Clemens Meyer's "Die Projektoren"  Soil cultivation with explosives

Clemens Meyer's genre-busting historical novel is a challenge and a provocation, but it is also a rich gift to its readership and to German literature.

The author Clemens Meyer, born in Halle (Saale) in 1977 and now based in Leipzig, should be familiar to anyone interested in German literature by now. His awards can no longer be counted on two hands, including the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, the MDR Literature Prize and the Bavarian Book Prize. Nevertheless, Die Projektoren, his grandiose work published in summer 2024, is only his third novel. He is also a successful screenwriter, author of theater texts, journalist and even a translator from English.

Clemens Meyer has worked on Die Projektoren for seven years, and he made good use of the time: It is a boiling-over, widely scattered and immaculately researched ride through the violent history of the People's Republic of Yugoslavia in the 20th century, through the (quite literally) insane world of the (also) Saxon con man and world-famous author Karl May, and into the soul of the GDR. With a love of historical detail, linguistic clarity and complexly arranged sections, he has created a classic that will survive the excitement surrounding the jury's rejection of the 2024 German Book Prize. The interwoven story, which spans many decades from the 20th to the early 21st century, all the small and large stories from the world wars, the numerous conflicts in the countries of the former Yugoslavia, the reality of life in the former territories of the Soviet Union and the two German states up to an unspecified present in today's Federal Republic, is carried by a large number of people, but only by a handful of —almost exclusively male— protagonists. First and foremost the central character, “the stranger who looked like a cowboy” (“I'm from down there too, somewhere down there”), an exiled partisan of the Croatian independence movement, who years later becomes an extra in various Karl May films of the 1960s, and many years later again a kind of chronicler and owner of a Zeiss TK-35 projector double unit, with which he brings these Karl May films to the people like documents of a lost time. He is joined by a number of sidekicks, such as the American Old Shatterhand and Kara Ben Nemsi actor Lex (“LEX”) Barker, who often appears in ghostly sequences. Or the population of Doctor Güntz's gaudy asylum for the insane in Leipzig, its enigmatic traveling and writing inmate, the “fragmentarist” ("the inexplicable prevails in the case of the fragmentarist. As if researched knowledge, acquired details, would in any way explain the authenticity of these texts ..."), a bunch of stilted and mostly aimlessly debating ‘doctores’ ("Dottores"), a rather sad, motley bunch of right-wing radicals who, as fighters in the Croatian wars, are relentlessly confronted with their own misconceptions, an ominous figure called 'Mr. Smith', possibly a double agent of the CIA and KGB ("You implied that you believe Smith and Smirnin are one and the same person. CIA, KGB.") and Yugoslavia's former head of state Marshal Tito. There is a lot going on in Clemens Meyer's great novel, and for long stretches it feels like a deliberate provocation. It's hard to keep up with the leaps in time and changes of location ("So why do you bring New Leipzig, which is in North Dakota, into play? You might as well mention America in Saxony and Inđija in the Yugoslavian Vojvodina.") and the countless characters, some, but by no means all, of whom we meet again in the course of the story. Meyer changes his narrative voice skillfully and effortlessly, with humorous sections bordering on the hilarious, juxtaposed with brutal war scenes and detached, almost surreal conversations. Reading this work, which is not only monumental in scope, is a challenge. The author has not made it easy for himself either and guides the reader with a sure hand through a series of chapters of recent Eastern European history, the complex interweavings of which become magically tangible under his direction. Despite all this historical pretension, and even though Meyer constantly interferes with his own narrative flow and always maintains an ironic distance even to his most important protagonists, it has become a pleasantly readable book, a rich gift for intrepid literature lovers, which not least sets new standards for historical literature, which, just like the cowboy does with his soil, is vigorously shaken up with unusual means.

Die Projektoren were rewarded with the Bavarian Book Prize 2024. I am happy for Clemens Meyer, he deserved it.
 

02/2025