Culture

Ingo Schulze talks novels and the German reunification

Berlin (Germany), Oct 3 (EFE), (Camera: Rodrigo Zuleta).- The German writer Ingo Schulze, author of three novels about German reunification, whose 30th anniversary was commemorated this Saturday, has proposed in one of his recent novels to take the two systems, capitalism and socialism, "to the letter" and through it reduce both to the absurd. The novel largely reflects Schulze's vision of reunification, a process he has always wanted to address without falling into idealization and without renouncing a critique of the present.FOOTAGE OF INTERVIEW WITH GERMAN WRITER INGO SCHULZE Translations:1.Q: What is the path from "New Lives" to Peter Holtz?A: "In the beginning it was very difficult for me to write about the time before 1989 because there is a great danger of falling into a kind of pseudo-dissidence. The question was, how do you write about the past without losing sight of the present?"New lives" was an attempt to show a paradigm shift, from how a writer, as a result of reunification, becomes a businessman. I found that very interesting"Adam an Evelyn" was something like the sonata in front of the symphony. To show again, in a minor tone, that change between two worlds. A provincial tailor ends up with his wife in Ballaton when people are escaping across the Hungarian border and the question is how they decide.Peter Holtz was the attempt to tell about that time with distance both from what was accepted as obvious then and from what is accepted today without discussion. It is to take both systems at face value, affirmatively, and through that to lead both to the absurd2.Q: One key to the novel is the naivety of the character...A: It is the naivety of the rogue. The rogue can mean many things. For me it was important that he evolved, that he believed first one thing and then another, and that he went through two systems and grew up. That was not easy.He's a madman, a naive madman who finds it impossible to separate words from actions.3.Q: When reading the novel, one cannot help but think of Voltaire's "Candide"...A: "Candide" was naturally a model, it's a great model but with him you never know if you are really naive or not. For me a great model was "The Idiot" by Dostoieski, someone who tries to be a good person.4Q: There are two allusions to Theodor Fontane and Günter Grass when they talk about Peter Holtz's "Confessions and Entanglements" and when they explain to Holtz that capitalism "is a long story. Are they deliberate?A: "Confessions, Entanglements" is for me one of Fontane's most beautiful books and it has become a catch-phrase in Germany. "It's a long story" is something that has also become a catch-phrase but of course you can't use it without thinking of Günter Grass.For me it was beautiful that when I had the first chapters of Peter Holtz ready I read them before him in a small round of writers in Lübeck - in February 2015, two months before his death - and he laughed a lot, he had fun which was important to me because Grass is key in Germany to the tradition of the rogue which is not very widespread.