2023-07-06 11:56:01
“A man who travels without his wife with a small child is quite courageous,” says Madame Melrose, the hotel owner in the medina, the old quarter of Tunis. But is it courage that leads this German named Quint with his little son Julian to the Tunisian capital? Or rather an inner compulsion, a total headlessness, a deep mental and marital crisis?
It is October 1991, in those years a lot has started to move, not only in the newly reunified Germany, but in all of Eastern Europe, indeed in the world. Things were also brewing in Tunisia at the time, with the autocratic ruler Ben Ali brutally suppressing the burgeoning Islamism. Quint knows his stuff, he is a radio announcer by profession, he is someone who brings revolutionary news into the world with his comforting voice.
No sign of peace of mind
But now, in his late 40s, his life itself has spiraled out of control after a typically dumb love affair with the family’s toddler sitter. Helen, who had abruptly pulled out of the affair the year before, has written a card to Quint from Tunis, and he grabs his son, boards the plane and checks into Madame Melrose’s Petit Hôtel de la Tranquillité, where Helen has previously been a guest was. But there can be no question of calm here, and certainly not of peace of mind, because Quint begins an increasingly desperate search for the object of his desire in the confusing alleys and bazaars of the city; the little, whining Julian is quite a burden, every father or mother can imagine.
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“Nachtdiebe” is the name of Bodo Kirchhoff’s new novella, which was published on time for the author’s 75th birthday and which, as he explains in the afterword, he “peeled” out of his 1992 novel “Der Sandmann”. In Tunis, the reader encounters not only the main characters of a messed-up relationship construction, but also various themes and motifs from Kirchhoff’s earlier books, which are often designed as a journey, a road novel, as an adventure with departure and return, yes, as a hunt. In the most recent novel, for example, the “Report on the Situation of Happiness” from 2021, it was a chase on the heels of a young migrant across Italy and to her African place of origin. His novella “Widerfahrnis”, for which Kirchhoff received the German Book Prize in 2016, also tells the story of an adventurous drive to Sicily and back.
The quest, which often gives Kirchhoff’s modern epics their narrative structure, moves in this novella in a very narrow space in comparison, repeatedly going from the “hotel of tranquility” to the restlessness of the teeming city. Helen, who has disappeared, is often present at the same time. Not only did Madame Melrose know her; Helen’s local lover works as a janitor at the hotel; another mysterious guest from Germany, who calls himself Professor Branzger and was in prison in the GDR, had become friends with Helen and had long conversations. But above all, Quint gets to read typewritten sheets in which Helen tells her version of the relationship stranded in bitterness and flight. So Quint’s search becomes a kind of scavenger hunt in a strange environment; in which, like a dumb Parzival of the medieval epic, he always seems to know and understand less than everyone around him.
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Kirchhoff mastered the technique of suggestion and anticipation with virtuosity. This creates psycho-thriller-like suspense, precisely because the reader suspects early on that bad things are about to happen. True to Chekhov’s maxim that a gun hanging on the wall in the first chapter must go off in the second or third chapter, the first-person narrator draws attention from the start to the unsecured roof of the hotel, from which Julian enthusiastically made his own paper planes throws down. Professor Branzger, of all people, turns out to be a designer with a high level of craftsmanship, which he allegedly acquired in prison. That Branzger earned his title as “Doctor of Storytelling” as Dr. nar Branzger, explains, should have made Quint suspicious. Who is really pulling the strings of history here?
In the footsteps of ETA Hoffmann
The author places “Night Thieves” himself in the context of Black Romanticism – the original title of the novel “Der Sandmann” alluded to ETA Hoffmann – and not only does Branzger appear in it like an evil, laughing fairy tale character who subjugates those around him with magical tricks. Julian wants to know less and less about his already distracted father and immerses himself completely in Branzger’s increasingly fantastic aircraft.
At the same time, a monster invented by Quint in a bedtime story takes up more and more space in the father-son conversations. Quint threatens to lose himself in the paper past of his passion and carelessly neglects his son, as if unknowingly trying to get rid of him. A double guilt that he recognizes too late: before that, he was the one who destroyed Helen’s life by captivating her with the magic of his radio voice, a voice “which in itself is a deception”. But what about the stories put on paper? Aren’t they floating on the wings of the imaginary?
Voice and writing, presence and absence, symbolic paternal order and the subversive power of the real, death and sexuality – Kirchhoff, who is well versed in psychoanalysis and textual theory, carries heavy loads of meaning through the narrow streets of the medina, which, thanks to the sensual descriptions, is hardly felt. The scents of North Africa, the stench of the markets, the quiet of the backyards and the chaos of the squares become vivid. It is the dreamlike, overly precise reality of oriental fairy tales that Dr. nar from the prosaic turning Germany into the kingdom of one thousand and one nights.
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Author of “Landgericht”
“Nachtdiebe” tells of how a superficially rigid world order – here the marriage with child, job and prosperity that has become “ice cold” – dissolves when Quint gives in to illicit desire for a moment. After that, no one finds peace and quiet, the hotel of that name only gathers displaced people who are fleeing their past, precisely because they have to reconstruct it over and over again. “As long as there is death, there is hope” is one of the darkest sentences in this novella, which hits the reader to the core like a perfectly folded, black-winged paper airplane.
Bodo Kirchhoff: “Night Thieves”. FVA, 160 pages, 22 euros
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