"Love is mighty": At home with the thrashing monster
Created: 05/31/2022Updated: 05/31/2022, 16:16
By: Michael Schleicher
Claudia Schumacher presents her first novel with "Love is Powerful".
© Roman Raacke
Juli grows up in a Swabian model family.
But her father is a beating monster - the mother his "crime scene cleaner".
Sounds like dismay prose?
Claudia Schumacher's debut novel "Love is Powerful" is miles away from that.
Our criticism:
Heavy metal was born when Black Sabbath released their debut album, which bears the British band's name, in February 1970.
The title track slowly creeps up, a threatening wait in G minor, a damned hesitation and procrastination – until guitarist Tony Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler unleash a musical madness after a few minutes, a surge and rage.
Meanwhile, Ozzy Osbourne sings about a – sorry!
– poor sow who has to realize that running away will bring absolutely nothing.
Because the devil himself has it in for the protagonist.
"Love is Powerful" is the first novel by Claudia Schumacher
Worse still: "Satan's sitting there, he's smiling." The Godseibeiuns, who sits there and smiles - this motif actually leads right into "Love is mighty".
Claudia Schumacher's remarkable debut novel
(dtv, Munich, 376 pages; 22 euros)
is not only a literary equivalent of the song "Black Sabbath" in terms of content, but also stylistically.
The novel is divided into three periods of life
The author, born in Tübingen in 1986, tells the story of Julia, known as Juli, a young woman who grows up in an outwardly harmonious world.
In three phases of life - 2007, 2014 and 2016 - the readers meet this person who was born on the sunny side of existence.
Swabian family to show off and envy, well off, small town villa in (fictitious) Ederfingen, father and mother are respected members of society - Juli himself is a math and arithmetic genius.
However: "I know you better than you know yourself," Papa kept saying when I was little - and took me away," Schumacher once said of her protagonist.
That's the big emotional issue Juli and her siblings deal with.
The father, however, not only occupied the souls of his children,
thus prevented them from developing: the respected, admired and well-loved lawyer everywhere becomes a cruel whipping monster at home.
To a devil who puts on his street shoes especially when he's beating up Juli's brother.
"Satan's sitting there, he's smiling."
Schumacher's style is far removed from dismayed prose
Schumacher lets the young woman talk about growing up in this terrible family, about her attempts at rebellion and liberation - also about her desire to belong.
This ensures great immediacy when reading, as if one were standing directly at the pits at the Sabbath concert – to stick with the image from the beginning.
Only in the last part of her book does the author change the narrative perspective and look at Juli's life from the outside.
A strong trick, because here it becomes clear that physical distance does not necessarily mean freedom, that emotional dependency is sometimes more stubborn, meaner - and that it takes time to really resolve a trauma.
“Love is powerful” reads laconic and is rousing
phew
That sounds intense.
What is surprising about this novel, however, is that it is about as far removed from dismay prose as Hansi Hinterseer's Ozzy Osbourne.
Schumacher has found an authentic, yes, in its laconic, funny and enormously entertaining style to tell of the wounds, pain and shame of her character - and of her struggle for emancipation.
In addition, the author succeeds in packing complex structures and tricky psychological processes into concise sentences.
"It's just the normality afterwards that's worse than war" is a sentence that Juli noted after his father's excess of violence.
In "normality" she has time to "ask questions".
Questions to which there are no answers.
For example how the mother was able to participate in all this?
Not only,
that she couldn't/wouldn't protect herself or her children.
No: "Mama, the crime scene cleaner" Juli calls her: "She stuffed our mouths with crumble cake and cream." It is exciting to read how Schumacher takes Juli away from the anesthesia with calories and sweets - spatially, linguistically, but above all emotionally.
"Is it the End, my Friend?" sings Osbourne in "Black Sabbath".
Is not it.
It's a start.
In many ways.
