Epos Clemens Meyer has written a gripping anti-war novel with “The Projectors”. It tells the story of three German neo-Nazis, with Karl May as the narrator. A bizarre, artfully narrated epic – literary perfection
Exclusively for subscribers | Issue 35/2024
“The Projectors” also tells the story of three German neo-Nazis fighting in Yugoslavia
In the new novel Die Projectors by Clemens Meyer, the following scene can be found on page 608: It takes place in Chicago, where the film Winnetou Pierre Brice and his film father, a Yugoslavian actor, traveled in 1973. They want to deliver a donation for the descendants of the indigenous victims of the Wounded Knee massacre. Before they drive there, they drive their rental Opel in Chicago to the two eleven-meter-high bronze statues of two feather-adorned prairie Indians, the work of a Yugoslavian sculptor. Just as they turn the corner, the car mirror brushes against a boy. Meyer has kept the chronology. The reader has already met him 300 pages earlier, when he gave himself the battle name “Chicago” in 1992 and joined a group of mercenaries.
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He belongs to a group of mercenaries who fight for Croatia as mercenaries in the wars of Yugoslavia’s disintegration, together with German right-wingers. Fights and murders. But alongside these rather dark parts of the plot, full of blood and death, the figure of the adventure and travel writer Karl May provides a lighter one. May provides a suitable projection surface for Clemens Meyer’s love of the bizarre. With May, he also draws a link to Leipzig. In 1891, he was treated for a nervous breakdown in Dr. Güntz’s “insane asylum” in Leipzig-Thonberg. The news of the massacre of the Indians had devastated him. After all, May dreamed in his books of a world community without race or class. Bertha von Suttner, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, gave him a standing ovation for this confession, which he made in a lecture in Vienna in 1912, the year of his death. The Projectors tells the story of three German neo-Nazis who volunteer to take part in the wars in Yugoslavia in the Ruhr group. Meyer does not use terms or stereotypes at any point in his novel. Each character has his own story for joining the neo-Nazis: Franko Nero, the half-Croat from Dortmund, Trajan and Georg from the East. They are looking for sovereign authority, want to be able to serve, want to be in demand, want to count for something. Their comrades in the right-wing groups offer them all of this. When Trajan becomes their first war casualty in Croatia, they are deeply shocked, but their empathy quickly blunts the more deaths they witness. A special feature of his novel shows how far Meyer ventures into foreign territory when writing: it would have been expected that he would look from Leipzig, from Dortmund, or at least from Germany, to Yugoslavia and the wars of disintegration in the 1990s. This is due to the fact that the filming locations of the German Karl May films become the scenes of the wars in Yugoslavia 30 years later. Meyer does it the other way round. Because it seems as though each war is a continuation of another, he extends the narrative time to around 75 years. The projectors begin in 1942, a year after the German Wehrmacht occupied Yugoslavia. Alongside the man in the wolf’s coat, the main character is a 13-year-old Croatian boy who is a messenger for the partisans. After the second great war, he was interned by Tito’s secret police on an island in the Adriatic on suspicion of treason. In 1956, he was released to the Velebit Mountains and from then on called himself a cowboy. From 1962, the karst landscape became the setting for the Karl May films, which were shot by German crews in Croatia. The novel once again expanded the time period and took a look at the Yugoslav wars of disintegration, which also took place in those places from 1992 onwards. The film had become bloody serious. In 1992, the corpses no longer rose. Bizarre and absurd jokeThe murder and killing did not end at this time either. In 2015 – when Franko Nero and Georg visited a cemetery in Croatia – Georg was shot by an unknown assailant. The presumed reason: Georg from Leipzig and Franko from Dortmund were visibly gay couple.Meyer does not bring the individual stages into a continuous plot. He approaches the image of the world through the fragment, the splinter, the episode. As in his debut novel When We Were Dreaming, he assembles the individual chapters into a whole. In The Projectors he combines around 15 individual chapters. It is remarkable that he does not lose sight of any character until the end of the novel. His art in storytelling consists in constantly opening up the spaces and blending them into one another. Reality continues as a dream and vice versa. Moreover, the author as narrator also jumps in chronological order in his new novel. The fact that he is pursuing a completely different plan is made clear by a sentence that Meyer gives to the character of Karl May: “Our century is coming to an end, madam.” “What do you mean, doctor?” Meyer fades in the locations, repeatedly visiting his protagonists: 1942, 1956, 1962, 1976, 1992, up to 2016. In 1992, the crumbling Yugoslavia is experiencing the fiercest wars. The fighters are remnants of the Yugoslav People’s Army, armed Serbs, Croatian volunteers and mercenaries, right-wingers from many countries, including Germany. They all fight according to the murderous principle: it’s them or us! Only in the evening do they lie next to each other – in the same cemetery. Meyer goes through scenes full of blood. He doesn’t spare himself or the reader because he wants to achieve a cathartic effect. Liberation through terror. But the author would not be Clemens Meyer if his novel only wanted to show horror and terror. As in the previous novels In the Stone and When We Were Dreaming, he has given each chapter a different tone. The novel describes the character of the mysterious fragmentarist as: He listened to the world and put it all together. Meyer, a master of dialogue, mostly sticks close to the spoken word. He seeks directness; no glass wall should surround the topic. Added to this is the almost constant use of the present tense. A love story adds a bit of romantic flair. Moreover, the bizarre and absurd humor is not neglected in The Projectors. Meyer loves the changes in style. The rhythm created in this way shortens the reading of the more than 1,000 pages. At the end of the novel, the Middle East becomes the setting. The cowboy, now 87 years old, runs a traveling cinema and travels the world with Indian films. He is looking for his niece, who is supposed to be in Iraq as a soldier. One of the last sentences in the novel comes from the cowboy: “I wonder whether it is really an achievement of modernity that war is not seen as a component of culture but as a failure.” In his novel, Clemens Meyer describes a time that repeatedly leads to wars and brings the world to the brink. This view makes The Projectors a gripping anti-violence and anti-war novel. With its subject matter and the art of storytelling, it is a novel from a different literary league.Placeholder infobox-1
