Nenik Journey through a Tragicomic Century

The Absurd Life of Hasso Grabner
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-3-86391-288-8
Verlag: Verlag Voland & Quist
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 170 Seiten

Francis Nenik’s thrilling slice of narrative non-fiction “Journey through a Tragicomic Century” is about the life of the forgotten writer Hasso Grabner, told with great joy in language and love of absurdity. The journey takes us from the Young Communists in
1920s Leipzig to wartime Corfu, with Grabner falling from steelworks director to a vilified author banned from publishing his work in the GDR.

Francis Neniks „Reise durch ein tragikomisches Jahrhundert“ handelt vom Leben des vergessenen Schriftstellers Hasso Grabner — erzählt mit großer Freude am Fabulieren und Liebe zur Absurdität. Die Reise führt uns nebst anderen Stationen von den Jungen Kommunisten Leipzigs in den 1920er Jahren nach Korfu, ganz nah begleiten wir Grabner auf seinem wilden Ritt vom Stahlwerksdirektor zum verunglimpften Autor, dem es verboten war, sein Werk in der DDR zu veröffentlichen.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Nenik, Francis

Weitere Mitwirkende

Derbyshire, Katy

Derbishyre, Katy

Leseproben

No One Knows Any More
It is 14 September 1930. The world is in the midst of a great depression, the Weimar Republic in the midst of a Reichstag election, and Hasso Grabner still hasn’t experienced a revolution. Instead, there is unemployment, a rise in votes for the National Socialists, and no sign of improvement on the horizon. These are, if you like, shitty times, and even the miraculous medium Mirabelli is at a loss: ‘A chair moved in such a way that the front legs were lifted, banged against the floor and then turned in a circle.’ Hasso Grabner, meanwhile, does not want to turn in circles; Hasso Grabner wants to do something. Having joined almost every leftist organisation he could get his hands on (or that could get its hands on him) over the past few years, including the Communist Youth Federation back in 1929, he became a card-carrying member of the Great Communist Party of Germany, the KPD, in August 1930. And because merely being a communist on paper is not enough for him, he gets himself sent to Berlin to the KPD’s Rosa Luxemburg Central Party School, where he is taught the theoretical basics of his new political homeland. For five whole months, he attends long lectures in the school’s impressive villa on Kurze Strasse, studying dialectic materialism, political economy and communist tactics. By the time he gets back to Leipzig in November 1930, it is raining – and the Dominican Order also returns to the north of the city, having departed at the Reformation in 1539. Perhaps it’s a dream or perhaps only a memory short-circuited somewhere along its route through the mind; that is, its resistance to fictions abandoned and its reality value reduced to near zero – in any case, one night it seems to Hasso Grabner as though there are a thousand young communists in Leipzig, the cradle of social democracy. And he ought to know, seeing as he has been subdistrict secretary of the Communist Youth Federation since 1930 and thus familiar with the organisational work of youth recruitment. And yet that too is not enough for him: Hasso Grabner, the trained bookseller as restless as he is officially jobless, wants not just to administer communist ideas, but also to take them out of the party headquarters and into the city, into workplaces and homes and spiritually spoiled minds. That same year, he founds a factory cell for young communists on the premises of one of Europe’s largest cotton spinning mills, which soon becomes the most important communist cell in the entire city, and – at least in the eyes of its good three dozen members – has enough thread to dream of world revolution and spin a version of previous and future history all of its own. Reality, however, looks different, and instead of mass uprisings and barricades, there are art afternoons and craft activities. The revolution needs preparing, after all. And so, Leipzig’s young communists spend their weekends painting banners and pasting printed paper onto walls, organising meetings, publishing newspapers and promoting the communist cause outside the city’s entertainment venues. This is not particularly attractive and nor is it exactly profitable, and when tens of thousands do come – for instance at Easter of 1930, when the Communist Youth Federation of Germany holds its annual National Youth Meeting in Leipzig, with the local federation secretary pulling the strings in the background and the KPD chairman Ernst Thälmann* speaking in the foreground – the police spoil the communists’ revolutionary fun. A tussle breaks out among the 80,000 demonstrators at the closing rally, two police officers shoot at the crowd, kill one participant – and get lynched themselves. What may sound like an extreme case has become political normality by this point, in Leipzig and across all the state of Saxony, and while some are crafting their version of the world revolution out of printers’ ink, paint and paper, others are obtaining guns and knives, and forming combat squadrons, defence associations and protection leagues, their members all carrying sturdy canes; and those sticks weren’t made for walking. Alongside the sticks, there are shirts, assault straps, leather puttees, peaked caps and boots, because this is the deal: every outfit has its own outfit and, as always, the matching deference is a part of the dialectical package – first the uniforms draw the young men, then the young men don the uniforms. And then? Then all that’s missing is the right names. And so, at some point at the end of the Weimar Republic, the