Judith Kuckart is a writer, director, dancer and choreographer. She has written scripts, radio plays, essays, a children’s book and twelve novels, two of which, Café of the Invisibles and her latest, The World Between the News, have been recommended by New Books in German.
Sarah Escritt: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to New Books in German.
The World between the News is a new departure because you draw explicitly on your own life and on the sometimes remarkable intersection between your personal story and world events. Yet you describe it as a novel. Why?
What I find interesting is the insight that arises from the friction between two images.
I wouldn’t describe what I have written as memoir because my narrator is not reliable. But she is honest and I hope that the world that is produced rings true. Equally, I wouldn’t describe it as biography because a biographical account would claim to be complete and definitive. The method I have used is montage, to take a term from film. What I find interesting is the insight that arises from the friction between two images.
Memory changes from day to day. Experience and narration interact. So I have staged within this novel the work of writing it. The story that the novel tells is not chronological because as I wrote I was pulled towards certain memories. As those memories arose I had to tell them urgently.
I have been struck by what my approach has released in readers. It is not exactly a comforting read but people have felt resonances between their own lives and the text. I came to writing from theatre and I work through dialogue. Writing about my own experience in the way that I have done, without hiding behind fictional characters, makes my invitation to readers to engage in dialogue particularly stark.
I worked hardest on the language. It is concise and that can be shocking. I hope I have also communicated the power of narrative to make sense of the most awful experiences. Ultimately I didn’t want to convey settled facts. I wanted to show how narrative can make provisional sense of uncertainty.
Dance has played a decisive role in your life and is a central theme of The World Between the News. Dance also emerges from the page through the shifting scenes and movement, rhythm and balance of the writing. Dancers, you say, have in common a certain attitude or posture: Haltung in German. Did your dance training inform your approach to writing?
Dance gives us stability. I find this grounding helpful in my writing because when I write it is as if I am finding my way through a hall of mirrors.
Dancers learn poise, both physical and mental. It is a posture for survival. It enables them to live gladly to the end. Dancers have a discipline, which I would describe as a sense of inner morality, and the backbone, both literal and metaphorical, to manage dance and to manage life and people. Dance gives us stability. I find this grounding helpful in my writing because when I write it is as if I am finding my way through a hall of mirrors. I identify with what I am writing but at the same time the act of writing makes it strange. My dance training enables me to keep an equilibrium, to remain responsive but also to keep the text at a distance. Through writing I learn to understand things.
This book is an exploration of how memories surface in the present. This exploration is also expressed in the narrative style. Certain words, phrases, reflections and images recur through the pages not only of this novel but also across earlier books. And, particularly if the reader looks back to find a previous iteration of a phrase or motif, the reading experience in itself becomes an exploration of memory and of how, as you say, past time, unlike present time, does not flow in one direction: it will come back. Is this use of repetition something you take from your work in dance and theatre?
The repetition comes principally from my work in dance. When I trained with Pina Bausch she made us repeat the same steps over and over again. That way we learned the steps thoroughly and we grew confident in the knowledge that we could do them.
When we read, if the same phrases are repeated, word for word, we read them differently every time. Each time they recur the context and the connotations are different.
I have tried to weave into my writing the way in which repetition evokes the same feeling as before, but also the difference between an earlier feeling and the present one. I used to ask my grandmother, who had a very interesting life, to tell me the same stories again and again. Please tell me the story about the frozen skirts. Tell me the story about the knife grinder. I liked the way listening to the same stories again and again brought up the same familiar feelings but also, each time, a variation: the stories felt both the same and different on every telling.
I’d like to ask you about the photographs that you have included in the book. They too change the pace of reading and they linger in the mind. How did you choose them?
Some of the photographs I took myself. Others came from my family: my cousin gave me photographs that were taken by my uncle. Some of the theatre photographs were taken professionally. A friend of mine, who was the in-house photographer for Pina Bausch’s dance ensemble, took the photograph of Pina Bausch. I deliberately did not put any captions under the photographs. They are not intended as proof that something really happened. They play their own role in the narrative. They set the scene. And they are something more that I can offer to the reader.
They also break up the narrative. After I had written about a particularly difficult experience I added a line break in the text. In the same way the photographs provide an opportunity for a pause. You could think of them as haikus.
