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  • Guntram Vesper’s Frohburg Between Religion and PoliticsThe Year in Germany
  • Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf (bio)

In March 2016 the Leipzig Book Prize was awarded to Guntram Vesper’s more than thousand-page-long epic autobiographical novel, Frohburg. The book came out at a time when Germany faces big challenges of migration and integration while the future of the European Community that for decades had been a reliable frame for the country’s welfare seems more than ever uncertain. Frohburg draws the reader’s attention to periods in German history of similar turbulances that might be considered as reflective of today’s problems. The Book Prize committee praised the book as an “opus magnum” and a “mammoth work.” The jury said that Frohburg reveals a wide landscape of history that includes—looking back from the present—the old Federal Republic, the GDR, and the Nazi period, and goes deep into German history to where only history books reach (“Guntram Vesper”). Critics praised Frohburg as a “German chronicle” (see Porombka).

Guntram Vesper was born in 1941 in the small town of Frohburg situated in Saxony, close to Leipzig. In 1957 his parents fled with him and his younger brother to West Germany. Today, Vesper lives in Göttingen. He has published poems, audio plays, radio features, essays, short stories, and novellas. Vesper earned several prizes, among them the Villa Massimo stipend in Rome in 1978, the Lowe Saxony Prize, the Peter Huchel-Prize in 1985, and the Prix Italia in 1987. In 1985 he published a small volume of poems and essays that was also called Frohburg and contained illustrations by the author himself. Since then he has been collecting material, consulting memories, and taking down notes for the magnum opus that he has been structuring and restructuring. Frohburg is Vesper’s only major work of prose and is something like a summary of his literary work—and his life. [End Page 615]

The author himself said in the award ceremony for the book that in spite of the fact that his book is called a novel it is actually in “dialogue with the facts.” He said that he wrote about the histories that had been told to him. The book’s thousand pages caused critics to compare the narrator of Frohburg with Scheherazade from the collection of One Thousand and One Nights. The stories told to him, said Vesper, were all wrong yet they became “right,” after he had taken them in his hands and turned and twisted them (Meyer). Indeed, Frohburg not only narrates history by telling stories but also makes the act of storytelling part of the narrative focus. The author’s Frohburg years from 1941 to 1957 form the center of the book, which a myriad of byways and detours set off from and return to. The effect of this narrative structure is a labyrinth of stories. For example, we read the story that the father tells—which he recounts as it was told to him by another person. For readers it is not always easy to maintain an overview of the manifold stories and narrators. Often we have to look back to the beginning of a story to recall the identity of the narrator of the story we are currently reading. The general narrator seems to delegate the task of telling to numerous other narrators—however, this general narrator remains the “architect” of the construction, knotting the plenitude of threads together. Another aspect that highlights the character of Frohburg as a narrative-reflective text is the fact that the various narrators tell their stories in an oral mode. Many of them speak in the Saxon dialect, and their speech is set in italics.

Und, fragte er. Man machte im Gegensatz zur Leipziger Tieflandsbucht, zur Sächsischen Schweiz und zum Vogtland im oberen Gebirge von Altenberg bis Rautenkranz nicht gerne allzu viele Worte. Wenn doch, wurde das leicht mißverstanden oder fehlgedeutet und als Unsicherheit, städtisches Getue oder Hochmut ausgelegt, der denkt, ich bin beschränkt, gabbiere nischt, deshalb muß er endlos quaddschn. E rischdscher diefr Schloaf, sagte der Mann, der vor Vaters Schreibtisch saß, das ist es, was mir fehlt, durch das Durcheinander meiner Dienstzeit...

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