Mit Aussicht

When I was a kid, I used to read unter my blanket on sunday mornings, when my parents refused to get up to entertain me. I had a lot of books to choose from - children's books, picture books, comics, some books my siblings used to read. The heros of my books then were ordinary people.
My favorite was Lütt Matten, son of a fisherman on the baltic sea, who never catches a fish. His friends laugh at him and call him the "Reusenadmiral". Naturally he catches the best fish in the end and saves the day. I bought this book again last year, because my mother couldn't find it anywhere. We moved a lot, when I was young and sometimes things got lost.

When I read the books of my childhood again today, I sometimes wonder about their cruelty, which I cannot remember from my childhood. Let's have a look at two examples.



The first one is a well-known collection: Brother Grimm's Fairytales. I think most of us, who come from a western culture, know at least one or two fairytales from this collection. But have you read them closely? Not only are a lot of people dying in these stories, moreover women are raped, children mistreated and men excersise their power over women's lives. And this is the variation, that had been officially edited by the brother's. The originals are even crueler.

The second, I believe, is only well-known to readers from my region in the north of Germany, even though the author is very popular: Hans Fallada - Geschichten aus der Murkelei. Unfortunately, this collection of fairytales has not been translated into English yet.
Fallada wrote these fairytales in 1938, in a time, when he slowly realised, that something was amiss in his country. In wartimes he chose to stop writing or to write harmless things, like stories for children. He had a hard time being an alcoholic and drug user, always threatened to being reported to the Nazi police. His stories show rural life at the beginning of the 20th century. They tell of children helping their father on the field by killing bugs. They tell of the rat Erika, who wants to life in the farmer's kitchen and of his sly ways to get her out again. Or Mäuschen Wackelohr, the last mouse in the house, whose family had been eaten by the fat cat and whose escape plans are reported to that same cat by a group of ants. I think you can imagine, what happened to the ants once the mouse got away.

As I grew up, the number of my books increased dramatically. I cannot remember what I used to read when I was 14 or 15 years old. My memory starts again at the age of 18 (puberty, you gotta love it.). I started choosing books by the cover first. When I saw a nice cover, I bought the books. I developed a heavy taste for the very minimalistic designs of a certain German publisher und thus came to read really good books. I read my first English book (not counting those I had to read in school) - Clockwork Orange. It took me months. I made it to the end and decided afterwards to never again read an English book, a decision that lasted almost two years until I picked up Wiliam Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil.

In my early twenties I focused on American literature, both in original language and translation. There were novels by Fitzgerald and Yates. Kerouac, Bukowski, Capote. Then I bought books by Hunter Thompson and Hubert Selby. From the present there were Palahniuk and the disturbing books of Easton Ellis. I couldn't get enough - until I met Haruki Murakami, or more precisely, until I found his novels.That was the end of my American reading. Murakami fascinated me with his alien style and themes. I read and re-read several novels. I looked out for something similar and didn't find anything satisfying.

Now you might wonder - "You're German, aren't you? What about your nation's literature?"

Well, German literature... You see, we have to read a canon of classics in our school years, and we are much too young to really appreciate their beauty. I had a wonderful teacher, who didn't destroy my love for reading, but I know a lot of people, who will never again in their life pick up a classic of German literature. Authors loomed in the background, scaring pupils for decades. I believe, there is a reason why I turned to American literature after leaving school. I was fed up with it and it took me five years to change that again.

In 2009 I changed my life. I had studied some semesters of economics, but wasn't happy with the situation and asked for advice. I wasn't sure if changing the field of study would be a good choice, but in the autumn I began my studies of both German Language and Literature and Baltic Philology. Imagine the new range of books I chose to read. There was a new world, because who on earth picks up a novel by a Latvian at any chance? There are just a few translations into German. I found that the German authors had lost their black shadows of doom and that I enjoyed reading them. There are still so many books I don't know yet.

And so it may not come as a surprise, that I choose books as my topic for the A to Z challenge. Hopefully I'll manage to come up with a nice story about a book, that influenced my life or an anecdote about something book-related. While I am grateful for every reader, I'll be more than happy if you'd share your reading-related stories with me. Moreover I would like to ask you to keep in mind that I am not a native speaker and that I still feel queasy using English in public posts. I hope you can enjoy them nevertheless.