An eye for moments: Hugo Dittberner’s stories

We haven’t heard anything from the poet and prose author Hugo Dittberner for a long time. His books were once published by renowned publishers, his debut novel “The Internat” in 1974 by Luchterhand, and his stories in the series “The New Book” by Rowohlt. Dittberner also worked behind the scenes in the literary world, for example as a mentor in the Lower Saxony Foundation’s author support program. Anyone who was lucky enough to see him in this role found him to be an approachable, extremely knowledgeable reader.

There was also the reviewer and essayist Dittberner, who wrote for the “Frankfurter Rundschau” and was editor of the magazine “Text + Critique”. His objection to the powerful poetry of Thomas Kling, in which he missed the beauty of all things, will never be forgotten.

A generational conflict: Kling, in turn, had completely rejected the poetry of the 1970s, the so-called everyday poetry or new subjectivity. At precisely this time, when people were sticking Pril flowers, today’s rock dinosaurs were still young, the politicization of 1968 was slowly subsiding and new, unbiased ways of writing without theoretical ballast were being tried out in literature, the books of 1944 began in rapid succession in Lower Saxony Gieboldehausen-born Hugo Dittberner, who had studied in Göttingen after graduating from high school. In poetry as well as in prose, her entire attention was focused on the perception of moments. Close to the person, but with a keen eye for social consequences.

Selected stories by Dittberner have now been published by the Swiss Nimbus Verlag, and one cannot be amazed enough at the fresh readability of the texts, almost all of which come from the seventies and eighties. You start reading and you’re already in it. They are classic, unpretentious beginnings: “The Wehrhahns’ family relationships were somewhat complicated.” Nothing more and nothing less than human life is negotiated, a life that is rarely glamorous, often confusing, often painful and sometimes funny. Sometimes we only experience an hour in an afternoon and then half a life passes by quickly. In the end, we are rarely wise, but we are often touched and amazed.

Without being recognizably autobiographical, the stories are determined by the author’s horizon of experience; they still touch on the world of those returning from war, but are primarily set in the present. That’s exactly what makes them so interesting for us today: They allow us to travel back in time to the West German countryside, to a strangely stagnant time when no one thought about the fall of the Berlin Wall – a city that is only mentioned once in this book, at that without reference to the present: Rather, the title story “The Professor in the Cellar” touches on an episode from the German colonial period.

An aging historian, holed up in his house during the summer holidays while his wife went on vacation, is tormenting himself with an essay about the German politician Wilhelm Solf, temporarily governor of the colony of German Samoa. In 1904, in an effort to achieve “humane colonialism”, he ended an uprising without armed force.

It’s hard to imagine that today such a sensitive subject could be dealt with in a story with humorous twists: here the professor drinks half his wine cellar while writing and gets into a fight with his son, who has joined the SPD. Such a narrative can succeed if the author neither introduces nor patronizes his characters. He makes them visible in their peculiarities and limitations, but he does not pass judgment.

The opening story “A Bottle of Brandy” is also very seventies, in which nothing more happens than an obviously attractive woman visits a shared apartment in Göttingen to meet someone who no longer lives there. Instead, she empties the bottle that she had brought for him with the current residents and the construction workers across the street, enduring some lewd remarks, and then leaves. Here, too, the relaxed narrative attitude should be emphasized, which leaves it entirely up to us to form an opinion.

The characters also occasionally travel outside of Lower Saxony, on the night train to Rome, where a somewhat colorless man meets a woman he didn’t dare talk to at university, or, also by train, through the north-east of Scotland. There is then talk of Great Britain’s recent accession to the European Community. There were some things that were pleasing in the 1970s, not least a certain informality. Thanks to the stories of Hugo Dittberner, who will be 80 years old in November, some of us can remember it, others are hearing about it for the first time.