The New Sorrows of Young W. E-Book

Ulrich Plenzdorf

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 161

Beschreibung

Edgar W., teenage dropout, unrequited lover, unrecognized genius - and dead - tells the story of his brief, spectacular life. It is the story of how he rebels against the petty rules of communist East Germany to live in an abandoned summer house, with just a tape recorder and a battered copy of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther for company. Of his passionate love for the dark-eyed, unattainable kindergarten teacher Charlie. And of how, in a series of calamitous events (involving electricity and a spray paint machine), he meets his untimely end. Absurd, funny and touching, this cult German bestseller, now in a new translation, is both a satire on life in the GDR and a hymn to youthful freedom.

Leseprobe

ULRICH PLENZDORF

THE NEW SORROWS OF YOUNG W.

Translated from the German by Romy Fursland

NOTICE IN THE BERLINER ZEITUNG, 26TH DECEMBER:

On the evening of 24th December, teenager Edgar W. was found seriously injured in a summer house on the Paradise II allotments in the borough of Lichtenberg. Following inquiries by the People’s Police it has emerged that Edgar W., who had been living unregistered for some time in the condemned property, had been using electric current unsafely while tinkering with machinery.

OBITUARY IN THE BERLINER ZEITUNG, 30TH DECEMBER:

On 24th December an accident ended the life of our young colleague, Edgar Wibeau.

    He had many aspirations left to fulfil!

State-owned enterprise WIK Berlin

Director Union branch committee Free German Youth

OBITUARIES IN THE FRANKFURT AN DERODER VOLKSWACHT, 31ST DECEMBER:

To our great shock, the life of our young comrade, Edgar Wibeau, was cut short by a tragic accident. He is not forgotten.

State-owned enterprise Hydraulik Mittenberg (combine)

Director Vocational college Free German Youth

It was with shock and disbelief that I learnt of the death of my beloved son, Edgar Wibeau, in a tragic accident on 24th December.

Else Wibeau

Contents

Title PageEpigraphThe New Sorrows of Young W.About the Publisher Copyright

The New Sorrows of Young W.

“WHEN DID YOU last see him?”

“In September. End of September. The night before he left.”

“Did you not think of getting the police to look for him?”

“You can’t blame me for this—you of all people! A man who’d had nothing to do with his son for years, bar the odd postcard!”

“I’m sorry! Wasn’t that what you wanted, given my lifestyle choices?!”

“Typical! Ironic as ever! Not going to the police was probably the one thing I did right. And even that turned out to be wrong in the end. But when it first happened I’d just had it up to here with him. He’d put me in an impossible position, at the college and at the factory. The director’s son—always the star apprentice and straight-A student—suddenly turning out to be a delinquent! Dropping out of his apprenticeship! Running away from home! I mean!… And then he did start to send word not long after that, fairly regularly. Not to me, God forbid. To his friend Willi. On tapes. The language he used was very strange.

So grandiose. In the end this Willi let me listen to them—even he was starting to find the whole thing a bit odd. At first he wouldn’t tell me where Edgar was: in Berlin, as it turned out. And you couldn’t make head nor tail of what was on those tapes. But they did at least let us know Edgar was well and even that he was working, not just loafing around. Later on there was some mention of a girl, but it didn’t work out. She married someone else. In all the time he was living here he didn’t have anything to do with girls. But still, it wasn’t a matter for the police!”

Whoah, stop right there! Bollocks I didn’t! I had plenty to do with girls, if you want to know the truth. Starting when I was fourteen. Now I can say it. You used to hear all kinds of stuff, but you never knew anything for sure. So in the end I wanted to find out the details for myself—that’s just what I was like. Her name was Sylvia. She was about three years older than me. It only took me sixty minutes to talk her round. Which I reckon was pretty good going at that age, especially considering that I didn’t even have my full charm back then, or this distinctive chin. I’m not telling you this to show off, guys—I just want to make sure no one gets the wrong idea. A year later Mum enlightened me to the facts of life. She nearly burst a blood vessel. I was that much of an idiot I could’ve pissed myself laughing, but I didn’t—I played the little angel as usual. I think it was a bit harsh of me, really.

