Frank Witzel

This seems to be a book like no other, although it does have a certain kinship with the American “male sprawl” novels of the sixties and seventies. The narrator is a former teenager looking back on his formative years in the provincial Germany of the fifties and sixties, a period during which he and his school friends might— or might not — have founded a gang that shared its name with a celebrated anarchist terrorist movement. Or was identical with that movement.

Much is uncertain, not least because the ex-teenager has been in and out of institutions (and seems to be in one now), and the text continually contradicts itself about trivialities like events and people and explores every conceivable style and genre from Catholic hagiography to philosophical aphorisms, in what the Deutscher Buchpreis jury called “…a great quarry, a hybrid compendium of pop, politics and paranoia”. Because the big question the book seems to be setting out to answer is not really “East or West?”, or even “RAF or Baader-Meinhof?”, but “Beatles or Stones?”

Predictably, perhaps, it also seems to be the sort of quarry where one visit is nothing like enough to get a proper feel for how it all fits together. Witzel helpfully provides a detailed keyword index that should make it possible to find all sorts of interesting new ways back in when you get lost, but I must confess to struggling a bit on a first visit. I did enjoy Witzel’s barbed nostalgia for the early days of the Wirtschaftswunder, and some of the stylistic play was really entertaining, but there were a few long stretches where the technique seemed to become more important than the novel it was meant to be supporting. I’m not sure if I could face that essential reread for a while…… (more)