They had all told Butsch, the barbarian, that this rock was a size too thick for him. But a real barbarian is not deterred. So they opened the vaudeville's tent roof especially for him, a crane lifted the 500-pound granite block into the air, and Butsch, the barbarian, was standing in the ring, ready to catch it. The performance should be his opus magnum. Well The people in the front row got pretty dirty. Or, as Philipp Winkler writes, they "got the grits injected into their faces." Butsch the barbarian no longer catches rocks.
Philipp Winkler, born in 1986 near Hanover and raised, made famous a few years ago with the hooligan novel "Hool", has written a little book about the world of showmen and fairground people. "Carnival" is a wistful farewell book to a world of eccentrics, freaks, bon vivants, gossips, money cutters and barbarians.
Author Winkler
Photo: Kat Kaufmann / AufbauWritten long before our corona times of staying at home worldwide, this book is now, when it appears, a current book of longing for the wild community of partying, intoxication, senseless fun. If these days every small group drinking in public is scourged by informers as an attempt at murder on the community, one has to read instead of partying.
Winkler doesn't write history. He lets types appear briefly, bows to their peculiarities and already comes to the next anarchist in the showman world. Hembo, the animal lover with half a skull, the baron, the talker who chatted all the money out of our pockets for us, the fair visitors, Darlien with the shotgun, the bride and groom Mindybo (Mindy and Dybo), who at their wedding with the super sling being shot to the sky, children juggling fork and knife before they learn to eat with them.
You can tell on every page how much joy it must have given Winkler to think up these types, to place them in front of him and to describe them in a friendly and amazed way. What is possible for people who are called "bizarre", "broken", "disabled", "stupid", "sick" or "dangerous" and spat out by the unified world out there.
Winkler loves them all. And he loves to describe them in old-fashioned words. "For love of the past and the golden times and love of a language that was about to die and thus marked the beginning of the end." So he writes himself.
Winkler combines all of this with a frivolous love of violence, a Tarantino-like joy in spurting brains. After shooting her husband, Darlien cleans the breakfast bacon from the blood, fries it, enjoys it and waits for the police.
"Carnival" reads a bit like the book of a drunk, youthful Nietzsche who carries a sugar apple in one hand and some poisonous, intoxicating mulled drink in the other and writes the text about the lost party world of the freaks and showmen. In these sober Corona times, we like to join this nostalgic high.
Icon: The mirror
