“The Tsantsa Memoirs”: Jan Koneffke’s very idiosyncratic research trip through colonial history /.
There is no shortage of gnome-like heroes in novels who turn a position of apparent inferiority into strength in modern literature. The most famous and energetic among them is the short tin drummer Oskar Matzerath in Gnter Grass’ novel “The Tin Drum”, who can sing glass to pieces and intervenes in world history on occasion. Another is the clever deceiver Fischerle, a deformed dwarf who only consists of a hump, a minor character in Elias Canetti’s novel “The Blinding”.
But what the great narrator Jan Koneffke presents to us in his new novel “The Tsantsa Memoirs” is certainly the most bizarre protagonist that can be found in a contemporary novel. In his prose debut “Before the Premiere”, published in 1988, Koneffke, who has just celebrated his 60th birthday, had already let an actor act who was suddenly growing bumpy. His new hero is only a dead, prepared object in terms of his historical destiny and has already said goodbye to the human world.
Because as the narrator of the novel, who takes us on 560 pages through 240 years of world history from distant Caracas to Berlin after the fall of the Wall, a shrunken head appears, a “Tsantsa” who awakens from his lifelessness in 1780 with a tax inspector of the Spanish crown and then after his death came to Europe, where he witnessed various revolutions Among the indigenous peoples of South America, the shrunken head called “Tsantsa” was a trophy that was used for cultic purposes.
The Roman shrunken head Koneffkes, on the other hand, can not only speak, he conquers more and more sensory perceptions and high cognitive skills and then even the “zest for life” as he walks through the centuries. He who hangs lifelessly on the threads and jackets of his twelve owners or lingers in chests or bags becomes an eyewitness and co-creator of various revolutions and key scenes in world history. Thanks to the care of an English merchant and poet, the “helpless half-being” becomes a “shrunken head with education”. The “Tsantsa” no longer trades as “a thing made by primitives”, but as the think tank of its owner. He performs informal services to initiate amourse affairs, and later he assists his owner in initiating successful stock market speculations. In the Paulskirche assembly in Frankfurt in 1848 he even becomes the ghostwriter of a member of parliament who throws a fiery speech for freedom of the press into the plenary.
While its owners sink one by one into the pit, the shrunken head retains the privilege of de facto immortality. Only once, when he refused rhetorical support to Reich German Hitler supporters in the Romanian town of Kronstadt, did he threaten to be thrown into the fire, but he was also able to escape this fate. Jan Koneffke reflected on the stylistic peculiarities of his idiosyncratic memoir writer at one point, when it was pointed out that the “Tsantsa” uses a German “that was spoken in 1820”: “It is therefore no coincidence that it seems old-fashioned to my readership should.”
After his masterpiece, the great family and social novel “Ein Sonntagskind” (2015), Jan Koneffke has now entered the terrain of the picaresque novel. He tells with an almost inexhaustible ingenuity and an opulent painting of bizarre details. One gets caught up in the enthusiasm for language and the shrunken head obsession of the author, which at times tends to be highly comical. With so much delimitation of the imagination, one threatens to drown in the overabundance of details.
For all the cheerfulness of the story, the depths and atrocities of European history are also highlighted: the barbarism of the scientific research spirit in the 19th century or the anti-Semitism in Vienna at the turn of the century. During a psychoanalytic session with a Dr. Abraham in Vienna, who has certain similarities with Sigmund Freud, the shrunken head discovers his real “pre-ego” in horror: He is not an indigenous “tsantsa”, but the head of a German conquistador who, as a mercenary and plunderer, was once involved in imperialist raids . Therefore, as a shrunken head, he now finds no peace, but has to restlessly cross the European age of extremes.
A shrunken head as a reporter on world history – that can also be read as an ironic commentary on the situation of the contemporary novel.
Jan Koneffke: The Tsantsa memoir. Novel. Galiani Verlag, Berlin 2020, 560 pages, 24 euros.
–
