Learning to speak in silence: Ulrich Rüdenauer’s novel “Offside”

At the beginning there is a lot of silence. “Offside” doesn’t even reveal the name of its protagonist. We later find out that his name is Richard. Even later it becomes clear that the novel takes place in the early 1950s. Also that the action takes place in southern Germany – not unlike the Bad Mergentheim area, where the author Ulrich Rüdenauer was born in 1971.

With “Offside”, the literary and music critic, who is also familiar to readers of the Tagesspiegel, has presented a late debut novel that tells the story so carefully, as if the author himself had to carefully coax every detail out of the darkness.

It is the darkness of post-war German society in which perpetrators and victims have chosen silence as their survival strategy.

But Richard has little idea of ​​this, and the narrative perspective that “Offside” takes remains entirely at the level of the boy who grows up on his uncle’s farm. There is no trace of his parents, only careful references to his mother are interspersed throughout the text.

Against the post-war silence cartel

The first half of the novel depicts a life that takes so little part in the course of the world that the action could have taken place a hundred years earlier. Richard has to help with farming, order is insisted on at school and, if necessary, enforced with a rod. In his family he is approached with emotional distance; no one chose to have to support another child.

Richard can breathe a sigh of relief in the company of his good-natured grandfather, or when he wanders alone through the woods. By nature he is an observer: “That’s what he liked best: seeing without being seen.” But while trying to catch a runaway horse, the uncle is injured and ends up in the hospital for weeks.

This breaks the well-rehearsed routine and Richard has to take responsibility. At the same time, he finds a newspaper clipping that indicates the presence of a man in the village: Jakub Wójcik. Who is the man? And how did he get to the village? A small criminal investigation begins and leads back to the time of the Second World War.

With Richard, the most unlikely character in the novel is chosen to take on the post-war silence cartel; even going to the village shop becomes a mammoth task: “But the words were buried under the fear.”

A little more noir would have been good

But that is precisely the appeal of “Offside”. Rüdenauer’s novel shares its protagonist’s precise powers of observation. The narrative trick of only letting the reader know as much as the boy’s eyes can currently perceive creates a dense atmosphere.

Just as Richard tries to orient himself, you find yourself grasping for support while reading. However, with the child’s perspective, the novel sometimes gets a bit cute. There is no real fear of falling into the abysses that open up beneath the feet of the post-war period.

A little more noir, a little less wood-panelled room would have benefited the novel. However, that doesn’t change the fact that “Offside” is a successful debut about a silent society in which some learn to speak.