Thursday 8 July 2010

Kappeler Chronicle: Lambert Weis (Satis Shroff)

(The house where Lambert Weis grew up when he was a child)

THE KAPPEL CHRONICLE (Satis Shroff, Kappel-Schwarzwald)

Lambert Weis: Whisper Words of Hope

It was a bright sunny day on the 6^th of July 2010 and you could hear the birds chirping merrily in the adjacent birch and oak trees. We, the men of the Männergesangsverein were attending the funeral of Lambert Weis who was born in 23^rd of August 1920. Almost ninety years and the picture above shows the house where he grew up as a child.

It was a funeral in the presence of the community in Kappel where he lived. His wife had preceded him fifteen years earlier. Ach, the suffering of this world, the darkness that befalls death. A life that death cannot tear away.

Lambert Weis had a special relationship to the Männergesangsverein where he was an active member for fifty years. We all knew him as an amiable, bespectacled man, who used to go around Kappel wearing his schieber-cap and a wandering stick, with emblems as reminders of the places he’d been to with his dear wife. It is in such times, when a soul departs that we think of the friendliness and sympathetic behaviour of the departed, and the signs of love a person has left behind. Such was the case of Lambert Weis, who died on the 29^th of June 2010, who had a fall and succumbed to his internal injuries.

The paths are abandoned and we’re alone in these grey lanes, where no one comes.

Bless us Great Mother every day. Bless all hearts and every hut and town where people live. Spread your holy hands and whisper words of hope in his mouth. Blessings in death and dying, and in the life we’re living.

The ceremony began with a song ‘Wir sind nur Gast auf Erde’, that is, we’re only guests on this earth---sung together by all present at the St.Peter and Paul. Then followed ‘Sanctus’ and ‘Agnus Dei’ from the Deutsche Messe (Franz Schubert) sung by the colleagues of Lambert Weis from the Männergesangsverein (men’s choir) ‘Liederkranz.’

When Lambert Weis came from the last World War II, where he was detained as a prisoner of war, and had lost his index finger, he looked frail and had a haggard expression on his face. He knew what it was to be hungry during, and especially after the krieg. There were a lot of difficulties to be overcome and quite a few people in the Kappeler community thought out loud and said he wouldn’t survive. But Herr Weis showed them all that he was made of sterner stuff and outlived a lot of his colleagues. He built a home after what had been a long journey towards the end of the war and thereafter.

Due to the Second World War the activities of the men’s choir were reduced and almost came to a stop because most of the able-bodied men from the bergwerk and the Black Forest farmsteads had to do work as soldiers under the Wehrmacht in different fronts. They were replaced by prisoners-of-war from Poland,Later France, Russia and the Ukraine. Since there were very few men left, the men’s choir came closer with Littenweiler’s ‘Frohsinn’ and Herr Weiss was the conductor then. World War II brough a heavy loss to the Männergesangsverein because seven singers didn’t return. It was August Dold who brought the old and young singers together in 1946.

The new men’s choir ‘Liederkranz,’ which means a wreath of flowers, was founded on July 13,1947 after the then French government gave permission to the men to sing officially. The first chairman was Pius Trescher, who held his office till 1959. After that Herr Weiss, a senior school teacher, took over with twenty-four active and 67 passive members.

Comradeship and socialising together have always been important to the men’s choir, and excursions were undertaken together to the different towns and hamlets and the neighbouring countries: France, Switzerland and Austria.

The 16^th and 17^th of July 1950 was a special day for the men’s choir flag inauguration, and it began with a festival mass and honouring of the dead. And in the afternoon there was a big procession with the Kappeler verein. The people rejoiced and it took on the character of a folks-festival. On the following Monday there was the children’s and family-festival.

After the choir had sung the Grablied and the priest had sprinkled the holy water and bestowed a small spade of earth and spoken the words ‘from dust to dust and ashes to ashes,’ it was the turn of the men’s choir to do the same. Richard Lindner, the standard bearer of the Männergesangsverein, lowered the decorative flag of the verein into the open grave and marched out in two in their blue and black uniforms, after having spoken words of condolence to the sons and their wives of the deceased, waiting below the arcade to the graveyard.

He was a loveable person and that is why his love shall remain in the places and the hearts of those who knew him, for love goes beyond death. What remains is something eternal and becomes a part of eternity.