“What do you mean he turned out to be a delinquent?”

“He broke his supervisor’s toe.”

“His toe?”

“He threw a heavy iron plate on his foot—a baseplate. I was completely gobsmacked. I mean!…”

“What—he just threw it, out of the blue?”

“I wasn’t there, but my colleague Flemming—he’s the supervisor—told me what happened. He’s an old hand. Reliable, very experienced. Anyway there he is in the workshop one morning giving out the workpieces, some baseplates that need filing. And the lads are filing away and as he’s going round checking the measurements he notices that Willi, the boy next to Edgar, has got a finished plate, only he hasn’t filed it himself: it’s come off the machine. On the factory floor all the baseplates are machine-made, obviously. And the lad’s got hold of this plate and is showing it off—it’s not even a millimetre out, of course. So Flemming says to him: That’s come off the machine.

Willi: Off what machine?

Flemming: The machine in Plant 2.

Willi: Oh, is there a machine there, sir? I wouldn’t know. The last time we were on the factory floor was when we first started our apprenticeship, and back then we still thought those things were egg-laying machines.

And that was Edgar’s cue—of course they’d had the whole thing worked out beforehand: So, s’posing there is a machine there. Which there could be. It does make you wonder why we have to keep filing these baseplates down by hand. In our third year of training and everything.”

I did say that, it’s true. But only on the spur of the moment. We hadn’t worked it all out beforehand. We really hadn’t. I knew what Willi and the others were planning, but I wanted to stay out of it, as usual.

“Flemming: What did I tell you all when you started here? I told you: Here you have a lump of iron! Once you can make a clock out of it, your training will be complete. Then and only then.

It’s a sort of motto of his.

And Edgar: But even back then we knew we didn’t actually want to be clockmakers.”

I’d been wanting to say that to Flemming for ages. It wasn’t just his stupid motto, it was his whole attitude—it was like he was stuck in the Middle Ages. In the era of cottage industry. Up till then I’d always bitten my tongue.

“And the next thing you know Edgar went and threw this plate on his foot, so hard that it broke his toe. You could have knocked me down with a feather. I didn’t want to believe it at first.”

All true. Apart from two minor details. First of all I didn’t throw the plate. I didn’t have to. Those plates were heavy enough as it was to break a bloody toe or something, just the sheer weight of them. I only needed to drop it. Which I did. And secondly, I didn’t drop it the next thing you know—I dropped it after Flemming had fired off one more little remark. He was raving like a madman: You’re the last one I would have expected this from, Wiebau!

That’s when I lost it. That’s when I dropped the plate. Just the sound of it: Edgar Wiebau! It’s Edgar Wibeau! Not even a complete dimwit says “châtau” instead of “château”. I mean, at the end of the day everyone’s got the right to be correctly addressed by their correct name. If it doesn’t matter to some people that’s up to them. But it does matter to me. And this had been going on for years. Mum always just put up with getting called Wiebau. She reckoned people had just got used to it and it wasn’t going to kill her and anyway, everything she’d achieved at the factory had been under the name Wiebau. So of course then that was it—both of us got called Wiebau! What’s wrong with Wibeau, anyway? If it was Hitler or Himmler or something maybe. Then you would have a problem. But Wibeau? It’s an old Huguenot name—so what? Still, it was no reason to dump that bloody plate on old Flemming’s bloody toe. That was pretty heinous. I realized straight away that no bastard was going to talk about our training any more, only the plate and the toe. Sometimes I just used to get really hot and dizzy all of a sudden and then I’d do things and not be able to remember them afterwards. That was my Huguenot blood—or maybe my blood pressure was too high. Too-high Huguenot blood pressure.

“So you think Edgar was just afraid of the consequences, and that’s why he left?”

“Yes. Why else would he leave?”

