Homeland! Is that still our Switzerland?

He grew up to a large extent in Switzerland and a large part of his new book is also about his old homeland: Christian Kracht paints the picture of a broken Switzerland and a broken family with lots of love.

Yes what, alcohol is sold at Migros? Since when?

This is what it says in Christian Kracht’s new novel. «Eurotrash» is in second place on the current “Spiegel best list of fiction”. In first place: a book from Diogenes Verlag in Zurich. The author is Benedikt Wells, who has a Lucerne mother. The Swiss are masters of German literature.

“Eurotrash” is autobiographical in a playful way and takes place in Switzerland. Christian Power was born in Saanen BE in 1966 and grew up in Saanenland, among other places. In one of the countless meetings here in Germany, it was even said that Kracht was drawing Switzerland as if a “Max Frisch or a Friedrich Dürrenmatt had drawn the pen”.

His image of Switzerland is full of indictment, but of course out of a pain, is injured homeland literature. The Germans don’t seem to really understand that, they keep silent about this topic in their countless meetings.

Can a white man translate the poem?

Kracht’s book comes at just the right time. Because there is a debate about how well one can understand literature from another culture at all. It is hung up Debate on a poem by Amanda Gorman lectured at Joe Biden’s inauguration. Gorman appeared in a glamorous yellow Armani costume and studied at Harvard University.

But the question in this debate is not whether people who have not studied at an elite university understand the poem so well that they are allowed to translate it. Because Amanda Gorman is black.

And so the question these days is: Can a white man translate the poem? In the Netherlands they just said: no.

The question arises not only among black poets, the agitators ignore that in the debate. In principle, you can place them wherever literature creates a strange world. Switzerland for Germans in “Eurotrash”, for example. Fortunately, the novel doesn’t need to be translated into German, it could be tricky.

The deep story of his family

The plot is quickly told: the narrator Christian Kracht travels into the cryptic story of his family. There is the father, who comes from a small family and rose to the right hand of the publisher Axel Caesar Springer and owned a chalet in Gstaad and the Chateau de Morges on Lake Geneva, among other things.

His mother is also rich, whose father, Christian’s grandfather, was in the SS. She vegetates as a lonely drinker on the Zurich Gold Coast when she is not kept in the closed in Winterthur. So the son visits her, and it is decided that the mother will give away that part of her fortune, which consists of arms shares, on a trip, because such wealth does not make you happy, as every Swiss knows.

It’s funny to read how they can’t get rid of the money, and it’s touching how Christian makes this last trip with his mother, not to Africa, as his mother would like, but via Saanen to Geneva and then back to Winterthur.

In between, the mother wants Christian to tell her stories. One of these stories contains a “dystopia”: Switzerland after a shift to the right, it ends with the introduction of the death penalty, people are strangled at the Lorraine Bridge.

The narrative is riddled with such details. The migrants learn perfect Swiss German in order not to be expelled, the “Nebelspalter” is brought into line, or it is forbidden to sell tofu at Migros, only meat and milk from local production. These things are not mentioned in the German reviews.

Strength makes mistakes

Now I have to Facebook a little bit about the book raved. How exactly Kracht wrote about Switzerland. I was corrected several times. Mother drinks Fendant for CHF 7.50, but she got it from Migros. And that can’t be the case, Migros doesn’t sell alcohol.

Kracht also deliberately fantasizes around, after all, he wrote a playful novel and not a pure autobiography, but he apparently made this mistake.

I loved a passage in which Christian remembers the weather reports and what the phrase “Snow down to the lowlands” triggers. One of them wrote to me that he also knew this from his childhood in Austria. Or I made a mistake and confused Saanenmöser, where you only drive through, with Schönried.

I made mistakes, Kracht made mistakes, that’s just how it is when you’ve been abroad for a long time. In truth, “Eurotrash” is the ideal novel for the Swiss abroad (of whom there are almost 800,000). As such, I have now started translating the novel into Bern German.

The beginning: «Auso, I have to go to Züri for a couple of days. Mini Mer het urgently wöuä talk to mr. ” I now have to weave the great theme of the novel into this dialect version: love. The love that is new for the dandy Kracht, who has never really written about it.

And even now she tends to be between the lines, masking herself, for example in the humor of the dialogues that the mother always wins, even when she has had a lot of intuition. Back to this debate about who can translate and who can understand: love is a universal topic.

How it is treated by the Swiss, Swiss Abroad or African poets will differ, it may seem strange at first. But if you try a little, you will be able to say in the end: I’ve never seen it that way. In this moment the foreign becomes a possibility of oneself.

And nothing else is literature, friends of the culinary arts.

Bibliography: Eurotrash, Christian Kracht, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 224 pages

About the author: Michael Angele from Bern regularly provides an exterior view of Berlin – regarding Swiss and German. Angele writes for them Weekly newspaper «Der Freitag». He grew up in Zealand and has lived in Germany’s capital for many years. But he can still speak Bern German perfectly. He was last published as a book author “The Last Newspaper Reader” and «Schirrmacher. A portrait ».

–