Now the Scenery of Back Then

»Thinking about my life and the memories of it, all I can think of are sentences, sometimes just a few, sometimes a few more.« This is the sentence Jörn Winter says at the end of the book, in which a journal of moments and memories is created from individual sentences and whole stories. Both the experience of the moment and the memory of the past create the space of simultaneity in which Jörn perpetually resides. We know him from earlier books: Der fehlende Rest (1997), Aus der Geschichte der Trennungen (1999), Schnee in den Ardennen (2003), and many a motif from them can be found again here, as a trace, as a shadow, as a repetition that searches for the non-narrated, for the forgotten, the silenced in what has already been told. Jörn follows the perceptions and experiences, the biographical paths of the author; they go back to the 1930s, to the war and post-war period, to the 1950s, to the present, and Jörn speaks of them as if they were his own life. The author employs him as an alter ego in order to maintain a distance from his own life; as a correspondent who tells the stories of places and people, landscapes and regions, that talk about the present and the past.

This book is a powerful continuation of Jürgen Becker’s prose work; it renews the style of his open writing; it is a chronicle of a time that has stopped and is passing at the same time.

»All of these perceptions and memories are presented as poetic condensates. In this slim volume, they once again come together to form a wonderful prose, created from a sovereignty that is always wide awake.« Martin Oehlen, Frankfurter Rundschau

»a fascinating book about memory and German history« Welf Grombacher, Passauer Neue Presse