I’ll admit it: I wasn’t exactly mad keen to stick around for the aftermath. “What does Young Comrade Edgar Wiebau (!!) have to say in connection with his behaviour towards Foreman Flemming?” If you want to know the truth, guys, I’d rather have chewed off my own arm than parrot some bullshit like: I realize now… In future I will… I hereby undertake to… et cetera et cetera! I didn’t agree with self-criticism—in public, I mean. It’s degrading, somehow. I don’t know if you get me. I think you’ve got to let people have their pride. Same with that role model stuff. You can’t so much as fart without some bastard coming along wanting to know if you have a role model and who it is. Or you get told to write three essays about it in the space of a week. Maybe I do have one, but I don’t go round proclaiming it from the rooftops. Once I wrote: my greatest role model is Edgar Wibeau. I want to be like what he’s going to be like. Nothing more. Or rather, I wanted to write that. I didn’t do it in the end, guys. Though the worst that would’ve happened would be them not giving it a grade. No bloody teacher ever had the balls to give me an F or anything.

“Was there anything else, do you remember?”

“You mean an argument, I take it? No, we never argued. Well, he did have a tantrum and throw himself down the stairs once, because I was going somewhere and wouldn’t take him with me. That was when he was five. If that’s what you mean. But I suppose I’m still going to get the blame for everything.”

Bollocks! No one’s to blame here except me. For the record: Edgar Wibeau chucked in his apprenticeship and ran away from home because he’d been wanting to do it for a long time. He scraped by as a house painter in Berlin, had some fun, had Charlotte and nearly came up with a great invention, because he wanted to!

The fact that I went over the Jordan in the process is a real bummer. But if it makes anyone feel any better, I didn’t notice much. Three hundred and eighty volts are no joke, guys. It was very quick. And anyway, we don’t really do regrets this side of the Jordan. We here all know what’s in store for us. That we stop existing when you stop thinking about us. My chances are probably pretty slim in that department. I was too young.

“My name is Wibeau.”

“Nice to meet you. Lindner—Willi Lindner.”

Hey, Willi! You were my best mate my whole life, now do me a favour—don’t you start rooting around in your soul or whatever for guilt and such. Pull yourself together.

“I’m told there are some tapes of Edgar’s, ones that he recorded? Do you have them to hand? I mean, could I listen to them? Sometime?”

“Yeah. No problem.”

THE TAPES:

to put it briefly / wilhelm / I have made an acquaintance / who is near to my heart—an angel—and yet I cannot tell you / of the depth of her perfection / nor of the reasons for it / suffice to say / that she has captivated me / and all my being—end

no / I am not deceived—I read in her black eyes true solicitude for me and for my fate—I worship her—desires of the flesh all are silenced in her presence—end

enough / wilhelm / her betrothed is here—mercifully I was not there to see her welcome him—it would have torn my heart asunder—end

he wishes me well / and I suspect / that this is lotte’s handi-work / for a woman is adroit in such matters and of delicate sensibility / when she can keep the peace between her two admirers / it is ever to her advantage / though it can seldom be accomplished—end

what a night that was—wilhelm / I may survive anything now—I shall not see her again—here I sit and gasp for breath / seek to compose myself / await the morning / and at sunrise the horses are

o my friends / why is it that the river of genius so seldom bursts forth / so seldom floods in / in great torrents to stir your wondering souls / dear friends / there are many placid gentlemen who dwell on either bank / whose garden houses / and tulip beds and cabbage patches would be ruined / they know therefore how to avert the threat that looms on the horizon / hampering its course with dams and channels—all this / wilhelm / leaves me mute—I retreat into myself and find a world—end

and it is the fault of all of you / who talked me into taking up the yoke and who extolled at such great length the virtues of activity—activity—I have tendered my resignation—I pray you break the news gently to my mother—end

“Do you understand it?”

“No. Not a word…”

Of course you can’t understand it. No one can, I bet. I got it out of this old book, this Reclam paperback—I don’t even know what it was called. The flipping title  page ended up down the bog at Willi’s summer house. The whole thing was written in that mental style.

“Sometimes I think—it might be a code?”

“It makes too much sense to be a code. But it doesn’t sound like he made it up either.”

“You never knew with Ed. He used to make up all kinds of random stuff. Like entire songs—lyrics and tune! There was no instrument he couldn’t learn to play in about two days. Or like a week, max. He could make these calculators out of cardboard—they still work now. But most of the time we’d just paint.”

“Edgar used to paint? What sort of pictures?”

