A year ago Helga Schubert won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize.
Her new volume of short stories, “Vom Aufstieg” (from standing up) has now been published.
The book is a literary treasure.
At the age of 80, Helga Schubert won the Bachmann Prize last year.
The author was invited to Klagenfurt 40 years ago, but the GDR did not allow her to travel.
Now Schubert's new volume of short stories “Vom Aufhaben” has been published.
It is lucky that they exist: those books that have an impact, that while reading do something to the reader, make something sound and thus touch something great and valid.
Books that might even have the power to change something.
In U.S.
Sounds pathetic, but that's how it is.
Helga Schubert has succeeded in creating such a remarkable piece of literature with "Vom Auferstand", which appears today.
"A life in stories" is what Schubert calls her book in the subtitle
The 81-year-old modestly calls her work “A life in stories” in the subtitle.
Ultimately, she says nothing else on the more than 200 pages.
It packs what you have experienced - condensed into literature - in 29 stories.
But of course, "From getting up" is much more than that.
In 1980, the GDR prevented Schubert from participating in the Bachmann Prize
The book takes its title from the last story.
It is the text with which Helga Schubert won the Bachmann Prize last year.
40 years earlier she had already been invited to the competition in Klagenfurt - and was not allowed to compete: the GDR had banned her from traveling to Austria.
Also because the then jury chairman Marcel Reich-Ranicki was considered a “notorious anti-communist” by the State Security.
Schubert won in Klagenfurt 2020 with "From standing up"
In 2020 she won with a wonderfully quiet contribution.
"Vom Aufstieg" (Vom Auferstand) sensitively interweaves retrospectives on Schubert's life with her dominant mother, who was 101 years old and was by no means an easy woman, with moments from everyday life with her husband, the psychologist and painter Johannes Helm.
“My ideal place is a memory” is the first sentence of the book.
Remembering, thinking back, thinking about what has been is a driving force in Helga Schubert's literature.
“I always want to keep everything together and not let anything fall apart,” she notes in a later chapter.
Archiving and preserving is never an end in itself.
The author is actually far from being a chronicler of her own sensitivities.
Rather, it succeeds in penetrating what has happened and in doing so to find universally valid.
Memory is Schubert's literary engine
Another driving force behind her writing, probably her life too, is a deep, completely natural and therefore unobtrusive belief.
"Today I know: In this one week before Easter Sunday everything happens that I have understood about life", it says in "My Easter Story", a cautious and therefore all the more powerful story: "How quickly a person's fate changes that one can be betrayed.
That there is always unexpected support and a way out.
I want to be reminded of this hope.
Once a year. ”The comfort that memories can give and the strength that literature can grow - here we find them again.
Schubert initially worked as a psychotherapist
Those who are so firmly rooted are not afraid of what lies ahead.
For the future that germinates in every human being, the author often finds memorable images in nature.
Schubert reports about the “old friend” who visited her in Neu Meteln in Mecklenburg in winter, where she has been at home since the seventies.
He wanted to go across the "frozen field".
“He lived in the city, there he doesn't have the invisible certainty like here, the sensual image for his hope that things will go on, that new life will arise beneath the frozen earth.” Without this experience, however, he could “because of his grief” not surviving dark times.
Isn't that “old friend” also in each of us?
Schubert seems to know that.
The writer, who was born in Berlin in 1940, came to write late.
After studying psychology, she worked as a psychotherapist.
The poet Sarah Kirsch (1935-2013) opened the door at Aufbau Verlag;
it was here that Schubert's debut album, “Lauter Leben”, appeared in 1975.
“From getting up” distinguishes his calm style
Her new book is not only characterized by an enormous knowledge of people and their souls (the knowledge from her first job certainly served her well for this).
“From getting up”, which is characterized by a clear, wonderfully unexcited style, is also pervaded by cautious wit and a flair for the bizarre.
The author writes that it is “atypical” - and without further ado calls her cardiologist to the stand.
In the end, Schubert dismisses us with great consolation: “In my long life I have absorbed everything I wanted in love, warmth, images, memories, fantasies, sonatas.
It's all in me right now.
And when I'm very old, maybe paralyzed and maybe blind, and maybe very needy, then it will all still be inside of me.
Because that's my darling. ”Happy who can say that of himself.
Information about the book:
Helga Schubert: “From getting up. A life in stories ”. dtv, Munich, 224 pages; 22 euros.