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Elke Heidenreich
»In February a book by Bettina Flitner was published.
Bettina Flitner is a well-known filmmaker and photographer.
She lives in Cologne and she is the wife of Alice Schwarzer.
I say that because Alice appears in the book, but not as Alice Schwarzer, the famous person, but as the human being who helps you in times when things are getting really difficult and really dark.
"Alice helped me through the night," they once said.
So this is Alice Schwarzer.
But otherwise it's about Bettina Flitner and especially about her sister.
And that's the name of the book that was published by Kiepenheuer and Witsch.
"My sister".
Here we see the two sisters Bettina and Susanne - and they look at each other and us.
They obviously look at themselves in a mirror, but then also at us.
And on us because
And in this book she talks about her sister, about herself. It's a big family novel, and it starts off so brilliantly that you can't stop reading after the first page.
Then a call comes in, and it's the call from Susanne's husband, Thomas, saying, 'She did it.
She took her own life."
And 33 years before that, my father called, almost to the day, and said, "She did it."
And then the mother took her own life at the age of 47.
So both women, the sister and the mother, killed themselves young because they were suffering from severe depression.
And now Bettina Flitner is telling the family: should you have noticed?
Were there cracks?
Were there any discrepancies?
Is something like this announced?
Or is it, as an uncle says, a gene
that is inherited in this family?
And the father once said to Bettina: "You don't have it."
Why does one have it and the other doesn't?
Does the survivor have to feel guilty?
She traces all of this, and she does so by going way back in time.
She tells the story of her youth with her sister, very funny, sometimes very funny.
The girls were often left with their grandparents because their parents were always out.
You have moved very often.
The girls couldn't really take root anywhere.
They were very different sisters, but they got along quite well, then as they got older they lived apart a bit with different lives, but the bond was always there.
And always, says Bettina, you could feel that her sisters couldn't stand it
if anything was damaged.
Whether it was a cup, a piece of clothing or a piece of furniture that was damaged, she immediately threw it away.
And in the end it's like she had herself because she felt she was damaged - she had already spent a few months in a psychiatric hospital - as if she had disposed of herself and didn't want to live anymore.
And that runs through the whole family on the mother's side, even an uncle, a grandfather had taken their own lives.
So the black ravens, as she calls it, run through this family, the depressions that eventually settle on the window sill and eventually strike.
because she felt damaged - she had already spent a few months in a psychiatric hospital - like she had disposed of herself and didn't want to live anymore.
And that runs through the whole family on the mother's side, even an uncle, a grandfather had taken their own lives.
So the black ravens, as she calls it, run through this family, the depressions that eventually settle on the window sill and eventually strike.
because she felt damaged - she had already spent a few months in a psychiatric hospital - like she had disposed of herself and didn't want to live anymore.
And that runs through the whole family on the mother's side, even an uncle, a grandfather had taken their own lives.
So the black ravens, as she calls it, run through this family, the depressions that eventually settle on the window sill and eventually strike.
And she tells it so furiously, with wit, which is a miracle in history, funny, like looking back at her youth - but with such a grandiose narrative and interlocking technique, as if she had done nothing else in her life.
She's just a photographer, an artist who knows how to compose pictures.
And so she can also compose a novel.
She's great at jumping back and forth between the present and the past.
And the book is a book that moves the heart and the head in equal measure.
I haven't read anything this good in a long time.
And at the very end she writes about a dream she has one night where her sister appears to her and she asks her in the dream: "Why did you do that?".
And the sister says: »I don't know«.
She simply says, "I don't know."
So, and that reminded me of something else, namely Wislawa Szymborska, the little Polish lady, that's what she looked like, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.
No one knew them, and at the time I bought The Poems, that volume of poems from Suhrkamp.
It was published sometime in the 80s or 90s and contains poems from the 40s to the Nobel Prize.
And these poems have a lot to do with us, with our everyday lives.
And now I'm going to read one of these poems to you, because it's a poem, it means "Sister's Praise."
It's also about a sister, very different from what I just said:
My sister doesn't write poetry
and probably won't suddenly start writing poetry.
She got it from her mother, who didn't write poetry,
and also from her father, who didn't write poetry.
I feel secure under my sister's roof:
my sister's husband wouldn't write poetry for anything in the world.
And it sounds like a poem by A. Mazedonski,
none of my relatives write poetry.
There are no old poems in my sister's drawers.
No freshly written poems in her purse.
And invites my sister to lunch,
not to read poetry, I know that.
Their soups are exquisite without ulterior motives,
and the coffee never drips on manuscripts.
In many families no one writes poetry,
and if they do, then hardly any one person alone.
Sometimes poetry flows along with gender cascades,
causing mutually uncomfortable eddies in feelings.
My sister uses a not bad verbal prose,
the holiday cards are all her writing,
in which she promises the same thing every year: when
she returns, she will
tell
everything, everything, everything.
Wislawa Szymborska writes in another poem that poetry, that poems for her are the railings to which she holds on in her life.
Let's take a look at the SPIEGEL bestseller list - and maybe there's one among the first ten books that could become a railing for you.«
On the ten, tumbled down by the three: »Serge« – the new novel by the French playwright Yasmina Reza, known for plays like »The God of Carnage«.
Here, too, it's about the real thing: after the death of their mother, three children of Holocaust survivors go on a kind of »identity-finding trip« to Auschwitz.
The excursion of the Popper siblings alternates between comedy and tragedy in the usual Reza manner.
"Stay away from Gretchen" by Susanne Abel is also about the story of a mother: The story of the well-known news presenter Tom, who deals with his mother's past for the first time and learns of an impossible love - in ninth place.
The tenth Taunus thriller by Nele Neuhaus about the investigative duo Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein takes us into Frankfurt's literary milieu.
The program manager of a publishing house is found dead.
Is there a sacked author behind the crime?
The solution is in eighth place - »In eternal friendship«.
»The Granddaughter« is also consistently in the top ten – this week on the seven.
The novel by international bestselling author and lawyer Bernhard Schlink tells an East-West story: After the sudden death of his wife Birgit, Kaspar investigates her secret.
What he finds is a granddaughter - among East German right-wing extremists.
Moved up from ten to six: »Der Buchspazierer« by Carsten Henn.
The feel-good novel about the enterprising bookseller Carl Christian Kollhoff, who runs a literary delivery service for special customers.
The top ten list cannot do without Juli Zeh this week either: »About People« was the best-selling novel of the past year - and if the rankings continue like this, the chances of it happening again this year are good.
The long runner - this time climbed three places to five.
The previous week's five is now four: the book with the questionable title »Sex is like flour«.
What does that mean?
Comedian and jack of all trades Jürgen von der Lippe answers this and much more in stories and commentaries.
The autofictional novel »Have you finally found us« came in third.
Actor Edgar Selge manages to tell authentically from the point of view of a twelve-year-old what it's like to grow up as the son of a prison warden.
Consistently on number two this week: the story of ex-soccer player Basti Schweinsteiger, told by Martin Suter.
The Swiss writer does not score a literary penalty, but apparently a box office success.
The Frenchman Michel Houellebecq occupies first place in literature again this week.
In »Annihilation«, Houellebecq furiously describes how things look in France shortly before the 2027 presidential elections and what role a viral video plays in this.