Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s novel “More beautiful than ever”: irony and average misery

Hans-Ulrich Treichel is one of those lucky writers who found their life’s theme at an early age. At Treichel it is his own way out of the common people milieu into the academic middle class, which he tells in surprising new ways. Self-ironic and poetically impressive novels were created on this autobiographical humus. “Anatolin” (2008), for example, in which Treichel uses a trip to the Polish Wartheland, from where his parents come, describes his own conflict, which is based on a dark identity spell: The parents had left Treichel’s brother behind when they fled to the west in 1945 and after Let the war search in vain for what has been lost – “The Lost” is the title of Treichel’s most successful book from 1998. In the shadow of this brother, or better: in the empty space that his brother had left, Treichel grew up.

Little by little, Treichel freed himself from the research pressure of his earlier stories and conceived a new subject model: the intellectual who escaped from the petty East Westphalian dump, who has found a decent position in old West Berlin, but cannot show the great life plan that made him the victor which could have been too small an origin.

Now Treichel adds a light and yet mysterious little novel to this subject: In “More beautiful than ever”, the didactic Romance studies specialist Andreas Reiss tells how he admired his friend and school colleague Erik as a child, because he had an unfamiliar “strangeness” blew around “. This strangeness becomes evident in a Mercedes that the adolescent drives in the distant district where Erik lives, and in what Reiss suspects is a special ability to experience, which enables Erik not to find the narrowness of his home as oppressive as it is Andreas: “It doesn’t matter what you do, but how you feel about it.” Both Erik and Andreas move to walled-in West Berlin after school, but this is where the supposedly connecting elements end. Erik lives in a beautiful apartment and is doing an apprenticeship as a carpenter, which – according to his plan drawn up on the drawing board of life – would pave the way for him to the film studios, where he would then become successful and prosperous as a film architect. Andreas tries to emulate the friend who is now apparently close, but in truth still distant, and also enrolls in architecture.

The characters are somewhat related to Wilhelm Genazino’s narrative selves

But you can’t align your life with someone else’s plans just because you believe that the other life has a better tendency to succeed. That is the remarkable foundation of this novel: one’s own, less grandiose existence is something like the pitiful variant of a supposedly successful life, the disadvantages of which are gradually revealed.

Andreas remembers his Francophilia, which is based primarily on his love for French cinema. He studies Romance studies and shifts his admiration from Erik to the actress Hélène Grossmann, whose “girlish bias” apparently suits his temperament. Treichel is a specialist in those exaggerations with which his male characters are protected from any false victory pose.

They are somewhat related to Wilhelm Genazino’s narrative selves, but they lack the pathological pleasure in mental self-mutilation. Treichel’s joke fits into the self-deprecating mood of the narrated. His laconic state descriptions are reminiscent of the best American storytelling: “We learned to kiss without candy, got married at some point and had a … harmonious, albeit childless, marriage that ultimately failed.”

“More beautiful than ever” – as in “Menschenflug” (2005) – is about the disappointments that have matured over the years and injuries that have remained unaccounted for in long-term partnerships. Treichel does a fantastic job of describing these fine cracks, which in their sum cause the building to crumble. “You can’t have children with self-irony” is one of the bitter, comical Treichel sentences that Andreas hears from his ex-wife Susanne.

By the way, you learn almost by the way that Andreas can father children, a former friend terminated the pregnancy. The revered Erik even became a father as a schoolboy. In these little side dramas there is already the material for the whole medium-sized misery. After separating from Susanne, Andreas accepts Erik’s offer to live in his large apartment in Charlottenburg. The former classmate has really become a recognized film architect and is going to the USA for three months, his life plan seems to have worked out completely. Andreas searches through drawers and cupboards in order to “look for” Erik, and he finds – Treichel doesn’t miss the cliffhanger technique – x-rays of Erik’s brain that do not suggest anything good. The landline phone quickly moves into the center – it’s forehand time – and at some point Hélène Grossmann actually calls through, Andreas’, the film diva, who is of course also very close to Erik, and offers Andreas to spend a day through Berlin drive.

This time, more than in his previous books, Hans-Ulrich Treichel relies on perfect dramaturgy. Right from the start, he carefully lays his tracks, suggests connections that turn out to be well-oiled plot machines in the course of the story, and builds his novel according to classic narrative principles. So much so that even poor Andreas Reiss noticed at some point: “The fact that the phone rang was like a scene from the script.” Perhaps it is no coincidence that Treichel, who was a professor at the Leipzig Institute of Literature for many years, is the first book to be published after his retirement three years ago, of all things. After all, it turned out to be a story for plot lovers too.

“But I wasn’t her lover. I shouldn’t even think that. I shouldn’t even think that I wasn’t her lover.” This is what Andreas says about the film diva Hélène, who suddenly became so close. And it is precisely because of such sentences that the clever and stubbornly witty narrator Hans-Ulrich Treichel has his admirers.