their own pace. In 2004 I made the film “The Ninth Day” with Schlöndorff, which will always be important to me. One day he picked me up in his vintage silver Jaguar. I said: “Max Frisch had one of those too.” Schlöndorff laughed and replied that it was indeed the author’s car. Frisch, who was already terminally ill, gave the car to Schlöndorff after Schlöndorff flew to Berzona to show him the rough cut of “Homo Faber”. If it wasn’t true but fiction, it would be called over-constructed.
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Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita
In “How to Die” my heroine Nina lives at the Patriarch’s Pond in Moscow. I made this choice early on, for practical reasons, because she is a runner and finds an ideal training route around the basin. When Nina confided in me that Michael Bulgakov was her favorite Russian author, I decided to incorporate “The Master and Margarita” into my novel. I was in my early 20s when I read this magical book in which the devil travels to Moscow to punish people for their greatest sin, cowardice. When I opened it again after so many years, the location of the opening scene immediately caught my eye – the Patriarch’s Pond, I had long forgotten that. My heart was pounding. These are the moments when I suspect that a text can be successful. I am a grounded person, stable agnostic. But when I write, in this state between being awake and dreaming, inexplicable things happen to me.
Raymond Chandler: The Long Goodbye
For seven years I drove a taxi, always at night, for twelve hours, then four hours of sleep, the rest of the time I wrote poems and short stories. With the rejections from publishers, I could have wallpapered my apartment; sometimes I placed something in small literary magazines. While waiting at the taxi stops I read: Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Mickey Spillaine – books with lonely heroes lost in the jungle of the big city; I liked the kitsch about it myself. But most of all: Chandler. “The Long Goodbye” is my favorite of his books. Friendship. Treason. Shame. Fault. Atonement. To this day, these are my biggest issues.
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Keith Richards: Life
When I write I listen to loud rock music. Exception: action sequences, where it has to be Callas. Richards has been my greatest guitar hero forever, a musical genius and proof that you can survive your own obituaries. A friend gave me his autobiography in July 2018, the month I decided to stop writing screenplays and concentrate fully on my novels. It had nothing to do with Richards and his snotty, self-confident book, but the uncompromising manner with which this man unwaveringly pursued his musical path serves as a guiding star, and not just for me.
José Luis Sampedro: The Etruscan smile
In March 1993 I flew via Moscow for three weeks to Omsk, whose drama theater had invited me. Unforgettable: The plane was mercilessly overloaded, passengers stood stoically in the aisle and held on to the holding loops like on a bus. Standing room to Siberia. During the Soviet era, Omsk was a “closed city” because of the arms factories and the surrounding gulags. I was among the first Westerners to see these people. These were intense encounters in which the happy and the sad were close together. And sometimes they became one. I only had one book with me, the Sampedro. Its laconic poetry remains a treasure on my shelf to this day. An old man, who knows that he will soon die, moves from the country to live with his estranged son in Milan and soon has only one hope: that he will hear his grandson call him “Nonno”, grandfather. I read the book on a bench on the Irtysh, at 25 degrees below zero, watching the babushkas and dedushkas playing with their grandchildren in the hard snow.
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Primo Levi: Is that a human?
In 1993 I shot the documentary “Five Years – One Life” in Auschwitz, which tells the story of Tadeusz Szymański, who survived the concentration camp as a prisoner and, after its liberation, founded the Auschwitz Memorial with eleven other prisoners until his death in 2002 to live in the place of greatest horror, in a former SS villa on the camp grounds. Just before I stood at Tadek’s door and rang the doorbell for the first time, I had read Primo Levi, the most powerful survivor testimony I know. A central motif is a sip of brackish water that Levi kept for himself in the concentration camp without sharing it with a comrade. This also gave rise to his “survival guilt,” which, like many fellow sufferers who did not find a grave in the sky, he carried with him for the rest of his life. I later made this sip of water a central point in the film’s narrative in “The Ninth Day,” despite some resistance. But it was so important to me that I would have accepted being replaced by another author. In 1993, in Auschwitz, Tadek sensed my anxiety immediately. He walked with me to the window of his apartment and we looked at the gallows where Rudolf Höss had been executed. Tadek put his arm around me and said: “Now let’s be on first name terms.”
Robert Harris: Fatherland
I bought the original English edition as soon as it was published, in 1992, when I was working on my first “crime scene”: “The Baryschna Affair”, with Günter Lamprecht as Berlin Inspector Markowitz. I quickly learned the hard way how mercilessly underfinanced German television films are, that as a screenwriter in this country you often have to bury your best ideas and that imagination and daring cannot be found in the list of television editors. Although there were exceptions. But Harris: what a shot, such a bold setting! It would be another 26 years before I decided to only write novels. But since this book, I have never left the certainty that art also comes from trust.
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