Twenty two day or Half a lifetime by Franz Fühmann

German Fiction

Original title -Zweiundzwanzig Tage oder Die Hälfte des Lebens

Translator – Lelia Vennewitz

Source – Personal copy

For my second book for German Lit Month, I moved off the Guide Crime novel and picked a book I had decided on earlier this year. Joe at Rough Ghost had put up a picture on social media of a book by Fühmann, but I’m not sure if it was this one or another. U had read The jew car by him a couple of years ago and hadn’t known he had some other books coming out years earlier, so I found a cheap copy of this book which is on a subject that he talked and wrote about a lot in his later life, and that is Germany’s past he hAD BEEN IN THE nazi party during the wart but lived in East Germany after the war and was a staunch socialist. This book, written later in his writing life, is part memoir, part travelogue. It follows a three-year period he spent in Budapest in 1972.

October I9

Budapest: perhaps even more mini-skirts than in Berlin, in any case shorter ones, sometimes ending above the top of the stocking, usually cheap materials with an inverted pleat back and front and the skimpiest ones covering the ungainliest thighs

The intersection outside the Astoria is a No Stopping zone, a taxi stops, the customer has trouble with his money, the driver explains, the customer searches, cars block the inter-section, the cars blow their horns, the cars make a racket, the customer negotiates, the driver shows the figure on his fingers, the cars are now jammed up beyond the intersec-tion, the customer doesn’t understand, the cars roar, the driver of the car behind the taxi jumps out, cursing as he thumps the rear end of the taxi, the driver waves him off, the curser flings up his arms, and the cars way at the back reverse or turn and look for another route.

I liked this observation about skirts very of its time !

Fühmann finds himself in Budapest as a 50-year-old on a trip to a writer’s conference.(I’m always amazed how much more in  Eastern European states’ Literature is taken)  We see him talking with his fellow writers and his own poetic piece a few times in the book as he wanders around Budapest, talking about the city but also looking back at his own past and those war and post-war years. As the ghost of the Warsaw apcts invasion of Budapest some fouyr years before this book a book that start like a travelogue about the place thew writers become a darker book a writer thinking about his writing and also the past isn ever good as he wanders dark street drinks with his fellow writers. Talking about their works and place, it is a world caught in Amber.

Among pillars, in niches, under arcades: four pools, three large, one smaller, one shell-shaped, one shaped like a stadium, the water rising in temperature from the smallest to the largest pool each time by four degrees, from twenty-eight to forty degrees Centigrade, and on the water in the circle of the talking heads, bibs floating like lotus blossoms

Thirteen Leopold Blooms: what a metamorphosis

In the sauna: the old men have left, and now above the common people an athlete sits on the arm of a chair, wringing himself out. Doggedly, as stubbornly solemn as an athlete who has come in eleventh at the regional champion-ship, he squeezes the water out of his tissues, pore by pore, and every time he lifts his elbow he ripples the muscles of his arm, and no one pays any attention, wise nation! For fifteen minutes he works the section between collarbone and the top of his left breast, I might have been curious to see whether he kept up this pace, but the heat drives me out

Had pick this bit with its nod to Joyce

This is one of those lost gems that maybe would be great reissued a man wandering post-68 Budapest, a writer remembering his past draft into war by the Nazis and then those post-war socialist years, a time when the world he knew seemed perfect. But as he wanders around Budapest, you can see how that changes, and he talks to other writers. This has a bit of everything in his poetry, fiction, travelogue, and memoir. In the days when reading of a place was how to feel it before the age of celeb travels, he makes us feel the town, the Acacia trees, and the writers he meets. The city itself wound but still getting by. I hope it gets a new publication. My book is over thirty years old. I know Seagull Books has brought a few of his other books out. Described as one of the most sensitive books in East Germany. It captures those two extreme views of German life from the mid-thirties to when the book was written in 1972. Have you a favourite East german writer ?