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By
Sebastian
Dead Rebel Of The Week
~ Jörg Fauser ~
German literature...
Those words put together... if they don’t put you to sleep right away, they could perhaps make you think of the likes of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe or Franz Kafka - The German Great Ones. The thing is, those people, although big names for a reason, don’t have any place in an article like this. As brilliant as “Faust” or “The Trial” undoubtedly are, their creators were anything but rebels. Now, I certainly don’t want to compare this week’s protagonist to the aforementioned classics, as that wouldn’t make much sense even by my standards, but I can’t help but bristling at this man's pathetic lack of acknowledgement among 20th century writers, if just a even little bit, when nobody’s looking. And while he obviously never tried to be another Thomas Mann or Herrmann Hesse, or who-the-fuck-else our critics here usually consider to be important enough to praise to the skies at any given opportunity, it still pisses me off. So, finally, here’s a big and long-overdue shout-out to my man, Jörg Fauser!
Let me tell you, Fauser kicked everbody’s ass - sometimes literally, but most of the time literary - which is harder to do anyway. He never beat around the bush when he wrote and he didn’t write to create forced art as so many other ass-clowns always did, and apparently still do. He once wrote: “When someone starts to write, he always wants to take the blue from the sky with his sentences. He wants the cadaver under the roses, and in the same paragraph, the shadow of the puma in mid-jump, too, and then, in all, love.” He didn’t need that. He said it like it was. He wrote about his down-and-out reality, and even if he superficially wrote about anything else, he mercilessly poured his own life onto the pages just the same.
Some consider him the creator of German pop-literature, others say he just borrowed his style from the American Beat-generation. Both claims are half-true and half-bullshit. Either way, there was noone quite like him.
To make a long story about his early life short: Jörg Fauser, born in 1944, grew up in Frankfurt, graduated from school, got interested in writing but didn’t like things in general very much. He started hanging out in London and got hooked on Heroin when he was about 22. Realizing a respectable, bourgeois lifestyle clearly wasn’t his thing, so he basically said “fuck it” and just went to Istanbul for a couple of years instead.
Almost dead, he somehow made it back to Germany, living as part of Berlin’s booming squatter scene, selling drugs to make a living. This is also when he started working on his literature - primarily utilizing his experiences of the past couple of years. Following Burroughs’ example, he soon quit heroin and started drinking heavily instead. Throughout the 70s he mostly wrote poetry and worked with several underground newspapers and magazines. He also made some money writing song lyrics for some more or less famous German musicians, and by translating lyrics from people like James Taylor or the Rolling Stones, while still living among radical leftist political activists in Frankfurt. However, he wasn’t really a part of that movement at all.
That’s another remarkable thing about Fauser. Whenever he became popular among a certain crowd or scene, he rejected them. He looked down on the young liberals, neo-hippies and the politically active student movement in Germany that started to embrace his work, as he considered them to be sort of juvenile in their idealism. Understandable, since few idealists had experienced what he had, without changing their minds (not to mention that idealists are, for the most part, crappy writers). He was too conservative for the protesting left, and too non-compliant for the conservative old-guard. And back then there wasn’t really such a thing as non-political literature.
From the 80s and on he started writing what would have the biggest impact in the literary scene: thrillers. But although those were labeled as such it was as much Jörg Fauser as anything else he had written before. To me, it never really mattered what he wrapped his thoughts around, it’s always a great read. Hell, I don’t even really know any Marlon Brando movies, yet I loved the “biography” of his that Fauser wrote.
He also worked as a political journalist for a while, and even enjoyed some success for his novels, but his obvious reluctance to be classified and take part in the hip literary circles provoked both critics and former aficionados to disown him. Some major magazines consider “Rohstoff” or “Der Schneemann” (“The Snowman”) to be some of the most important works of the last 50 years, and yet the critics ridiculed him on live TV. With his behavior he pretty much forced them to do so, and I’m sure he secretly loved it, true rebel-style.
I could tell more rather boring details about his life and work but I’ll leave things at saying that he basically lived happily ever after; got by with his writing, married and always stayed true to himself. His death is the best proof of that: on the night of his 43rd birthday he went out, had a few drinks at a bar he was a regular at, headed home shortly after midnight and died in a car accident. That’s the official version, according to the wife and a barkeeper, and while it’s basically true, it’s not what Fauser was all about, really. Turns out he went on a binge, celebrated with a bunch of hookers, and walked into the street, drunk off his ass. Police found a blood alcohol level of almost 0.5% in his cold corpse, and it looks like he spontaneously killed himself by walking in front of a truck on the autobahn at four in the morning.
Jörg Fauser is one of my heroes; not only because I can personally relate to his moral conduct and general way of life – and boy, can I relate! – but because his rebellion came in such a subtle way. He always looked like the class-nerd; he dressed like a financial consultant until he died, but he fucked more hookers than other people fuck wives in a lifetime; he came off as a calm and soft-spoken, polite man most of the time, but his poetry could make any rotten sailor blush with shame; he was a respectable journalist and a loving husband during the day, but he could turn into a raging alcoholic on any given night.
At any rate, it’s a shame his name will mean nothing to anybody reading this. His writing is as relevant as ever and nobody has ever come close to put Germany’s dull, zeitgeisty reality into words, like Fauser could. So if you ever come across an English translation of any of his work, do yourself a favor and buy it.