The epitaph goes thus:

Wenn die

Kraft

Zu Ende

Geht,

ist die

Erlösung

Gnade.

Autor Biographie

Satis Shroff ist Dozent, Schriftsteller, Dichter und Kunstler und außerdem Lehrbeauftragter für Creative Writing an der Albert Ludwigs Universität Freiburg. Satis Shroff lebt in Freiburg-Kappel (poems, fiction, non-fiction) und schreibt über ökologische, medizin-ethnologische und kultur-ethnische Themen. Er hat Zoologie und Botanik in Nepal, Sozialarbeit und Medizin in Freiburg und Creative Writing in Freiburg und UK studiert. Da Literatur eine der wichtigsten Wege ist, um die Kulturen kennenzulernen, hat er sein Leben dem Kreatives Schreiben gewidmet. Er arbeitet als Dozent in Basel (Schweiz) und in Deutschland an der Akademie für medizinische Berufe (Uniklinik Freiburg). Ihm wurde der DAAD-Preis verliehen.

The Kappel Chronicle: Whisper Words of Hope (Satis Shroff)

THE KAPPEL CHRONICLE (Satis Shroff, Kappel-Schwarzwald)

Lambert Weis: Whisper Words of Hope

The paths are abandoned and we’re alone in these grey lanes, where no one comes.

The epitaph goes thus:

Wenn die

Kraft

Zu Ende

Geht,

ist die

Erlösung

Gnade.

Autor Biographie

Creative Writing Critique: Book Reviews by Satis Shroff

Creative Writing Critique: Satis Shroff

Ortheil, Hanns-Josef Die Erfindung des Lebens, Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 590 pages,ISBN 978-3-630-87296-4.

Kirchzarten, a scenic Schwarzwald town, lies in the heart of the Dreisam Valley from where you can take the train to Titisee and the Black Forest. A tranquil place to go for extended walks and bike tours. And it was in Kirchzarten where I met Hanns-Josef Ortheil. To be precise: at Katrin Beltran’s Kirchzartener Bücherstube. Katrin studied Geography and went to work with microsoft in Munich where he met her husband. The two of them decided to overtake her Mom’s Bücherstube when she retired, where she loves to arrange author-readings. Katrin said, ‘I don’t earn much during the readings but we get attention from the media, and that’s good for our Bücherstube.’

Die Erfindung des Lebens is the story of a young man in the style of a Bildungsroman, an educational novel, in the tradition of Goethe’s The Sorrow of Young Werther and James Joyce’s Stephen Hero, which was eventually published as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Hanns-Josef Ortheil looks good for his age, has a lot of blond hair, shows no signs of greying, and is soft-spoken and works sympathetic and quiet. He has a pleasant voice which he keeps modulating to suit the text he’s reading, sometimes loud, fast and calm. A lecturer who knows his way around in the reading circuit in Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

This novel tells us about a biography that has to be re-invented every time after fate strikes a blow. What comes out is a thrilling account of a young pianist, and later a writer who’s fate takes a happy turn. The subject matter is organised chronically in five major chapters: I The Mute Child, II The Flight, III Rome and IV The Return.

Hanns-Josef Ortheil was born in 1951 in Cologne and lives in Stuttgart, Hildesheim. He belongs to one of the most important contemporary authors and has received many literary prizes. He works as a professor for Creative Writing and Cultural Journalism at the University of Hildesheim.

As to the treatment, I must say that it shows an extensive study into the protagonist’s life and his art of thinking and psyche as a person with a ludicrous autism, after all this ‘Ich-Erzähler’ is writing about himself in the first person singular. He describes his symbiotic relationship with his mother, his journey with his father to a family homestead, life there and separation from his dear mother, who’d actually curbed his life, development and social contacts with his peers through her omnipotent muteness. His father’s unconventional methods of teaching and the development of the young mind are noteworthy in this novel.

The book reveals the author’s life as a young man, his childhood and youth and his early success as a writer, after he had to give up playing the piano due to a chronic inflammation of the tendons his fingers. As the only surviving son of his parents, who have lost two sons during the World War II, and two other sons after the War, he grew up in Cologne with his parents. The mother has become mute, and in her muteness she communicates with her husband and son only through small, neat chits written during the day, stacked and held together by a rubber. He, the only surviving son, lives also mute beside her. It takes years for him to free himself from the clamour of his family and goes to Rome to begin his career as a pianist.

