Brenner

by Hermann Burger

“Hermann Burger was an artist who went the whole hog every time, didn't conserve himself. He was a man with a big longing for happiness.”  --Marcel Reich-Ranicki

Appearing in English for the very first time, Brenner is a delightfully unusual novel full of dark humor tracing the childhood memories of the book's eponymous narrator, a scion of an ancient cigar dynasty.

Perpetually shrouded in a thick cloud of cigar smoke, Herman Arbogast Brenner, scion of an old and famous cigar dynasty, has decided to kill himself––but not until he has written down his forty-six years of life, in a Proustian attempt to conjure the wounds, joys, and sensations of his childhood in the rolling countryside of the Aargau region of Switzerland.

Estranged from his wife and two children, he decides there is no point in squirrelling away his fortune, so he buys himself a Ferrari 328 GTS, and drives around sharing cigars with his few remaining friends.

In this roman à clef, writing and smoking become intertwined through the act of remembering, as Brenner, a fallible, wounded, yet lovable antihero, searches for epiphany, attempting to unearth memories just out of reach— the glimmer of a red toy car, the sound of a particular chord played on the piano, the smell of the cigars themselves.

Brenner is the final work from Hermann Burger, who died by suicide in 1989. The book comes out just days before what would have been the author’s 80th birthday.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Germany, German Literature

331 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Hermann Burger was born in 1942 in Burg, Canton of Aargau; his father worked for an insurance company. He enrolled at the ETH Zurich in 1962 and began studying architecture, but switched to German literature and art history in 1964. The publication of the poetry collection "Rauchsignale" ("Smoke Signals") in 1967 marked the beginning of his literary career, followed by the prose collection Bork in 1970. For the next couple of years Burger focused on his career in literary studies, writing his thesis on Paul Celan and his habilitation treatise on contemporary Swiss literature. He taught at universities in Zurich, Bern and Fribourg and worked as a literary editor for the Aargauer Tagblatt. His academic experience is reflected in the loosely autobiographical novel "Die künstliche Mutter" ("The Artificial Mother") which won him the Conrad-Ferdinand-Meyer-Preis in 1980. It was dedicated to his wife and its first edition has the dedication „Für Anne Marie“.
Burger's first major novel "Schilten. Schulbericht zuhanden der Inspektorenkonferenz" ("Schilten. School Report for the Attention of the Inspectors' Conference") was published in 1976 and made into a movie by Swiss film director Beat Kuert in 1979. It is about a teacher who has to tell the conference of inspectors about the development of his pupils, but speaks about death cult, graveyards and burials in a very detailed way. Archetypes of this novels are Franz Kafka and Thomas Bernhard. Burger mixes reality and fiction, and the more one reads about him, the more one finds out, that Burger writes about himself, his own suffering.
He won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1985 for his story "Die Wasserfallfinsternis von Badgastein" ("The Waterfall-Eclipse of Badgastein"). 1988, a changing of publishers from S. Fischer to Suhrkamp took place in a spectacular way.
The novel "Brenner" (in two volumes, four were planned), shows a protagonist wrapped in cigar smoke, who tells his life - Burger himself was a cigar smoker and descendant of cigar producers. Volume 1 has exactly 25 capitles, like a cigar box contains 25 cigars. Each capitle's name contains the name of a famous cigar brand. The second capitle announces the author's suicide intention: A red Ferrari is bought, because saving money no longer makes sense. It is about the divorce and the grief about having no contact to his two kids. Burger's last lessor was emeritus historian Jean Rudolf von Salis (= „Jérôme von Castelmur-Bondo“ in the novel). The last months of Burger's life and a review on his 46 years are described detailed in this roman a clef, he describes all coining persons (under changed names).
Burger's depressive and desperate moods grew with his literary acclaim, leading him to write the "Tractatus logico-suicidalis" (1988), a collection of aphorisms advocating suicide. The 1046 aphorisms are about the sentence „Gegeben ist der Tod, bitte finden Sie die Lebensursache heraus.“ (Death is given, please finde the cause of life.) The title remembers Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The book about suicide was viewed by the critics with sarcasm, and the seriousity of his suicide plans were not recognized. On February 28, 1989 he committed suicide in Brunegg by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Not until Burger's death the critics saw similarities to Jean Améry and his book Hand an sich legen (that Burger knew).
Burger's early promoter Marcel Reich-Ranicki, literature critic, wrote March 3, 1989, few days after his death, in an obituary: „Hermann Burger war ein Artist, der immer aufs Ganze ging, der sich nicht geschont hat. Er war ein Mensch mit einer großen Sehnsucht nach dem Glück. Die deutsche Literatur hat einen ihrer originellsten Sprachkünstler verloren.“ („Hermann Burger was an artist who went the whole hog every time, didn't conserve himself. He was a man with a big longing for happiness. The German literature has lost one of her most inventive language artists.")
H

Reviews

[Kevin Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

4-4.5 ⭐️

I’ll always love memory novels like this. Less Proustian when you get into it and more honest and revealing to the life of one Herman Arbogast Brenner. Heartbreaking at times. Extremely addictive reading and an excellent translation by Adrian Nathan West. Little too much cigar speak though. If I was a cigar aficionado I’d go as high as 4.5 ⭐️

Again, archipelago books always succeeds. Definitely should be read by more.

[Adrian Alvarez · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is there to say about the irascible Hermann Arbogast Brenner? Lover of puros, frustrated and estranged from his Tobacco empire... frankly the man is insufferable. As insufferable as I imagine Hermann Burger was in real life. I don't speak German so this is my first exposure to the author but I don't imagine I would seek out more work. Though there are moments of beautiful prose here and there this is a novel that brings up a question it does not (cannot) answer.

As I understand it, Burger entertained the idea that this would be the first part of a cycle of novels. Sadly, before it was published, he killed himself. But that's not an insignificant act with regards to the novel. The author couldn't conquer the problems of the novel bc they were his own unconquerable problems. Reading this was like reading a note from someone who already decided they were finished. It was depressing and futile. Hard to award a star rating to something like this because the project is so mixed.

I would recommend it only if you knew what you were getting into and especially if you have a love of cigars.

[michal k-c · Rating 5 out of 5]

The novel of self-dissatisfaction par excellence. A memory novel contra-Proust (who Burger only really seems to be familiar with by word of mouth — whom amongst us etc etc), a personal history disguised in the fetishization of an object (cigars).

[Farfoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book itself— the physical thing — is captivating and made me take it out from the library. Small, square, heavy, with a texture to the cover. A small man with a cigar, in profile done as a cartoon.

I liked the bits about cigars, tobacco and history, but I got bogged down with the prose. I guess I am not loving books about grumpy old men, near the end of their lives. I skimmed to the end.

[Margot · Rating 2 out of 5]

I managed about 1/3 before bailing. I usually like meditative, digressive prose but couldn't quite get the hang of it here. Needed something more to hold on to while we wandered amidst cigar history and old memories.

[Mandy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ve tried to read this twice now, and sadly have to admit that it’s just not for me. Hard to rate it, as perhaps it’s really good and I’m the wrong reader, but I simply couldn’t engage with this digressive, meandering, Proustian and self-indulgent narrative from a man who is going to commit suicide but before he goes wants to record his life story. Which he does here. Endlessly, in long serpentine sentences. Looking for closure, he reminisces about his triumphs and failure – mostly failures – and all the cigars he has smoked over the years, cigars being the source of his family wealth and his own predilection. A lightly fictionalised version of the author’s own life, it’s a book about memory and is indeed erudite and self-aware, but unfortunately is one that failed to keep me reading.