2023-08-20 15:47:41
Literature Wolfgang Herrndorf
Painting was like dentist without anesthesia
Status: 3:47 p.m. | Reading time: 4 minutes
Everything should be flawless: Wolfgang Herrndorf
Source: Mathias Mainholz
The writer Wolfgang Herrndorf died ten years ago. His fate with cancer touched many, his bestseller “Tschick” inspired millions. Now a biography tells how Herrndorf only became an author when he had failed as a painter.
Wolfgang Herrndorf shot himself with a revolver. On the evening of August 26, 2013, he took his own life at the age of just 48 on the banks of the Hohenzollern Canal in Berlin before cancer could take his life. Since the spring of 2010, the writer, who was born in 1965, has been confronted with the diagnosis of glioblastoma, an incurable, deadly brain tumor that is associated with visual disturbances and epilepsy – headaches anyway.
“How many more books can I write?” is supposed to have been Herrndorf’s first question to the treating doctor. And from then on, in the race against death, the novel “Tschick”, Herrndorf’s most famous book, published in autumn 2010, was written. The story about the two student outsiders Maik Klingenberg and Andrej “Tschick” Tschichatschow, who want to go to Wallachia with a stolen Lada during the long holidays, is a romantic celebration of growing up. A youth book that has sold millions of copies to date and has mutated into an instant classic. As a school read, as an adaptation on numerous theater stages and in 2016 also in the cinema, filmed by Fatih Akin.
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It was Herrndorf’s plan to “write something like the ideal form of a youth book,” explains journalist Tobias Rüther, who now, ten years after Herrndorf’s death, is publishing a biography that bears the artist’s surname in the title alone, according to the motto : People without first names are classics. In fact, Herrndorf had a penchant for the classics, which may have something to do with his self-image as an artist, his socialization as an only child from a performance-oriented family of athletes (father: teacher for sports and history, mother: dance teacher) and his personality. “Whatever he does has to endure and be error-free,” remarks Rüther, without ever slipping into mere kitchen psychology.
Paint like Dürer or Vermeer
Herrndorf was already conspicuous in the way in which he, as a painting student at the art academy in Nuremberg, looked to the old masters as models. From 1986 to 1996, Herrndorf mostly copied and imitated Vermeer or Dürer. “Get off your high horse, the renaissance is over,” a professor is said to have said to him at the time. In the post-modern West of the 1980s, which had been weaned from figures, one could do absolutely nothing with his technically perfectionist painting style. During his lifetime, Herrndorf never made it into galleries or the art world; instead, his creative power later culminated in illustrations (e.g. for the satirical magazine “Titanic”) and book covers (e.g. for Haffmans-Verlag). His Helmut Kohl portrait in Vermeer style is legendary. Or the self-portrait on the cover of Rüther’s biography, which shows Herrndorf from an ambitious perspective.
Source: Rowohlt
One of the great advantages of Tobias Rüther’s “Herrndorf” biography is that it explains the genesis of the writer Herrndorf with the failed painter Herrndorf. “For me, painting is like a dentist without anesthesia, I CAN’T do it anymore,” Herrndorf once stated. The advantage of writing, especially on the computer, was characterized for him as follows: “You can make corrections endlessly, you don’t describe a sky for five days and then realize: You can throw it away.”
The tendency to correct instead of completing is known from many artistic professions. In Herrndorf there were signs of mania. Rüther writes that Herrndorf corrected more than 500 passages in his pop-literary debut novel “In Pluchgewittern” (the title is a pretentious allusion to Ernst Jiinger’s “In Stahlgewittern”) when changing from the hardcover to the paperback edition.
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Should the tragedy of Herrndorf’s artistic career lie in the fact that it only really became productive in the countdown to death? As a respectful biographer, Rüther does not ask this question directly, but her answer is obvious. In general, this artist portrait is particularly successful because it does not glorify Herrndorf in a hagiographic way, but explicitly knows about his weaknesses and quirks, for example in social and private life. In addition to Herrndorf’s developmental novel, Rüther’s book also impresses as an ethnography of a writing scene whose attitude to life in Berlin in the 2000s was organized very significantly via the then new Internet. It’s the scene around authors like Kathrin Passig, Holm Friebe or Ulrike Sterblich, all of whom have something to do with writing, irony and this Web 2.0.
In addition to the collaborative weblog of the ZIA (Central Intelligence Agency), the forum “Wir höflichen Paparazzi” (own designation “Pappen”) is an organ of this writing scene, which from Herrndorf (2004) to Passig (2006) to Tex Rubinowitz (2014) has had several successful ones participant in the reading competition for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in Klagenfurt. Herrdorf, who failed as a painter, and his forum friends have long written literary history, and this biography is the first to read about it.
Tobias Ruether: Herrdorf. A biography. Rowohlt Berlin, 384 pages, 25 euros
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