An interview with writer Judith Hermann
“I pluck up my courage to take on the void”
Judith Hermann has now come out with a new book called Daheim (Home), which has been nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. In this interview she talks about her early success, big crises and smoking.
By Wolfgang Schütz
Ms Hermann, the opening of your new book comes as a surprise, seeing as the first twenty pages were published as a short story a few years ago. What’s the deal? Was anything left hanging then?
Judith Hermann: Writing the story and then continuing it in the novel was a process, yes. After writing up and finishing the story “Falle” (Trap), I knew it could be just a conventional short story, but I also knew I felt like writing a follow-up to the story for a change. I wanted to know how this rather aloof character would fare in life: if she isn’t going to Singapore, what does she do instead, where does she go from there? That's what I wanted to write about.
Judith Hermann: “I’m looking for something metaphysical”
There are pretty long intervals between your books. But as we read them, it immediately becomes clear why. It never seems as though you mean to tell a pre-constructed story as realistically as possible, but as though you always begin by creating a reality in language and then you see where that takes you. It's hard to imagine this process as an everyday task: it seems more like you’d have to hole up in a safe place and enter a phase in which you can question anything and everything. Is that true? So did you pluck up the courage to take on the void again?
Hermann: Thanks for this fine phrase. I think that’s exactly how it is: I pluck up my courage to take on the void. Just because you’ve written some books doesn’t mean you can write. Every book involves writing from scratch, going back to square one, the blank sheet of paper is white all over every time. Its whiteness stares at me in wonder, metaphorically speaking, every time. With each book I learn something – and lose something. It's pretty much a zero-sum game, I always start afresh. I'm less interested in pre-constructed stories, and I'm glad it seems to you that I’m more about using language to create reality. I'm looking for something, something metaphysical, for a tone that suits the year and the times in which I want to give it another try.
There’s a tension in your narration that can’t really be put down to whatever it is you’re describing. It’s almost a kind of suspense, as if we’ve got to brace ourselves for anything to happen at any time: death, happiness, even horror. Or is this an intentional effect? Is it perhaps, as your first-person narrator suggests at one point, that when we take a close look, especially in retrospect, it’s amazing that we manage to summon up any faith in life at all?
Hermann: To me, this is almost what it feels like to be alive – this mind-set of being ready for anything at any time, for hard knocks and beautiful things too. I often wish I could face everyday life more serenely, that I could “count on life”. But I have a hard time doing that. And it's exhausting, of course. On the other hand, however, it also gives events a certain density, a potentially magical moment arising out of what may be the tiniest, most insignificant things. Maybe this is what creates the sort of suspense you’re asking about in my writing.
Judith Hermann: She used to have to smoke when writing. Does she still?
In the opening flashback, your first-person narrator is working in a cigarette factory and she’s a heavy smoker herself. When we meet up with her again, nearly thirty years later, she has quit the habit and is living way out in a village on the coast. What about you? You once said you couldn't write without smoking...
Hermann: I gave up smoking over fifteen years ago… with a heavy heart. I smoked whilst writing my first two books. Ever since Alice, I've been sitting at my desk with tea, apples and Japanese incense. I love smoke. And I still miss smoking, I don't think you can ever get rid of that, it's hard-wired into your system. But ultimately I'm delighted, of course, not to have to smoke anymore. Cigarettes disappeared from the text for the space of three books – and now they’re back in Daheim. Some of the characters smoke a lot, and with a passion. They’re allowed to – because I’ve managed to get myself out of harm’s way.
Sommerhaus, später: “Early success was a blessing and a burden”
You were 27 at the time and hailed as a poster girl for the Fräuleinwunder (“girl wonder”) in German literature with your debut, the short story collection Sommerhaus, später (Summer House, Later). How did you actually survive that?
Hermann: Big words, what! Fräuleinwunder – you couldn’t get away with that one nowadays –, poster girl and German literature. I didn't take it very seriously, which was simply a way of protecting myself. That rained heavily on my parade, needless to say, but it also helped me keep my distance and my self-possession. The early success was at once a blessing and a burden, and it informs my writing to this day.
Your new book raises questions about what comes across like a statement of fact in the title: “Daheim” (Home). Do we need roots? How do we know who we are? Can we trust the memories on which we construct our self-image? Each character seems a separate attempt at an answer. And yet what comes to pass bears out the narrator’s observation that we mostly fail. Unless, as she puts it, we find a sun around which to orbit as satellites.
Hermann: Yes, that’s what she says: we almost always fail. But there’s something serene about the tone in which she puts it, and in this failure always lie new paths and unexpected possibilities. With every failure, you lose something and something completely different takes its place, something that would never have occurred to you had it not been for the failure. The characters in the book have come to terms with all the unfulfilled longings and desires in their lives. Slightly bitter, a little wistful, but still – they accept it and they are, perhaps abstemiously, quite present. Their lives are centred - the narrator's centre is her child and her husband – and these centres are immutable. But they still meet others and engage in meaningful encounters that can be tender, restorative and satisfying.
“A guilty conscience because Covid hasn’t changed my everyday life much”
Is it a book about existential loneliness in the modern age and our strategies for living with it or escaping it?
Hermann: Maybe that’s what it is? The book is one-dimensional when I write it. But when read, it comes to life: it is understood or misunderstood, interpreted, categorized and enlivened. It may well be a book about existential loneliness – even though I wasn’t thinking in these terms when I wrote it.
How do you feel about spending so much time Daheim (“at home”) because of Covid?
Hermann: I often have a guilty conscience because Covid hasn’t changed one aspect of my everyday life much at all: I'm “home” a lot, alone a lot, writing, reading, I go for long walks, I talk to myself. No change really – but of course that's not true: I miss my parents, my family, just meeting people, touching, embracing. Celebrations. Big meals. Afternoons at the cinema. Going to the theatre, travelling, a full tram and a huge party. Feeling carefree, the simple life. What we all miss.
Although you again write with great precision about people in an era that is ours, too, no one would ever think of calling this a social novel. The first-person narrator's neighbour is the only one who brings up issues like the environmental and climate crisis at all, and that conversation immediately fizzles out. Do you consciously avoid the weightiness of the bigger picture or does it dissolve in focusing on the individual?
Hermann: I see it the way the narrator’s brother puts it: these are things you can't talk about. It’s important to be aware of them, he says, to make them part of your daily life, but talking about them won’t change a thing. I can relate to that. All the same, I wanted the characters to talk to one another about these vital issues. I wanted to situate them clearly in time and space: they are here, they are among us and, just like the rest of us, they’re part of the problem. They bear some responsibility for the crisis, just as we do too.
“I’ll be gone by then and the world will be at war over water”
How do you yourself live – as a mother, too – in this age that seems to be plagued with such big crises, present-day crises as well as those looming on the horizon?
Hermann: Hmm… How do I live. I count the years and then I count my son’s years, and by the time he gets to be as old as I am now, I’ll presumably be gone and the world will be at war over water. How do I live with that? It's unimaginable. And bound to happen all the same. I listen to my son and his friends, they’re constantly talking about these things, and maybe they’ll achieve what I consider impossible because I’m old: maybe they’ll change the world that we wordlessly bequeath to them.
Your novel has been nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. But even though you’re considered “one of the greatest contemporary German writers”, you’ve never won it – or the German Book Prize – before. Would that be something special for you?
Hermann: The reaction to my texts is often tense and perhaps perplexed, occasionally quite aggressive. I’m awfully happy about this nomination. It has helped the book get off to such a warm and welcoming start, it’s coming into the world in a way that’s very peaceful for me.