Usambara

Christof Hamann:
Usambara
Göttingen: Steidl, 2007
259 S.
ISBN 978-3-86521-557-4

Fritz Binder, a postman from Solingen, is fascinated by his family history according to which his great-grandfather, long legged son of a gardener, Leonhard Hagenbuch, not only participated as botanist in the first ascent ever of the Kilimanjaro undertaken under the leadership of Africa explorer Hans Meyer in 1898, but could also be considered as the actual discoverer of the Usambara violets. However, the violet got lost during the Arab revolt and since then colonialist Walter von St. Paul-Illaire has been regarded as its discoverer. When Binder’s mother dies in a Solingen old age home, Fritz does not only start a liaison with nurse Camilla Becker, a boxer in her free time, but also inherits Hagenbuch's papers and a sum of money, which allows him to venture to the Kilimanjaro together with his friend Michael whom he has known since his youth: both want to participate in the "Kilimanjaro Benefit Run 2006" in aid of the melting glaciers of the mountain.

Because of an injury Michael has to stay at home at the last moment, while Fritz who with his restless legs syndrome is more or less predestined for a marathon undertakes a journey, which brings close to him the adventures of his great-grandfather with all its ramifications and strains. The journey becomes a trip that brings him to his physical limits. Through a number of confused associations the narrator gradually melds with Hagenbuch; yet even after the letters by the great-grandfather have been deciphered it remains unclear, whether Leonhard Hagenbuch indeed participated in the adventurous expedition long ago or whether everything is just invented. In the end, Fritz Binder has to abandon his ascent because of altitude sickness, and thus plagued by delirious fever fantasies only manages to reach seventy eighth place in the Kilimanjaro marathon, a grotesque mass event of extreme sport in a world, where no white and undiscovered spots are left.

The narrator of this novel is no hero. Professionally, he never made it beyond postman. He tells his story in a rude and self-ironic manner. There will be no heroes in this story, rather the memory of childhood games on the playground with his friend Michael, with whom he fought over the question of who was allowed to impersonate the conqueror and who could be the Arab leader Buschiri. Of course in the end the Arab always lost.

Fritz Binder's search for his own family's colonial explorer combines historical research, literary allusions and fiction all of which are enriched by surreal sequences to form a multi layered fabric. Fact and fiction is artistically interwoven into "skewed images of the German's hidden desire for adventure and his Africa longing" (Martin Halter, FAZ) through which Hamann achieves the deconstruction of male heroism and colonial romanticism. Leonhard Hagenbucher is a character from a novel by Wilhelm Raabe. No reference is made to him however in the report entitled "East African glacier travels" by Hans Meyer, the first man to have climbed the Kilimanjaro. The narratives by the protagonist play a game of hide and seek with the reader, which remains unresolved until the end. History as fiction and the truth of narration are the underlying themes of the book.

Raabe's Hagenbucher was an adventure seeking dreamer who preferred to be a slave at the Mondberg to wasting his life in the petit bourgeois environs at Bumsdorf close to Nippenburg. Hamann's Hagenbucher, a botanist and gardener, "dreams with his legs" and restlessly seeks the blue flower favoured by German romanticism, which remains as much out of reach as the fame of the explorer. Binder is unable to reconstruct the life and adventure of his forefather, thereby enabling him to see his own life, may be not as heroic but at least as open-minded and as part of a respectable continuum. The more he tries to come to grips with the character of the great-grandfather, the more it disintegrates. "I travel with the dead. Would it not be time to finally put you to rest? There you sit, eternally tired in your arm chair. And you have stretched out, eternally. But in my head the years continuously flow into one another, because I have been overfed, by you and by you, and what should I do? (…). Years ago, that is now."

Unsurprisingly mention is also made of a Nazi son-in-law, Binder's grandfather. He serves to explain, why his relationship to his family lacks warmth, as with Fritz's father, who abandoned his family and his mother, for whom the son was just a "ball of chains". Throughout the novel it does not become plausible, however, why Fritz seems to hate retired people, whose post he delivers, why in his relationship to his girlfriend Camilla he cannot move beyond acts of love which resemble boxing matches, and why of all things his buddy Michael is tripped in an underhanded manner by a pensioner’s Nordic walking stick in the Munich English Gardens resulting in a nasty fall. Instead Fritz verbosely laments his physical state, dilating towards the end of the book into quasi orgies of vomit and excrements. One does not quite understand whether such things are part of hero deconstruction or are assumed to be a normal male state.