Cherrypicker | Literature
Living the world to its end

Crime writer Tommie Goerz has written his second novel outside of this genre. Set in the Franconian province, it tells of loss and transience in simple but precise language.

By Holger Moos

In Tommie Goerz's novel Im Schnee (In the Snow), in the fictional Franconian village of Austhal, the old people who have lived there for generations live in the decaying village centre almost like prehistoric creatures alongside the "newcomers". These two groups live in parallel worlds with relatively little understanding for one another. Getting to know each other over the course of time is a hopeless endeavour. When it comes to offering a newcomer the ‘you’, this is firmly rejected:

Max and Schorsch, who are around 80 years old, have been friends since childhood. But Schorsch, who took baskets of apples from Max's garden every year, has just died at the beginning of the novel. It is winter, the solitary Max is standing at the window, watching the snow fall, lost in thought and listening to the silence, which is suddenly interrupted by the tinkling of the death bell. The bell is rung by "Mehlmeisels Gunda", who had inherited this task from her mother. Max soon learns that it was Schorsch whose hour had struck.

Wall of silence

The novel only covers the days following Schorsch's death and follows the traditional procedures and rituals. At the wake, first the old men sit until midnight, then the women. Only Max stays up all night at his deceased friend's bedside. The next day is the „Leich“, when everyone meets in the pub. There are more and more deaths among the old-established people, they say laconically: Max and Schorsch had a close and intimate relationship, but like the rest of the old village population, they found it difficult to talk: "There was more silence than dialogue, because the rules were clear." People lived a life with a reduced vocabulary and equally reduced emotional balance. When a rumour spread in the early 1990s that refugees were to be housed in the empty school building, it was vandalised at night. The perpetrators were never caught: "The walls of the schoolhouse were torn down, but the wall of silence stood, that was how the village was."

One thing set Max - and Schorsch during his lifetime - apart from the other men in the village: he appreciated the slightly more cordial nature of the women and spent more time with the opposite sex: "Because they weren't so loud and so rough. And they also laughed differently, not so much at each other ... mostly anyway." Schorsch is also receptive to the women's singing, especially when the even older Lilo sings old songs:

No glorification of the old days

Max's musings are characterised by alienation, melancholy and an increasing weariness with life. The village is far away from the rest of the world: "A mess, he no longer understood it. There was war everywhere, people were fleeing everywhere - here only the snow was falling." The often invoked solidarity of the old village community is also not so great: Goerz is not interested in romanticising the old days. The narrowness and speechlessness, the resignation to fate and the human cruelty lend the novel a dark undercurrent. Social outsiders and problem cases, be they "crazy" people or just red-haired children, are locked away or die in bizarre ways, for example by being stuck upside down in a shaft for too long without being noticed. Nobody enquires further, because "that's how people often died in the village: not infrequently in a strange way".

A great little novel

So the old days were not necessarily better: Im Schnee is a great little novel about ageing, the passing of time, losing oneself in a world that is becoming increasingly alien. His characters "live their world to the end", says Goerz in an interview. Goerz uses sparse language - much is only hinted at - and a coherent style to tell of this passing world, without pathos, without pity, but with a great deal of compassion.