This is a courageous book because you do not hide behind fictional characters. There are some wonderful scenes, such as roller-skating on the motorway during the oil crisis, but you also reveal some very dark and traumatic incidents. Your dance ensemble Tanztheater Skoronel recently re-grouped to experiment with autobiographical story-telling. There is a sense of urgency. What drives it? How would you like to see readers respond?
I would like readers to enter into dialogue with themselves and push their own boundaries. I’m not a politician but within my own parameters this is a political book. I want to establish a small space in which people can interact respectfully and reflectively. And I would like to inspire others to find their voice and to contribute their stories. At a joint event that I attended with Jenny Erpenbeck she thought that she too would like to write a personal narrative.
I feel that I’m the right age to write a book like this. I’ve lived through enough for there to be sufficient material but I’m not so old that I incline to the anecdotal.
I have given my papers to the German Literature Archive in March (because we share an initial, I’m filed near Kafka) and I have realised that I have much more material. But I didn’t want to include everything in this one book because the effect would merely have been cumulative. The moments that I have included are emblematic. To have written, for example, about dance training in Stuttgart or encounters in East Berlin or my friendship with Monika Maron would have detracted enormously from the distilled moments through which this story reveals itself. Perhaps I will write a Part 2.
You have spoken about translating experience and mood into text, spoken word and dance. Your 2019 novel No Storm, Just Weather has been published in English translation by Seagull Books. Café of the Invisibles will be out shortly in English. Do you see interlingual translation as analogous to your translation of experience into words and movement, or as qualitatively very different?
I don’t feel qualified to judge. I enjoy working closely with my translators. They are brilliant at spotting the weak moments in my writing and noticing where something doesn’t ring true. I value the care, commitment and sense of responsibility they bring to the text. They help me to see my texts through fresh eyes.
I value the care, commitment and sense of responsibility translators bring to the text. They help me to see my texts through fresh eyes.
In your novel Wishes, published in 2013, your protagonist vanishes for a time from her home in small town Germany and immerses herself in the London of Cambridge Heath, Petticoat Lane, Bethnal Green, and the Peter Jones café. What research did you do for these London scenes?
When I was fifteen I spent six weeks in London. I was there to learn English but the city was much more interesting and anyway you can learn a language at the disco. I lived in Barnet and travelled into the centre every day by underground.
Later, in 2004, thanks to a grant from the Swiss foundation, Landis&Gyr, I spent nine months living on Smithy Street, near Whitechapel and Mile End Underground stations. I shared accommodation with Swiss nationals, who said I was living in a completely different London from the London in which they were living. I joined a gym on Mile End Road and attended kick boxing classes with young Muslim women who took their headscarves off to do the class, then put them on again before they left the gym. Even though I was living in Kreuzberg in Berlin, London felt much more international.
I also went to the Peter Jones café, which is mentioned in the book too, and enjoyed the marvellous views.
You have been published by DuMont Publishers in Cologne since 2002. Is your working relationship with DuMont important?
Absolutely. It’s a relationship that I greatly value. I have worked for many years with Judith Habermas in the international rights department.
Cafe of the Invisibles is about the importance of active listening and, by extension, active reading. Do you see The World Between the News, in which you explore ways to write about personal experience and to open up a space in which lived experience may be voiced, as a logical next step?
This logical progression hadn’t occurred to me but I think it’s correct. Susan Sonntag said, I write so that I know what I think. She’s right. Readers probably have a better sense than I do of the threads that weave my books together. I had to write five or six novels before I realised that there is a big topic that I am always writing about: DISAPPEARANCE.
Or did I only notice this when someone pointed it out?
Judith Kuckart is an award-winning writer, choreographer, dancer and director. She is the author of over ten novels, as well as essay and short-story collections, numerous theatre pieces, radio-plays and features. Judith Kuckart grew up in Schwelm on the edge of the Ruhr region. She lives in Berlin. She completed her studies in literature and theatre studies at the Free University of Berlin with a master’s thesis on Else Lasker-Schüler.
Sarah Escritt has a longstanding interest in German and translation. She read German and Italian at university and now works as a solicitor and part-time translator. She recently completed a Masters in Literary Translation.
