Cherrypicker | Literature
Discovering the Past

Julia Schoch completes her trilogy about memory, writing and personal experience. In the third volume, she explores the question of how personal experience becomes literature - and where the limits of autofiction lie.

She hasn't kept her readers waiting long. Just two years after The Lovers of the Century, Julia Schoch completes her trilogy. Her new novel Wild nach einem wilden Traum (Wild after a Wild Dream) concludes the series, which began in 2022 with Das Vorkommnis (The Incident) and is subtitled “Biography of a Woman”.

In the third volume, we also follow a narrator who has obvious parallels to Julia Schoch's own biography. This is one of the reasons why her work is categorised in this country as the new-fangled genre of autofiction – and why she is placed alongside authors such as Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk and Tove Ditlevsen.

Memory and desire

But this comparison falls short. Schoch pursues her own approach in her trilogy. Although the three books are linked in terms of content, each poses its own questions, sets new emphases and begins at a different point. While in Das Liebespaar des Jahrhunderts (The Lovers of the Century) everything revolves around a progressively fading love, the new and final volume focuses primarily on the persistence of fleetingness.

The starting point is the (love) story with the “Catalan”, whom the narrator meets during a scholarship stay “in A., an artists’ colony in the north-east of the USA”. The Catalan himself remains as nameless as the place. She disliked him from the very first moment: “I didn't like him. He was neither handsome nor elegant, nor did he have anything athletic about him.”

The Catalan: attracted to the show-off

It wasn't just his appearance that repelled the narrator, but also his demeanour. He: articulate, self-confident, successful. She: reserved, quiet, observant. But they have one thing in common: writing. While she keeps a low profile in a round of introductions, he openly boasts about the sales figures for his book.

Just a few days after the arrival of the scholarship holders, the story takes its course: “The Catalan [...] stood up and signalled to me over the heads of the others. At least that's how I interpreted it: he held his right hand in the air with his fingers spread apart. Then he disappeared. Five minutes later, I also left the veranda and climbed up to his room.”

An NVA soldier reads Sartre

An affair, a love affair, perhaps even a love affair? The narrator avoids categorisation. She is more interested in the storytelling itself, in the writing. About the question of how we remember and how memory can be shaped with the help of language.

The narrator also draws on her experiences during her scholarship stay and remembers the story of the soldier. As a young girl in GDR times, she met a young NVA soldier in the forest on the outskirts of the garrison town of E. on the Szczecin Lagoon. It is this enigmatic mushroom picker and Sartre reader who ultimately encourages her in her desire to become a writer and gives her the eponymous advice: “You have to be wild for it. Wild for a wild dream.”

The limits of autofiction

This is where the double exposure comes in: the Catalan and the soldier alternate constantly in the novel. Again and again, the question arises as to how experiences can be made literary. Are authors allowed to make unsparing use of their own experiences? And are they particularly entitled to do so because – as the book says – they are more permeable? The trilogy is also exciting because Schoch not only reflects on experiences, but also on autofiction itself.

However, the consequences of revealing the private sphere for the environment only play a minor role in Schoch's work. She is interested in the shaping of the past through language. It is therefore not surprising that her protagonist does not ask herself the question of morality – her husband is at home in Germany during her scholarship stay.

Where is the physicality?

As precise and stylistically confident as Schoch's use of language is, she remains reserved in her depiction of love, desire and fear of loss. The physicality inscribed in the story is largely omitted. Therein lies a missed potential, namely to take the language and the narrative beyond the voyeuristic to the sensual.

“I'll start again, at another point.” Wild begins with this ambiguous sentence after a wild dream. The final volume does not follow on from its predecessors in terms of chronology. Each book can be read without knowledge of the others. The trilogy is now formally complete. But it will be interesting to see where Julia Schoch picks up next.