Status Updates From Mein Vaterland war ein Apfe...

Sometimes my cabinets with all these drawers seem to me like a train station, and I ask myself whether the words would like to set off for the text I’m working on, or would prefer to wait for some future, unforeseeable text. I also don’t know whether they feel locked up inside the drawer, or whether they feel protected.

I feel I am lucky to own hundreds of thousands of words. And when I am travelling, I often think of the fact that the words are waiting for me at home. The fact that they are allowed to lie around in the open is an expression of ease, of personal freedom. For my abundant ownership of words is the opposite of the past, the opposite of censorship.

The emergencies, the contingencies, the congruencies are entirely different with cut-out words compared to ordinary writing. Even after more than twenty years of producing collages, they still astonish me. To this day, I still don’t know what disposition is concealed within each word. This is only revealed when they come together in new ways.

I understood then that damage is an intimate connection.

I saw Harald Jung’s portrait of Jorge Semprún: In the film, Semprún visits Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was as a young man. And during his visit, he walks across the site and is so relieved that Jung is surprised by him. Semprún says simply that he has come home. It was the same with Oskar Pastior. It was trauma. Something that buries itself so deep inside your body that it destroys and enchants you.

Only with time did I learn that the effects of deportation are insidious – as cruel and intimate as hunger itself. Aside from the body’s torment, the damage also takes the shape of an addiction. One dreads the camp, while developing a homesickness for it. And it consumes the survivor. It continues to humiliate him long after he has escaped, because it enchants him against his will.

I had to ask myself whether recollection has more to do with a person’s memory or with their disposition. Or whether it is solely how one perceives an experience at the time that determines what one will remember and what one will forget later on.

Above all, I was interested in the seemingly unimportant, the inconspicuous. I wanted a personal description of the camp, from an individual, to capture its so-called ‘everyday life’.

Everything is artificially constructed, but the unreal is made valid in the text through my use of the right language. The language must be beautiful precisely because the topic is threatening. I wouldn’t be able to bear writing if it were not for the invented truth of language, in which what is beautiful is painful.

And when a manuscript seems to be finished, I read over it again twenty times. Every reading conjures up a new version. These are often detours, and I end up coming back to the very first version, but it is not for nothing: I only know that the very first version is the valid one once I have tried out twenty other possibilities.

And the habit always contains the fear that I won’t manage to both look at my life and endure it again. This double doubt is part of it, though. Otherwise, you have already lost.