Peter Härtling

Härtling's novel reflects the severe personality damage and disruption of world relationships which arose from twelve years of Nazi rule, as much from its cult of the masculine as its systematic repression of individual truth. It is a book of that lost generation of sons who grew up in the 1000-year Reich, and after its demise had to lie on the bed that their fathers made. Hubert, unfit for heroism and thus unloved son of an SS-man, uses the suggestive power of Humphrey Bogart's Hollywood film as a psychological crutch for his battered sense of self-worth, and so becomes ever more deeply drawn into that dangerous intermediate area between reality and fiction. During the Nazi era he missed out on growing into a contemporary role in society - to both his joy and regret - yet neither did he receive a normal civil education; so in post-war Germany, which for the time being had no fixed types of role to offer either, he found himself in many ways on shaky ground. For a while he has some success with his trick of appropriating the Bogie-charisma for himself, but as soon as he makes a serious attempt to patch together the identity he lacks out of the film story he has made his own, he is bound to fail dismally.

However, in the process he does learn how stories arise and how they function. Looked at retrospectively, the whole novel reads as a non-discursive reflection by the author on his profession, yet at times it does plumb philosophical depths. Hubert's experience touches on the very concept of reality, and Peter Härtling, some ten years younger than his hero, must have felt this - his lyrical early writings already indicated that. They were strongly influenced by his profound mistrust of the 'real' and were based on 'premonition'; in a kind of poetic nominalism he treats fantasy as more real than reality. In this respect Hubert certainly shows autobiographical traits.