Talking about his mute days as a child he says: ‘sometimes I used to believe, nothing could separate me and mother at any time, no one and nothing in this world.’ A deep mother-son attachment. He goes on to say, ‘Father used to come early in the evening, and he belonged to us two. He was the third in our alliance, he used to leave the common apartment early morning and spend the entire day in the free Nature. My father worked as a survey engineer. When he returned he’d give my mother a kiss on her forehead. Then he’d ask her a few questions: how are you, is everything okay, anything new? Mother reacted always mute by shoving a small packet of chits she’d written during the day. Hans-Josef was also mute and there was no one whom he could ask.’ You have to imagine how it feels to live in a traumatised family, where the mother and son do not speak and only write and read small letters as a form of communication.

I’ve left out the other two chapters just to make your curious. The way Ortheil describes his visit to the Conservatorium in Rome with Marietta, whom he has taught the piano, and now tells her what questions to ask her prospective piano teachers, their choice of a warm and spontaneous pianist and how they leave him for an hour with a Steinway piano is delightful. The description conjours up images akin to Patrick Süskind’s Jean-Baptiste in ‘Parfume,’ the man with the extraordinary smell. Whereas Süskind’s descriptions of scents and fragrances are a sensual experience for your olfactory glands, Ortheil’s confrontation with this piano is like the taming of the shrew, as he begins to play Schuman’s Fantasie in C-Major. He sweats in Rome, takes off his shirt, improvises, switches over to Phil Glass, and comes back to Fantasia again and again like in a trance. He flirts with the seventh piano sonate by Sergej Prokofieff. When it’s over, the applause comes from the street below. But the pianist doesn’t take a bow and chooses to remain unknown and undiscovered. The memory of bygone days overwhelms him.

Ortheil always told his parents about his piano studies in Rome but never about the separation from Clara. This time he comes home without prior announcement. He has long hair, and not even the local taxi driver recognises him. He returns home after two years in Rome and decides then and there never to leave his beloved home again. His mother greets him with, ‘Johannes! My good boy!’

After a visit to the university hospital in Cologne he decides to end his career as a pianist. He goes with his mother to one of her readings. She reads Balzac for an audience. At home, she reads Stendhal, Flaubert and Proust. In the meantime, Ortheil dreams of Rome, Clara and calls Signora Francesca. A-major, that’s the most tender and also the saddest major-tone ever…Beethoven and Schubert wrote poems in A-major.

Ortheil meets his former teacher Walter Fornemann, who can’t believe that his pupil now to work as a waiter and give up his career as a pianist virtuoso. He says he wants to go for walks, be underway and write. He wants to rewrite his notebooks and diaries. He’s written thousands of rough notebooks. So he becomes a writer.

Fornemann says to Ortheil, ‘In reality you were not only a pianist but a writer since your childhood.’

When I asked whether his book was an autobiography, Ortheil said in his own words that ‘it is not a classical autobiography because it isn’t detailed and pragmatic.’ On the other hand, it is an excellent novel that has been inspired autobiographically. It is a tale about the psychological dependence, almost an addiction, to the world of his ancestors. At the same time, it’s a homage to his parents who learn to live again after years of sorrow, misery, deprivation during, and after the World War II. He also mentioned that he has a lot to thank the German literary pope Marcel Reich-Ranicki who appreciated and praised his work. Ranicki, it might be noted, can make or break an author.

Ortheil’s work has been recently awarded the Literary Prize of Brandenburg, the Thomas Mann Prize, the Georg-K.-Glaser Prize, the Koblenz Literature Prize, the Nicolas Born Prize, the latest being the Elizabeth-Langgässer Literature Prize. His novels have been published in 20 languages. His German book-titles are: Die grosse Liebe 2003, Die geheimen Stunden der Nacht 2005, Das verlangen nach Liebe 2007. His other books are: Wie Romane entstehen 2008 and Lesehunger 2009.

Apropos Kartin Beltran, she’s bringing out a book about the beautiful Dreisam Valley. You bet I’ll review it. The book will be published by Herder Verlag, Freiburg.

Welcome to the Schwarzwald (Black Forest).