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Friedrich Christian Delius
Der Königsmacher
(The Kingmaker)
Rowohlt Berlin, September 2001. 320pp. There are two intertwining strands to this ambitious, original novel. One is historical, telling the story of Wilhelmine von Dietz, known as Minna, the illegitimate daughter of Willem, Prince of Orange, who later, after the defeat of Napoleon, becomes King of the Netherlands. He agrees to support the child, whose mother is a dancer, and soon she is lodging at Netherlands House, the residence of the Dutch representative in Berlin, Herr Boyer. This is a happy time - she thinks of Boyer and his wife as her parents - but soon she falls into the grasping clutches of a family of impecunious Mecklenburg aristocrats, the Jasmunds. At sixteen she is persuaded to marry their eldest son, bears him four children, then dies at twenty-three, without ever discovering who her real parents were. A sad story. But not so sad as the ultimate fate of Albert Rusch, subject of the second strand of this tale. Rusch is a writer, aged about forty, and living in the Berlin of today. His career is on the skids. His first novel was a success but his latest has sold only 1439 copies, not counting returns. At this point, attending a family reunion, he learns that his family are descended from Minna and determines to write about her. His publisher is delighted; it will be, he declares, 'a kind of Mecklenburg Gone with the Wind.' So is his girlfriend, who sees it as a portrayal of the woman as victim of a male-dominated society. But Rusch has other ideas. He sets himself up as a modern Prussian, marketing the old Prussian values in a cool, un-Prussian style, and becomes a smash hit on TV. But only momentarily. As he fades from the limelight he ends in a psychiatric clinic, obsessed with his love for the Prussian queen Luise, another figure of the time.
It takes enormous skill to bring off this complex theme. With this, his first historical novel, Delius proves himself as one of Germany's leading writers. A book for those who dare.
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