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Clemens Meyer
Als wir träumten
(When we were dreaming)
S. Fischer Verlag, February 2006, 528 pp. This novel will move you to tears, laughter, and frequent intakes of breath, as well as awe at the brilliant control of the writing. Meyer turns the trashy, grungy, dark desperation of inner-city Leipzig in the late 1980s and early 1990s into a deeply-felt work of elegiac beauty and heartache. These are qualities which can transcend their particular setting to claim the admiration of book lovers worldwide. The backdrop is the moment when the GDR falls apart, and hopes of happiness in a reunited Germany emerge and are shattered. The narrator, Daniel Lenz, and a group of young friends start off as ‘Pioneers’, members of a sort of East German Boy Scout movement. Across twenty-eight chapters, flicking backwards and forwards in time, their descent through the adolescent delinquency and gang warfare of their teens into hardened criminals, drug addicts and social and sexual outcasts by their early twenties is chronicled with heartbreaking directness and lack of sentimentality. Also dispassionately, to the extent that the author makes cogent play with the concept of the potential falsehood of memory, both personal and collective – three different but similar accounts are given of one character’s death. The multitude of incidents range from the near-absurd to examples of the undeniable dedication and seriousness of youth in certain circumstances, while an immense cast of brilliantly observed secondary characters – Daniel’s father and mother, shop owners, neighbours, teachers, pensioners, policemen, prison officers, Fascists, squatters, and Turkish immigrants selling untaxed cigarettes – add further to the sense of realism and delight. The dialogue is slangy, up-to-date, reeking of reality and lived experience. Notable too is the author’s dedication to detail: his characters fight and drool over the different brands of cigarettes, or East German schnapps, or underwear; over the make of a microwave, over football team scarves, over card games, billiard balls or the merits or otherwise of the weekly soft core sex magazines.
This is a superb novel, densely packed, deeply
compassionate, yet with a wonderfully assured lightness
of touch and openness, especially in handling fluctuations
of emotion and mood and memory. One ends it with a
thrilling sense of having encountered a new writer of
true and immense talent.
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