“A2 size.”

“I mean, what sort of subjects? Or are there any I can look at?”

“Nope. He had them all at his. And ‘subjects’ isn’t really the right word for the stuff we painted. It was all abstract. One was called ‘Physics’. Then there was ‘Chemistry’. And ‘Mathematician’s Brain’. Only his mum was against it. Wanted Ed to get a ‘proper job’. Ed got quite a bit of hassle about it, if you want to know the truth. But what used to annoy him most was the times he found out that she, his mum I mean, had hidden one of the postcards from his progenitor… I mean, from his father… I mean, from you. That used to happen every once in a while. Then he would get massively annoyed.”

That’s true. That always used to piss me right off. After all there was still such a thing as privacy of the post, and the cards were clearly addressed to me. To Mr Edgar Wibeau, the flipping Huguenot. Even to a complete moron it would’ve been obvious that I wasn’t meant to know anything about my progenitor, the slob that was always boozing and sleeping around. The bogeyman of Mittenberg. With his paintings that nobody understood—which was always the paintings’ fault, of course.

“And you think that’s why Edgar ran away?”

“I don’t know… but anyway, the reason most people think he went, because of that thing with Flemming, that’s bullshit. I don’t get why he did that either. It wasn’t like he was having a hard time. Ed came top in every subject without even needing to work that hard. And before the Flemming thing he always used to keep himself out of trouble. It used to irritate some people. A lot of them called him a mummy’s boy. Not to his face, obviously. Ed just put up with it. Or maybe he didn’t hear. Like that time with the miniskirts. The hotties—I mean, the girls in our class—would not stop coming to work in miniskirts. They’d all show up at the workshop wearing them, to give the supervisors something to ogle. They’d been told about a million times that it was against the rules. Eventually it pissed us off so much that all of us lads turned up for work one morning in miniskirts. It was pretty immense. Ed stayed out of it. I guess the whole thing was just too stupid for him.”

Unfortunately I just didn’t have anything against short skirts. You can peel yourself out of bed in the morning feeling barely bloody human, but the minute you spot the first woman out the window you start to feel a bit more lively. Anyway, the way I see it people can wear whatever they want—it doesn’t bother me. But that miniskirt prank was still a right laugh. It was the kind of thing I might’ve come up with myself. I only stayed out of it because I didn’t want to cause any trouble for Mum. That was my big mistake—I never wanted to cause her any trouble. In fact, I’d got into the habit of never causing anyone any trouble. Which basically means never allowing yourself to do anything fun. That can start to piss you off after a while, guys. I don’t know if you get me. And that’s the real reason I decided to go AWOL. I’d just had enough of being paraded around as living proof that you can raise a boy perfectly well without a father. That was the idea, you see. One day this stupid thought came to me—what if I just snuffed it one day, black pox or something. I mean, what would I have got out of life? I just couldn’t get that thought out of my head.

“If you ask me, Ed left because he wanted to be a painter. That was the reason. It was just a bummer that he got turned down by the art school in Berlin.”

“Why was that?”

“Unimaginative, Ed said. No talent. He was pretty pissed off.”

No shit! But fact was, my collected works were worth sweet FA. Why did we always paint abstract the whole time?—Because I was that much of an idiot I could never in my life paint anything real, something someone could’ve recognized, a bloody dog or something. The whole painting thing was a fully ridiculous idea of mine, I reckon. But still, it made quite a hilarious scene, me bowling into this art school and straight into this professor’s room and whacking the whole of my collected works down on the desk in front of him, bold as you like.

First of all he asked: How long have you been painting?

Me: Dunno! A long time.

I didn’t even look at him while I said it.

Him: Do you have a job?

Me: Not that I know of. What would I want a job for?

That should’ve been enough to make him turf me out, guys! But the bloke was tough. He stuck with it!

Him: Is it in any kind of order? Which comes last, which comes first?

He meant my little exhibition on his desk.

Me: The early stuff is on the left.

The early stuff! Shit, guys! I was on fire. That was a good one.

Him: How old are you?

The guy was seriously tough!

I mumbled: Nineteen!

I don’t know if he believed me.