Weave Style With Bangs

interview with Ulrike Draesner

it takes for the budding literary and cultural scholars often as a simple task to write about writers. A more difficult question is, with them instead of just talking about it, without at the same time in professional hair-splitting to expire. Jana Böttrich took on this task, which became the following interview with Ulrike Draesner (see also "Text and Taboo" in the January 2008 issue of the cultural magazine DRESDNER ).

Ulrike Draesner, as a 10-year-old child you have been following the hostage taking and murder of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the Olympic Games in Munich 1972nd How did you feel about this event then?
The Olympic games were obviously prepared well and looks forward to joyful tension. When she finally began, the city filled with people of all colors, in the most imaginative and beautiful clothes. To understand how unusual such a thing in 1972 still worked, is necessary to remember that at that time, for example, only three television channels were. And then suddenly the whole world as a guest! That was fabulous, the city changed, the people rejoiced, was allowed to play in many places and they were pop music. My parents thought nothing of this music, they heard more yodeling and brass band music, but I was now enjoying Olympic Pop on the street, and the whole city is a party.
And then, suddenly, a shock: The hostage-taking, the worried faces, and the morning after horror at the deaths of Israeli athletes. At Marienplatz were Flowers and wreaths, and people were crying. So when I was a child, ten years old and had lived until then that adult children and themselves protected. But now something had happened which made clear that even adults are powerless in some situations. I believe such a finding is a first step to leave childhood. This is connected to me personally with these Olympic games.
How has the experience been wearing for her novel games?
It was important for me, but perhaps in a different sense than you might initially assume, my still very childish recollection of the events in the fall of 1972 to have. It is a emotional memory, no memory, the little white. I probably knew at that time Palestine and Israel, at best, from the teaching of religion and the contemporary political context were unknown to me. What has been disclosed in the aftermath of the hostage-taking or hidden, repressed, and what was covered up deliberately, I have researched the novel work on the train, like everyone else would have to investigate. My memories were writing, however much just for the parts of the novel, the play in Munich in '72. These chapters give you their foundation, their specific sound.
central theme indirectly with the Munich attack is currently still tense Ratio of religions, whose relaxation has the 'enlightenment' dream. But apart from this problem: How do you evaluate the role of religion in the 21st Century?
I recently heard the wise statement that it is a romantic notion to think that all that is abolished in the symbols and values in religion, was shattered by the modern world. The opinion that was broken up, is common, and I find it exciting to call it romantic. It is based on a too large unit and linearity of history, of a progression, which is actually quite doubtful. In other words, religion is something very human and therefore not unequivocal. With a simple either / or will not be with her.
What is religion to you personally?
I had said earlier that I am not a religious person. Today, I took possession of the church maintained as an institution. Presumably this has to do with my family background: my father's family were refugees from Silesia, Protestant, my mother's family is Bavarian and Catholic. My father was important that his children were baptized Protestant. What led to that the very Catholic mother of my mother's only two non-Catholic grandson tormented half and half bekehrerisch rather well regarded as little devils. So I now look with skepticism at church as an instrument of power, as a human arm, manipulator, but also as an institution with a lot of bloody history. But I also see good effects, and by that I mean not only the social work, but also the spiritual content.
And this is crucial: every human being there is the facility to ask questions afterwards, which means the passing of time, which is our origin, what our end. A kind of inner question-and-mind requirement. Perhaps one could call it, in the absence of a better word, our "soul dimension".
What is your opinion of the cause or the solution of the Middle East conflict? Will your novel to something ? Help
I have no answer. She has no one. I, of course, the novel research on the train for the games a lot of reading to do so. The more you know it, the more complex the situation. It's really a mixed bunch in every sense of the word, the conflict is 5000 years old, and on each side is so much injustice has been done and so many people were injured. An ad hoc solution to me seems to be unthinkable. This is recognized in Ireland. Long, long processes are necessary if people really - and this is a great cultural achievement - must learn to think differently, or even to forgive. You can request this by anyone. It must grow from within. We have Of course it all like that this region is pacified. But how can this be done? An additional piece of land the size of Israel from the planet's crust push it up? Then perhaps the regional conflict would be mitigated, but the cultural and religious conflicts persisted anyway. How long real changes that we see so well at the famed merging of East and West Germany.
I would like to talk about writing, not about politics. Authors are no world say they make the world perhaps in the first place "because only"!
My focus, my interest in the games was the question of what it is for people means that if in the city where they live, held a terrorist attack. They or people they are connected to, perhaps contributing to the elimination of the consequences, or even tolerate such episodes. This is also the constellation of the Games: the 'first love' of the protagonist is used as a police officer in Fuerstenfeldbruck. Or just a normal bus driver will suddenly take the hostages and hostage takers to the helicopter.
And yet the question: Do you feel as a writer's responsibility, to social, political and historical grievances to draw attention?
If you primarily social and political responsibility would like, then it is wrong to be a writer. As it moves so relatively little. On the other hand, I certainly am not a writer in the "ivory tower," my lyrics are contemporary, they are about our lives here, now - which does not mean that the past did not matter, that would be quite absurd, for the time, life time, always thwarted by many threads and influences. The dowry and of course the games have to do with German subjects and the German reality, and that goes for my stories and the poems again and again. The unfortunate and probably undeserved, bad outcome of the hostage crisis of 1972 in Germany is still a taboo. That was me really really clear when the book was published. It was striking, of course, already in their research that there is virtually no discussion of the topic in German history was. American and British scientists on the other hand got to work after 2000 and brought incredible footage of the planning and the subsequent German dealing with what's happening to light. As you could probably already guess what was confirmed at a reading in the lobby of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in December 2005. I read briefly from the novel, then there should be a panel discussion with a sports reporter, an Olympic official and athlete of 1972. The athlete criticized much as with the memory handled in the attack today, especially from former positions of responsibility such as the former police chief of Munich. She read a short text to front and began to cry. Thereafter there was a kind of tumult in the hall, a panel discussion was no longer possible, because the audience intervened: the one defended the officials, others grumbled that the issue is still being swept under the carpet. The event was canceled, we were still two or three hours in the lobby and discussed. About this event has been the way, never reported in the press. And to come back to the question: Yes, there are always things in my lyrics, the edge of normality touch or exceed it. This has to do with my view of literature. You may ask, what is normal as a "true" and what we have to work "and may talk about what it costs us normal, what we lose when everyone is equal, and obedient, and what we win. Just in this literature is itself a profit of vitality and experience: it throws light on many sides to what we and our world "self-call."