Encounters – The World Through the Eyes of German Authors

Daniel Kehlmann

It may be a cheap phrase, a threadbare cliché, but in the case of Daniel Kehlmann there is no way round it: he drank in the arts at his mother’s breast. His father was a well-known German television director; his mother, an actress.

He began writing, as he puts it in his self-portrait, “at probably the same time as everybody else: at fifteen and with bad poems, which luckily no one else has seen to this day”. Fifteen years later, Kehlmann has published six novels, and was already able to observe after the first that “one can pass writing off as a profession not only to tax offices and in official forms, but also even to mistrustful members of the family”. No later than when his Measuring the World (Vermessung der Welt) became the most successful post-war German novel, with 500,000 hardcover copies sold and translated into thirty languages, will the Kehlmann family have finally condescended to accept his calling.

Measureless vastness

The features pages became aware of the then 22 year-old Kehlmann with the appearance of his book Beerholms Vorstellung (i.e., Beerholm’s Performance). Later they pressed him to their bosom thanks to his biting satire on the art scene entitled Ich und Kaminski (i.e., I and Kaminiski). Kehlmann, by the way, has a German and an Austrian passport – a circumstance that, as he freely admits, has the advantage of allowing him to be invited by the Austrian Cultural Institute as well as the German Goethe Institute. Especially since he likes writing while travelling – often better than when he is at home, in Vienna. A trip two years ago at the invitation of the Goethe Institute took him first to Moscow and then to Siberia – Jekaterinenburg and Omsk. And there he experienced the vastness, the measureless vastness.

Daniel Kehlmann - Russia WMA, 0:26 Min.

Kehlmann: One always has a certain fear of Russia based on images of everyday life there. ... always has the idea of a country where great catastrophes have happened, and at the same time one has from the contemporary media an image that life there is very uncertain and dangerous and if anything bleak and full of privations. ...One doesn’t go there without a certain dread and caution.

But go Kehlmann did. German culture in all its facets – hundreds of events from St. Petersburg to Novosibirsk. Pina Bausch’s dance theatre, the Berlin Radio Orchestra – and young German authors.

In the same programme a few German authors were invited to, as Burkard Spinnen once called it, a writer-country package.

… so as to give readings first in Moscow in then in a few Siberian cities. That was in 2004, the German-Russian cultural year.

…like the great writers of the 19th century

Kehlmann is now sitting in his small flat in the middle of Vienna, which has about it something of a student’s room: on the wall a cheap print of Don Quixote which was already there when he moved in. On his writing desk, a great confusion; on the floor, books and notes – all in all, a moderate chaos. But no, it doesn’t always look this way; actually he is, he says, an orderly fellow, yet he is in the midst of moving again, to a bigger flat in the same building. He glances at his watch: we have time until five-thirty, he says nearly apologetically. And so he tells rather quickly of his “writer package” which, in spite of initial reservations, he enjoyed:

At readings in Russia I always find that an incredibly good, interested and well-read audience turns up. Mainly one that really knows the books, which are being read, and asks intelligent questions. That naturally impresses a writer. One notices that an author here, and also in the general culture, means more than he does with us. This is surely one reason that writers like going to Russia. Although it is of course a pleasure purely for one’s vanity. Still, it is somehow fun to be treated like the great writers of the 19th century.

Between Tolstoy und Dostoievsky

The works of one of the great writers of the 20th century is lying on Kehlmann’s floor, still unpacked: the complete works of Nabokov, hot off the presses – a present from his publisher to mark the sale of the 500,000th copy of Kehlmann’s Measuring the World. Whoever loves books, according to Kehlmann, couldn’t read or live – he actually says “live” – without delving into Russian literature.

For me, the image of Russia was strongly influenced by two poles which were provided by literature: on the one hand, Tolstoy, the fox and wolf hunts and endless, snow-covered steppes and sleigh drive, palaces and glittering balls. And on the other hand, the Dostoievsky image: hysteria, profundity, people who are constantly occupied with philosophy and buttonhole or kill each other at every opportunity, challenge one another to duels and are incapable of conversation without very soon bringing up God and ultimate things.

On the one hand, Russian literature – on the other, everyday life in Omsk. Kehlmann is literally speechless, thrown back to the condition of an illiterate:

… because one can’t read even the simplest signs. That is really an existential experience, which is again very interesting. How often does this happen, that one suddenly finds oneself in the position of a lost child? Then one does feel somewhat, how should I say, “alone” (laughs). One is constantly thinking: If I now had a problem, of whatever sort, and the nice people from the Goethe Institute wouldn’t take care of me, then things could become very unpleasant.

An enrichment of dialogue

But they don’t. Quite the contrary. Kehlmann talks of friends that he made and how he would like to return to Siberia. He was surprised, he says, even “shocked”, by how many well-read, literary people he met:

Literary scholars at the universities who speak German without a trace of an accent. And when you ask how they can do that, they reply: “But that’s my job”. People who would be an enrichment for many conversations, for many discussions here. So one knows that all these splendid people are there and separated from us by a kind of “iron curtain” which this time we have set up – it does makes one sad sometimes.

And then comes the question, which writers often don’t like to hear, because it sounds to them too concrete, too trite. But Daniel Kehlmann has expected it: Have you put your experiences in Siberia into your writing?

As a matter of fact they did get translated into my work – at the end of Measuring the World I have my character Alexander von Humboldt go to Siberia. That I visited a few places where his gigantic Siberian journey took him gave me a certain confidence that I could actually describe them and that I could invent the others.

The full interview with Daniel Kehlmann in German (WMA, 6:16 Min.)