communist side has the Youth Federation people fighting alongside the Storm Falcons and the Antifascist Young Guard, the paramilitary Red Defence Squadrons, Red Youth Stormers and Red Front Fighters Alliance men, not to forget the Red Youth Front, which sounds like a mixture of the Red Youth Stormers and the Red Front Fighters Alliance, but actually has its very own shade of red, just like the proletarian combat groups and the numerous local groups named after their respective centurions. The social democrats, in contrast, take a more traditional approach to naming, and boast the Young Socialist Workers and the tightly organised Reich Banner Black-Red-Gold, which in turn is flanked by combat squadrons that have not only telephones but complete telecommunications units with their own system of coded flashing lights, which send signals all across Leipzig and if necessary up to 40 kilometres outside the city, enabling their motorised members to take immediate action when Nazi troops like the Stahlhelm, the Frontbann or the Young German Order attempt attacks in concert with the SA and SS. Essentially, at the end of the Weimar Republic, everyone is fighting everyone else, and the only thing capable of creating clarity seems to be violence. Communists fight social democrats, social democrats fight national socialists, national socialists fight communists, and then back to the beginning and start all over again. Yet that is not yet nearly all. Communists sometimes also disrupt SPD events along with national socialists, social democrats join forces with communist combat groups against the Nazis, and social democrats on occasion take action with the Nazis against the KPD, who in turn never tire of attacking defectors from their own ranks. In general, especially with the communists, the defence organisations only follow the party’s orders to a limited extent, so it comes as no surprise that the KPD’s East Saxony leadership at some point declares the aggressive whippersnappers of the Red Front Fighters Alliance to be nothing but ‘semi-idiotic syndicalists with Communist Party contribution cards in their pockets’. And in Leipzig? The next killing soon comes along, with the local chairman of the Young Socialist Workers stabbed to death by a young communist while distributing leaflets on 15 August 1931. That puts paid to any chance of a united front between the SPD and the KPD. In the cradle of social democracy lies a dead boy of 19. Hasso Grabner, meanwhile, keeps out of the worst battles. The favoured site of his confrontations is the city library, not the streets. Grabner reads Nietzsche, Maeterlinck, Luxemburg. He doesn’t read Thälmann. When the Saxon branch of the KPD relocates its offices from Dresden to Leipzig in 1932, Hasso Grabner is appointed to the inner leadership circle and entrusted with the ‘Opponents’ portfolio in the field of youth work. He, the former social democrat, is now responsible for encouraging the SPD’s ‘left’ groupings to secede to the ‘right’ of the KPD. Arguments for crossing over are provided through Sozialismus ist das Ziel, a journal sectarian enough to build a bridge between the shores, with socialism as the destination, as the title suggests. Grabner writes the articles himself, while his girlfriend does the duplicating. And what do you know – the plan works, and soon the first Young Socialist Workers are turning their backs on the old SPD and their fronts towards the young communists and their great party. That is just the beginning, and over the following months the number of individuals switching sides in Leipzig makes constant strides. In some districts, the group that splinters off is so large that the few remaining members have no option but to disband. There’s simply no known cure for the powers of persuasion possessed by the converted, as we know from the history of political medicine. In the KPD itself, the common belief by now is that the bourgeois world has long since ceased to flourish and is in rapidly deteriorating health, if not on its deathbed. The communists see the Weimar Republic of 1932 as deeply embroiled in a domestic crisis, with the collapse of the capitalist imperialist system imminent; the arc of history cannot possibly avoid leading straight to the dictatorship of the proletariat. However, history ignores the principles proclaimed by the communists, takes a right turn driven by millions on 30 January 1933 and erects its own dictatorship. In Leipzig, Hasso Grabner and his comrades know immediately for whom the bell tolls, and after thousands protest against Hitler’s appointment as Reich chancellor on the evening of 30 January, the communists give up their headquarters the very next morning and go underground, united in conspiratorial...

Über Autor(innen)

Derbyshire, Katy
Katy Derbyshire ist eine in London geborene, in Berlin lebende Übersetzerin und Literaturvermittlerin, die sich auf zeitgenössische deutsche Schriftstellerinnen und Schriftsteller konzentriert. Sie hat u.a. Werke von Clemens Meyer, Christa Wolf, Heike Geißler und Olga Grjasnowa übersetzt.

Nenik, Francis
Francis Nenik ist ein Pseudonym, der Autor scheut die Öffentlichkeit. Er wurde Anfang der 80er geboren und lebt in Leipzig. Zahlreiche Veröffentlichungen in renommierten Zeitschriften wie Merkur, Edit und Words Without Borders, die zum Teil fürs Radio vertont wurden. Sein Debütroman „XO“ erschien 2012 in Form einer Loseblattsammlung, im selben Jahr erhielt er den 2. Preis im Essay-Wettbewerb der Literaturzeitschrift Edit. Der Essayband „Doppelte Biografieführung“ sowie der Roman „Die Untergründung Amerikas“ erschienen 2017. Im Januar 2017 startete Francis Nenik sein „Tagebuch eines Hilflosen“, in dem er online die Amtszeit von Donald Trump literarisch begleitet.