Coming Home: A Novel by Jan Peter Bremer

“Home is where no one has been before,” is a famous sentence by the philosopher Ernst Bloch. This of course also applies to the memories of Jan Peter Bremer, who describes what he is doing as a “form between remembering and inventing”.

Who | like | What

By Jan Peter Bremer

Title “Coming Home”

Berlin Publishing House

Year of publication 2023

ISBN 978-3-8270-1491-7

Pages 208 pages

Price 22.00 euros

Problem childhood

What Jan Peter Bremer describes in “Coming Home” is a problem childhood. When his parents moved from West Berlin to Wendland in the early 1970s, he was six years old. His father, the graphic artist and painter Uwe Bremer, was a celebrity as an artist. With him, not only the Rixdorf printing workshop moved to the village of Gümse. In his entourage were numerous artists and writers such as Hans Christoph Buch, Reinhard Lettau and HC Artmann, who were constant visitors there.

It is a left-wing, anarchic, artistic bohemian group that gathers there and is viewed with suspicion, even distrust, by the villagers. After all, all the long-haired and full-bearded people look like the terrorists on the police wanted posters, and since all the villagers vote for the CDU, Willy Brandt’s supporters are also suspicious. “The opinions and views that were held in our home were completely contrary to the opinions and views that prevailed in the village on almost everything.”

An artist, adolescence or homeland novel

The boy has to pay for this because he is dependent on the village children and classmates. But he is treated like a leper who is not allowed to park his bike in the shared bike rack and where the coat hook next to his jacket always remains empty. Because of his Struwwelpeter hairstyle he is called “the girl” and otherwise has little to laugh about. He learns to read and write with difficulty, constantly trips over his own feet, can barely keep up in school and therefore doesn’t go to high school, and his drawing talent has also atrophied to such an extent that his artist father cannot bear it without pain.

This boy, as Jan Peter Bremer develops him looking back through the window, is a true good-for-nothing who is happy in the country but remains a stranger in the village. The fixed point of the story is the moment in which he discovers storytelling and thus writing. He can finally even remember what “describe” means in English. “Describe” is the last, programmatic word of the novel.

“Coming Home” can be read as an artist’s novel as well as an adolescence or homeland novel, which is quite typical of West German history because it is rooted in the provinces. At the same time, it is a lucid father-son portrait that illuminates the figure of the father, who disappears behind pipe smoke and is quite aloof in his immersion in art.

“In this new place,” writes Jan Peter Bremer, “my father was suddenly visible to me in all his significance, and I understood that he, my father, was a very extraordinary person.”

Precious, beautiful language

However, the most precious and beautiful thing about “coming home” is the language. Bremer is a fine stylist who hides a gentle irony behind long, artfully braided and often a little old-fashioned sounding cascades of sentences. His view of reality is often funny in its dollhouse-like precision, without having to exhibit the funny. After all, it’s about the child’s suffering, about his loneliness and misunderstanding, but also about his own inability. Without becoming absorbed in the child’s experience, Bremer allows the child’s emotional world to come to life. He manages to do this from a distance, through the “cleaned window pane”, but with all the empathy and closeness that is possible in this artful artificiality.

As of September 11, 2023