Anna Katharina Hahn’s Stuttgart novel “The Choir”: Alice in Wonderland

2024-09-09 09:02:42

A self-confident, organized manager who always has everything under control meets a young student during music. And everything is getting out of hand. With Anna Katharina Hahn you can learn how thin the wall is that separates our clean lives from chaos.

Outside of Stuttgart, the boundaries between civilization and wilderness are blurred. Anyone who, like Alice, deviates from the well-kept paths ends up in a world in which familiar, supportive rules do not apply, “The typical Stuttgart forest feeling is lost, that’s the idea of ​​finding There should be a park full of joggers, dogs and riders.”

The order dissolves. “A thick growth, growing beneath the trunks of great trees; Identifying the leafless giants of deciduous trees is a lot for them. Ivy and clematis twist themselves into impenetrable mats between the hanging branches. Scornful noises from the crowns.”

Alice has lost her way into a world, led by a young, cinnamon-scented woman with dreadlocks, rough boots, a Marian amulet around her neck and a bindi in front of him, whose efforts he could not resist. Alice is the opposite of a natural child: work and power woman, manager of human resources in a high-tech warehouse of Stuttgart, Audi driver, lives in Killesberg, which clearly shows her social status.

A woman dressed only in a black and white business suit and leaving behind her accountant husband’s greasy pizza boxes and bags of chips, before that cleaner entering the room. And now Alice has fallen into a very un-Swabian chaos, into an undetermined forest and spiritual realm, where the ego is no longer the mother of its own house. Chaos versus control.

Anna Katharina Hahn’s new, fifth novel “The Choir” is – as always with the author, born near Stuttgart in 1970 – an exact structure, spatially anyway, but also temporarily. The story takes place in the first winter after the pandemic, the war in Ukraine has already started, the heating in the community hall has to be abandoned.

When student Sophie shows up at the ladies’ choir practice, she stands out simply because of her age – “every girl has something rabbit-like in her insecurities,” Alice thinks and the new girl is immediately impressed. . Whether it is out of maternal protection, out of love or other reasons entirely remains to be seen.

In the chorus, individual voices take a back seat to the general voice, so the title of the novel aptly reflects the initial situation in which the pandemic period endured together creates a deceptive connection. Unity is certainly a deep crack. Hahn takes a lot of time to separate his band members – the men who don’t sing together tend to play supporting roles – from the chorus.

There is a gap between mothers and childless women like Alice. Between the supposed happy wife and the unhappily married. Between the ladies from the health- and body-conscious neo-bourgeoisie and the pure help from the village, who presented himself not with a folk ballad or a Schubert song, but with Drafi Deutscher’s “Marble, Stone and Iron Breaks”. Between generations.

Alice, whose strict and rigid life leaves the path, is at the center of a complex mix of characters who play with romantic ideas, including illusions, doppelgangers and masquerades. Sophie is writing a dissertation about Clemens Brentano, for which she helps Alice.

The world of ancient art songs is naturally present in the singer’s repertoire and under the prosaic everyday life with double meaning and transcendence. It is fitting that the back stories – including the couple’s relationships – are presented in narrative form. In psychology, symbols are superior to bare facts.

Of course there are understandable reasons for Alice’s love, such as the fact that her marriage, burdened by the trauma of failed fertility treatment, is in serious crisis. The refined defects of his sources (two: as a social climber and “wind”) can also explain his encounter with Sophie, who is completely different; void of personal pain anyway. But there remains a mystery that cannot be drawn into the bright light of wisdom. A trip to Paris together leads to an encounter with demons of all Alice in Wonderland types.

In “The Choir” a lot happens in the narrow field of action that, as always with Hahn, is used in a very economical way: an elderly woman becomes in need of care, a friend falls apart, a man commits adultery, someone becomes a criminal . Above all, Hahn talks about mental illness and how ambiguous the world between normal and pathological can be. You just take one step and you go out into another world that can be tempting, dirty and free, but also very dangerous.

Anna Katharina Hahn: “The Choir”. Suhkamp, ​​284 pages, 25 euros.

Richard Kämmerlingsliterary journalist for WELT, reviewing international and German newspapers for 30 years Roman. He had never lived in Stuttgart, but at least he knew and appreciated the Swabian way of life while studying in Tübingen.