Andreas Stichmann was born in Bonn and has seen plenty of water flow down the Rhine. His stories tell of people who live by the river, exploring their desires and yearnings – and the way they deal with reality.
A punk by the Rhine
Heimatgedicht is the first of the stories in this slim volume. It’s about Motte, a young punk who has decided to camp out in her home city. We accompany her as she roams around Bonn: Kaiserplatz square, Hofgarten park, Kennedy Bridge. And hovering somewhere above it all is the eponymous rock in Sankt Goarshausen and the legend of Lorelei.In Stichmann’s tales, history and myths serve as frames of reference, relics of a bygone era that feel strangely distant from the modern world, a sensation which Stichmann conveys subtly at times, and rather more ostentatiously at others. “Steffanie’s eyes spun like the blades of windmills may have done everywhere around here until a few hundred years ago.”
Continuities remain ancient and ponderous, such as the Rhine, which is mentioned in virtually all the stories. This inspires Motte to compose punk elegies like: “are you grunting, oh water? you liquid dog?/i’m grunting too!/alas, all beauty must die!/ it’s over: lorelei.”
This must be what the Rhine punk poetry sounded like, more or less. After all, it’s unclear whether the poem was in fact accurately reproduced. The person narrating the story is, more than anything else, the brooding type. Ultimately, the only thing that is certain is that there was “a girl named Motte down there at the Rhine”.
Indecisive narrator
This unreliable narrative approach is also evident in the story Verwechslungen. It was read out by Stichmann at the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize award ceremony in 2023 and became the subject of a heated debate. In its six episodes, the first-person narrator reports on a stay at an allergy clinic. This features strange passages in which he talks about the humiliation he experienced when his ex-wife gave him a recumbent bicycle as a present. The stilted Skype calls with his children are also among the bizarre moments in the story, which is framed by an encounter with a person whom the first-person narrator believes to be an old acquaintance called Alexander Germ.The narrator struggles continuously to find an apt description: “Overall, the man appeared somewhat pendulous. Only the wrinkles on his forehead still conveyed this mischievous air he once had, though I only use the word mischievous because I cannot find the right word. Like a demonic dashboard might be more accurate, I don’t know.” The narrator conjectures the entire time, digresses, makes mistakes and corrects himself, loses his thread, claims to no longer remember exactly. He abruptly switches from a stream of consciousness to direct speech, which makes it impossible to work out which is which. In short, we are dealing here with an unreliable narrator.
Speculative contentions transition seamlessly into enthusiastic outpourings, ever comic and frequently amusing. Finally we discover that Alexander Germ is not in fact Alexander Germ at all but a carer named Pepe Schwertens.
A place for lost souls
Alexander Stichmann succeeds in quickly establishing the characters in his stories without letting them degenerate into templates. This is also the case in the story Motel, in which Beate, now a widow, opens “a small peach-coloured motel on a nondescript bend of the B42” that is named Motel Loreley. She caters for lost souls who appear to have become detached from the world and need a place to stay. Beate herself is looking for company but does not get it from her guests, who at no point in the story become tangible. Through the widow’s eyes we see the characters appear and disappear, come and go – and ultimately exit the stage completely. With one final glance at these elusive figures, Stichmann’s collection of short stories draws to a close, leaving its characters behind in the river of lingering transience.05/2024