Martin Walser

Helmut Halm is the main protagonist of Breakers. He is given the chance to visit an old friend from university who is in California. No sooner has he arrived than he is injured in the Pacific, and then receives the news that his mother is dying. He gets entangled in an affair with a student. However there are inheritance issues to unravel in Stuttgart. Breakers is the story of an aging tragic hero, borne along by Walser’s trademark burlesque humour.

The staging of the funeral at Prag Cemetery went off surprisingly smoothly. And a production it was, with the black-clad procession walking toward the bombastic architecture of a Babylonian fin-de-siècle monument. Up the operatic stairs. Inside, organ music. The coffin was slid into a quaint kind of housing. With that huge mountain of flowers it was hardly noticeable that, at the end of the ceremony, the coffin was missing. And the roaring, rushing sound could just as well have emanated from the organ as from the furnace. Halm was thinking: perhaps the thoughts I am having are exactly right for this kind of funeral. He found any kind of funeral appropriate. In the face of death, anything is appropriate.

They spent that afternoon with her father, her brothers Franz and Elmar, and Elmar's wife Gitte. Her father refused to enter the house. They had foreseen that. Many years ago he had told Halm he hadn't been well treated in this house by his wife's mother. Mr. Gottschalk came from Heslach, a penniless schoolteacher who had married the Heimbucher girl. Although the Heimbuchers owned no big business, no factory, not even a butcher shop, they did have this house on Buowaldstrasse. It was their pride and joy. The "country house." That's what the builder, Kugel the baker, had called it, the originator of "Sillenbuch Farmers' Bread," which had enabled him to build a house in the country near the woods. But it wasn't the Heimbuchers who had been smart and efficient either, it was the Gutöhrleins. Heimbucher the postal clerk was lucky to have married a Gutöhrlein; that was how he came by way of the house. Gottschalk the schoolteacher was lucky to have married a Heimbucher who was descended from the Gutöhrleins. How else could a hard-up schoolteacher have acquired a house, and a country house at that?

Sabina's father had moved out of the country house as soon as he could. Needless to say, it wasn't he who had earned the money to buy the apartment on Hegelplatz into which he and his wife had moved: it was his wife, a direct descendant of the efficient Gutöhrleins, who had taken a night-school course as a tax consultant and subsequently opened her own office.

So now she was dead. During that afternoon old Mr. Gottschalk spoke only one sentence, directed at Sabina, as soon as he had found a seat after being helped down the steep path by Franz: "Why didn't you tell me yourself?" Halm was about to spring to Sabina's defense, but her glance prevented him. He knew from her expression that she agreed with her father. She went over to him at once and laid her face against his shoulder, and they remained like that for a while. Elmar started on his subject. If he'd had any say in the matter, his parents' house should have been sold long ago. A ramshackle old house, but 2,700 square meters, in the Stuttgart suburb of Sillenbuch, situated on a slope, at the moment worth two million marks at the very least, which would mean 700,000 for each of them. His words were obviously meant for his younger brother Franz, who had long been expected to set himself up in some solid business.