Schulze, Ingo

In the summer of 1995, fifty years after the end of World War II, I travelled around Germany – courtesy of a cultural agency of the Federal German government – meeting writers, publishers and literary journalist on both sides of what was once the Iron Curtain. Practically everywhere I went, the mantra proved much the same. When would we see a new generation of novelists to rival those who came into prominence after the war – the likes of Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll and the Austrian Thomas Bernhard? What was wrong with younger people, had they been seduced by television and the cinema into neglecting fiction?

A few names were mentioned, it is true, in the course of those conversations in Munich, Berlin, Dresden and Leipzig. One, Marcel Beyer, who was a guest at this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival, had just published Flughunde (released some years later in English as The Karnau Tapes) which seemed to be attracting considerable praise. However, one name I do not recall hearing was Ingo Schulze, who was born in Dresden in 1962, studied classical philology, worked in the theatre and then, for six months in 1990, was a newspaper editor in St Petersburg.

Perhaps Schulze wasn’t mentioned because his first book 33 Augenblicke des Glücks (33 Moments of Happiness) had not yet been released. By the end of that year, nevertheless, his was a name to conjure with: the brightest star in a new literary firmament, one guaranteed the shine even brighter in years to come. Schulze soon collected a raft of prestigious literary prizes for that dazzling volume of short stories. Simple Stories (the original, somewhat idiosyncratic German title is Simple Storys) followed three years later in 1998, confirming that his outstanding debut was no flash in the pan.

The inspiration behind 33 Moments of Happiness was obviously Schulze’s experience of the febrile atmosphere of St Petersburg in the early 1990s, of everyday life in the former imperial city which had just emerged from its long sleep as Leningrad. These brief, at times nightmarish, at others ghoulishly farcical vignettes of a confused world – where the old and the new almost always clash against one another with a deafening clang – reflect an outsider’s vision. Some of the stories are, indeed, about Germans – newspaper people, entrepreneurs, con-men – adrift among the debris left behind by the collapse of the USSR. Elsewhere, the protagonists are Russians: bemused, rudderless, sometimes reduced to near-catatonic indifference to the confusions of the new Russia.

Schulze’s collection is a tour-de-force of allusion and pastiche, most of which has survived the transition into English in John E. Woods’s fine translation. Schulze pays homage to Chekhov, to Gogol and, most spectacularly perhaps, to Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita in a hair-raising tale of gourmet cannibalism in a run-down Turkish bath. These stories are obviously the work of an exceptionally gifted writer intent on displaying his virtuosity – so much so indeed that one or two of these puzzling “Augenblicke” fall victim to their own cleverness. By contrast Schulze’s second book, Simple Stories, is far more sober and restrained – though in my opinion it is an even more accomplished and significant achievement.

The structure of this “novel” (as it is identified on the title page) seems very similar to the organising principle informing 33 Moments of Happiness. Its 29 sections deal with the fortunes of the citizens of Altenburg, a small town half-way between Leipzig and Zwickau, as they attempt to survive in the paradoxical climate of “freedom” that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Each of these vivid, at times hilarious, sketches seems to deal with the everyday, the trivial and, indeed, with simplicities. Yet the imaginative and ethical vision informing Schulze’s book is far from simple or trivial. What we witness is the tragicomedy of lives that had been assailed by two brutal tyrannies in the course of the twentieth century.

In one important respect, though, Simple Stories is strikingly different from its predecessor. These 29 sections are not self-contained visions of a confused and confusing world. Schulze’s large cast of characters floats in and out of these episodes in a disconcerting though exhilarating way. So the reader needs to be very much on the alert to learn why Dr Barbara Holitzschek, the psychiatrist who may (or may not) have been responsible for the death of a young woman called Andrea Meurer in a road accident, has a yellow key ring with a koala on it and why she natters on about Australian birds and animals. Similarly, forensic skills – so to speak – are required to find out why one of the characters has the nickname “Zeus”, the mention of which drives him into a frenzy, and why another, the unfortunate Andrea’s step-father-in-law, ends up in a psychiatric institution under the care of Dr Holitzschek, the proud owner of the koala key ring.

Particularly in Simple Stories, Schulze seems to me to have answered the riddle posed by those people who, in 1995, lamented the then current state of German writing. By the 1990s the preoccupations of writers like Grass were no longer as urgent as they had been in earlier decades. Perhaps, as one of the characters in Simple Stories remarks, German writers “can’t find problems now to write novels and poems about, not real problems.” In these wonderfully witty, sophisticated and often disturbing pages – and also in 33 Moments of Happiness – Schulze has demonstrated how the allegedly unproblematic present (which is far from problem-free in fact) can lead to writing that is fresh, enthralling and doubtless a promise of even greater things to come.

The Books

Schulze, Ingo: 33 Moments of Happiness / translated by John E. Woods. - New York : Vintage Books, 2001. - 320 pages
ISBN 0-3303-73412
Original title: 33 Augenblicke des Glücks (German)

Schulze, Ingo: Simple Stories / translated by John E. Woods . - New York : Knopf, 2000. - 280 pages
ISBN 0-375-40541-0
Original title: Simple Storys (German)