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“You become an architect when you don’t have the courage for art and physics is too much trouble in the long run” – this is the initially sobering bottom line for Thomas Schwarz, around forty and an architect himself, as he looks back on his life during a two-month sabbatical in St. Louis in 2002. He has finally taken the time to accompany his longtime girlfriend, internationally-renowned installation artist Elise Katz, on one of her trips and watch her “do the work that had made her reputation: coming with empty hands and leaving behind a work of art.”
The Midwestern metropolis is a symbolic setting because Tom Schwarz, as he called himself at the time, had spent a year there a quarter of a century before as an exchange student. At the time, the boy from provincial North Germany saw America as the land of opportunity, and life itself as an infinite array of different possibilities. Returning to the place where he began to grow up, Thomas comes full circle, and he is able, indeed compelled to look back upon his life to date. “He was on the move. He was in the process of transforming himself back into Tom Schwarz.”
Thus Ziegler is also telling a coming-of-age story – not only that of his hero, but of the entire generation of those born in the late 1950s, attempting to break out of the confines of their familial and intellectual background without knowing exactly which new professional and personal goals to aim for. Due to indecisiveness and the sense of “anything goes” so typical of the time, many decisions were never made consciously, but were in fact long inherent in the very attempt to keep all possibilities open. As if of its own accord, a whole has emerged from all the open ends: the path taken in life.
For Thomas the two months of free time on the Mississippi become an intersection between past and future as he prepares his talk and reviews the professional and private stations of his life that have made him what he is today. The future comes into play in St. Louis when his successful talk leads to the offer of a professorship at Washington University, the city’s academic gem. It is an especially attractive offer given his meandering path in life so far, and his struggle with his own indecisiveness – and one that he ultimately chooses to turn down, returning to Hamburg with Elise, at least for the time being. It is the first time he has taken his life firmly in his own hands.
Ziegler shows an astonishingly light touch in breaking down the backdrop of Thomas’ life – thirty years of West German history – into individual stories that reflect the transformation of society, the historical turning points (above all, of course, the fall of the Wall) and their effects, now obvious, now less obvious, on the development of the protagonist and those around him.
Thus, the phases of this act of memory, shuffled non-chronologically, always reflect thinking and behavior typical of each given time, yet with a completely individual touch that gives the characters a three-dimensionality independent of their specific German experience. The journey leads from schooldays in Lüneburg to university studies in Braunschweig – where a now-fading friendship was formed – from modest beginnings as a preliminary draftsman in a Hamburger architectural firm to the first encounter with Elise and the art scene, culminating in an unexpected promotion to head of communications in the architectural firm of a university friend.
Ziegler is known as an art and architecture critic, and clearly has more in common with his protagonist than age alone. In his late and very mature debut as a novelist he erects a highly complex and remarkably resiliant narrative construction. The layers of memory are not worked through linearly, but in a process of reconstruction and insight that is sometimes arduous and painful. This allows Ziegler to skillfully intercut the different temporal and plot levels, fading confidently in and out. The narrative present in St. Louis, set at a distance by shifting to the third person, segues seamlessly back into the first person to recapitulate and reconstruct the seminal events of Thomas’ life. In this way the past draws near, made tangible through its effects on the present.
One final impressive feature is the casual precision with which Ziegler repeatedly weaves in observations on architecture that reveal the experienced critic, yet blend quite organically into the context of the work, illuminating the relationship between urban planning and ways of building and life so lucidly that they convey something like a history of West German mentality. The Hamburg Elevated captivates with its densely realistic voice and its sharp eye for the codes and behavioral norms of a specific artistic and intellectual milieu. The novel is so allusive, so precisely observed, clothing its wise reflections in such sensual imagery and such apt aphorisms, that it is just as convincing and enjoyable as a tale of love and adolescence as a novel of society and of its time.
Anne-Bitt Gerecke
October 2007
[Translated by Isabel Cole]
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