Ulla Lenze’s “Peace”: This old German romance of darkness and ghosts

2024-08-17 12:57:29

The key is in the spirit. ” It was the doctor who put this in Ulla Lenze’s novel “Virtue” said that. The statement reflects the spirit of the times around 1900. In the factories of Beelitz near Berlin, Professor Blomberg considered his reform plans: he could not cure tuberculosis, and penicillin only came to the market half a century later . But you know another way.

“Real therapy is wellness,” Blomberg explained. With his hospital he has created a kind of “middle ground” in which the poor in particular can find peace, far from the busy city and the daily grind. Especially progressive: Beelitz opened its doors first to women. Here they are taken care of in the same way they take care of their husbands and children.

Blomberg, a fictional character the cosmos of the Beelitz sanatoriumswhich was and still is as a wasteland, Ulla Lenze explained her idea to Johanna Schellmann. She is a passionate writer and wants to write a book about Beelitz, which her husband Clemens encourages her to do. Not without second thoughts, because Clemens, also a doctor, would like to have a job there. Unlike Johanna, however, he is skeptical about the therapeutic methods of his colleague there since he knows that Blomberg likes to use the word “all-spirit”.

On the other hand, Johanna was impressed. Don’t you know your Clemens in the “Club of the Search” on Berlin’s Nollendorfplatz? Had he not been in love with Rudolf Steiner for a while, who lived around the corner on Motzstrasse and, as a rising star in philosophy and anthroposophy, was preparing to become the guru of the imperial capital? We find ourselves in the midst of a milieu that is more open to the occult than ever since the Romantic period. Novalis once offered the phrase: “The mysterious path leads inward.” Around 1900 there were spiritual times with table setting and indifference die social event in Berlin, terms like telekinesis and teleplasm are everywhere.

Johanna Schellmann then meets Anna at Professor Blomberg’s house. With Anna comes the type of person that everyone is looking for then: the so-called medium. A person with clairvoyant powers. As in the Romantic period, when Clemens Brentano sat at the bedside of the nun Anna Katharina Emmerick, who was bleeding from the wound of Jesus, to let her visions tell her, Ulla Lenze’s Anna is a “woman from the people” who wants . Blomberg’s death predicted month and day. And the middle-class doctor’s wife Johanna Schellmann liked him so much that she knelt before him and wanted to kiss his hand.

Medium as soul guide

Yes, for Johanna the medium Anna becomes a spiritual guide over the course of the novel, leading her to confess her feelings and desires and to recognize them in the beginning. There is no doubt that Anna persuaded Johanna, who stood by her in her class meetings, to write a novel that the women’s group of that time saw as a foundation.

But here you have to avoid a misunderstanding: As Ulla Lenze, who has already received many awards, deals with the attitude to life around 1900 in this new novel, which its publisher not without reason describes as a year old 50 already. “Magnum opus”: He has never written a historical novel. Nor is it an esoteric primer, as it takes some ordinary phenomena seriously. But for him it is precisely about the material of darkness, about dealing with the spirit, about the all-too-worldly side of what is called the supernatural.

The third female figure makes this clear. Vanessa is the great-granddaughter of Johanna Schellmann, a modern woman in her mid-thirties who is isolated and anxious in the same way as her grandfather and who first consulted her meditation tool before she could make a decision. On the other hand, this Vanessa, who works as a content manager for a shopping portal, is also able to advertise vacuum cleaners that she thinks can clean not only carpets, but also the soul.

In other words: Vanessa testifies to the progress of the noise in mental health care that has been leveled from the level of literature and life-style to the level of business. And it reminds us of the fact that, fortunately, it is not too dangerous to say it today: women have their own battles to fight in order to free themselves from the tasks by the male society that be the leader

Necromancy as fraud

The three female characters in Ulla Lenze do this in very different ways: Anna, a medium from the precariat, bravely accepts the opportunity to work as a necromancer and adapts to the deceitful system she sees through. In the end, the old maid is so confident that she asks her mentor Johanna, whose novel has been published, to help her write. Johanna, in turn, gains a literary profile under Anna’s influence and writes her most important book, but loses touch with her husband and family. However, it is not clear what unexpected twist the novel takes here.

Finally, Vanessa is unable to develop a stable self because of the many options in a digital environment. After all, dealing with his ancestors opens up a space of power for him. At the end of the story, he makes the only promise he has left and celebrates Christmas with his widowed father.

In the plot of the novel, which is divided methodically on three historical threads in three different periods, Ulla Lenze continues with an amazing sense of ambivalence: he knows that pyramid, activity, love for power or classicism do not stand in the place of darkness , but he does not deconstruct this environment to its core. This book offers many things at the same time: women’s awakening stories, genealogical research conducted by explorers, and the memory of an important tradition in intellectual history that is hardly in the public consciousness today – like many things that you do. it is not appropriate to find a narrow fixation on avant-garde works of art.

For Lenze, to borrow a penultimate quote from Professor Blomberg, it is about “the kind of knowledge that cannot be measured in companies”. And we would like to comment on this in the last word with Goethe: “The highest happiness for a thinking person is to discover what can be studied and to calmly worship the undiscovered.” , It’s rare at this time who believes in Science, Ulla Lenze still accepts it.

Ulla Lenze: “Peace”. Klett-Cotta, 333 pages, 25 euros.