Today, German singer-songwriters call themselves singer/songwriters, they prefer to return to their home country in their lyrics and, full of smug melancholy, realize that life was somehow more fun during adolescence. Tocotronic bassist Jan Müller and his former bandmate and ex-flatmate Rasmus Engler prefer not to bother with such tears.
In their novel "Vorglühen", which will be published on Thursday, they prefer to immerse themselves in the days when they were unambitious students and passionate young musicians, in the filthy flat share in St. Pauli, in littered rehearsal rooms in Eimsbüttel, in weird bars in the neighborhood and in their feelings of aimlessness, new beginnings and complicated (love) relationships. They conjure up the time in the early 1990s in a grandiose way, capturing this very own sound, characterized by a personal spirit of optimism, which is also reflected in the music.
After graduating from high school, the protagonist of the novel, Albert, comes to Hamburg to study half-hearted German studies in order to escape from the Oberberg province and also from his ex-girlfriend Nele, who, like everyone else around him, went to Cologne to study. Boring in his opinion. The only thing he misses is Skrei, his best buddy, who got stuck as a trainee in the local construction and garden center, the only one with a “resilient taste in music”.
But the two remain connected even over the distance, both geographically and personally, as will become clear. Conveniently, friends of Albert's parents have a small furnished apartment in Barmbek, which they leave to the young student - financed by his parents. Not exactly a place Albert dreamed of. Then he gets to know Claus. Claus is the son of an architect, Hamburg, the intellectual, lives with friends in a shared apartment on Talstrasse and plays in a band. For both he is looking for a fourth man, to whom he chooses Albert.
He can hardly believe his luck. Suddenly he has a cool flat share, new friends and a band. He leaves the apartment in Barmbek to a complete chaotic who executes it completely, at the university he doesn't even notice that it's the semester break. He makes music, meanders through the pubs and bars of St. Pauli, meets bizarre characters and gets into absurd situations. Life vegetates, enriched with a lot of alcohol, and yet it is full of twists and turns. Albert seems to be treading water, staggering through life without motivation. And yet it is a time of reorientation, of self-discovery.
And it's the year 1994. There are no mobile phones with which you can always be reached, with which you can ensure your social existence or get out of tricky situations. For weeks, Albert cannot get hold of Diana, his almost girlfriend, who runs a run-down comic shop in Barmbek with her depressed, seriously ill father. He can't even call his boys when he accidentally gets locked in the rehearsal room. He just has to wait for more than 24 hours until someone comes back to rehearse. A lasting claustrophobic experience for Albert.
It is always a decision to let a novel play in the pre- or mit-mobile period. For Müller and Engler it was not a decision but a necessity. The two only lived together in a shared flat on Talstrasse at the end of the 1990s. But it was in the early 1990s that a new style, the so-called Hamburg School, developed with Tocotronic, Blumfeld and Die Sterne in Hamburg.
Müller was a founding member and still plays the bass at Tocotronic. Of course it makes sense to see the protagonists of the time in the characters. "Our main characters are based the least on the real people, we developed them much more together," says Rasmus Engler in an interview with WELT AM SONNTAG. Engler not only shared a flat with Müller, but also played with him in the band Dirty Dishes, which was founded in 2005. And Engler comes from the Bergisches Land. "Of course we incorporated a lot of our experience, so we didn't have to think about much," he says.
A small Instagram post by Müller gave the two (and a literary agent) the idea for the novel. In it, Müller recalled the early days of the two friends together. "We immediately reminisced and sunk in nostalgia," Engler continues. Experiences and situations came back to them as if by themselves. And as if by themselves they would have found the sound of that time.
It is anything but elegant, but perfectly conjures up an attitude towards life. Told in the third person, Albert's experiences seem scrawled in a diary. The two authors describe him as if a twenty-year-old were speaking in hermeneutic one-liners, which also made up the music of Schrammelrock at the time.
The characters call themselves "du bum", answer with "na logen" or find "a few coins" in their pocket for a phone call. They describe drunk nights (and days), awkward concerts, embarrassing situations at city festivals and Albert's wonderful break with his old neighbor Mrs. Baszak. After being kicked out of a shared flat, she fed him with chicken soup, her deceased son's guitar and songs by Freddy Quinn. These healthy, austere days become a key experience.
Whether consciously or unconsciously, probably simply due to their subject, Engler and Müller tell the story in the best tradition of pop literature. They sprinkle in brand names and everyday objects of the time. They have a high recognition value and a high identification potential of a readership of the same age, i.e. the now around 50-year-olds. The great strength of the almost 400-page novel, aside from this unmistakable sound, is the flair for ludicrous situations that only carefree 20-year-olds catapult themselves into, and for the weirdest types that are hardly possible today.
Tocotronic singer Dirk von Lowtzow has just received the Literature Prize of the City of Wiesbaden for his literary debut "Aus dem Dachsbau" because he "transports the conciseness and originality of his song lyrics in prose". Müller and Engler don't always succeed in this, but "Vorglühen" is still fun to read and ultimately a wonderfully nostalgic enthusiasm.
