Suchbild: über meinen Vater

by Christoph Meckel

Rare Book

Genres: Nonfiction, German Literature, Biography

190 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1987

About the author

Christoph Meckel spent his youth in Freiburg im Breisgau, where he attended Gymnasium. In 1954/55 he studied graphic art at the Academy of Art in Freiburg im Breisgau, and in 1956 at the Academy of Art in München.

Since 1956 he has worked as both an author and graphic artist. He has traveled extensively through Europe, Africa, and America and lived in Oetingen in Markgräflerland, in Berlin, in the south of France, and in Tuscany.

His graphic work has appeared in numerous exhibitions. Until his withdrawal in 1997, Meckel was a member of the PEN Center of the Federal Republic of Germany. He is a member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz and the Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung in Darmstadt.

Meckel has received numerous literary prizes, including:

1966 Preis Junge Generation zum Berliner Kunstpreis
1974 Reinhold-Schneider-Preis
1978 Rainer-Maria-Rilke-Preis für Lyrik
1981 Literaturpreis der Freien Hansestadt Bremen, Ernst-Meister-Preis für Lyrik
1982 Georg-Trakl-Preis
1993 Kasseler Literaturpreis
2005 Schiller-Ring der Deutschen Schillerstifung (Weimar)
2006 International Literary Award Novi Sad (Serbia)

Reviews

[Ben Winch]

To write about someone means: destroying the reality of his life in favour of the reality of words.

Christoph Meckel—I grow surer—is a naive/childlike genius. Let me qualify that; I don’t want to condescend. He’s “beginner’s mind” genius. Yogi genius. He keeps things fresh. About the man himself I know next to nothing—what I could learn in English on the internet. And of course there’s that rule about three points to make a straight line. But on the basis of Image for Investigation (a memoir) and The Figure on the Boundary Line (short stories and a novella), so disparate in tone and subject yet so much his own, I know, if nothing else, he’s himself.

What links Image and Boundary Line? Precision. Vigilant invention. (“Of course there are many who can invent and cast their spells without a second thought,” he writes in Boundary Line: “But with me, nothing ever comes of boredom.”) Honed craft—the craft of the whittler, the condenser. Craft that’s dense and light at once; packed with allusion yet free of dead weight; nimble, poised, able to pin a butterfly to a tree, yet able to bring down the tree with explosive force if necessary. Christoph Meckel, if you like, is a miniaturist—like Antonio Tabucchi (a friend, according to Tabucchi) yet more earthy, more raw. He’s direct, he pierces through, he cuts to the core.

And make no mistake, this book cuts. The surgeon’s metaphor, oft-used, is accurate, since Meckel attempts nothing less than a dissection, an autopsy in search of a root-cause. Luckily or not, the corpse is bloated; he has much to work with. Meckel’s father was poet, reviewer, journalist, obsessive diarist. “Dependably and pedantically,” writes Meckel, “he archived it all.”

I had not intended to spend time on my father. It did not seem necessary to write about him. His case, a private one, was closed. [...] Since I read his war diaries, I cannot let his case rest any longer; it is no longer private. I found the notes of a person I did not know.

Image For Investigation, then, is an act of need, personal and political: the attempt, by the son of a former German officer in the Second World War, to account not just for his father’s actions but for the actions of a generation. Note I said “account for”, not absolve, not condemn, though Meckel’s language is unsparing, torn from a heart shut tight and wounded by love. Image for Investigation: About My Father (in German, Suchbild. Über Meinen Vater; in French, Portrait Robot Mon Pére), as its English title can’t suggest, is an identikit portrait of a spirit at large—an essential soldier (officer-class), a man (though he be pitied) to be feared. Not a war criminal as Hollywood would have it, maybe, but the unthinking servant of a criminal state, who never repented nor assimilated the fact of his guilt.

Writers from Tadeusz Borowski to Danilo Kiš tell us in one way or another of the worst a human can be or experience, of the darkness (always inferred, though Borowski comes close to naming it) in our hearts. What Christoph Meckel (a child among the rubble—born, like Kiš, in 1935) does is more subtle. Rather than monsters and victims, Meckel gives us an ordinary bourgeois, a pawn. But for all his strong words he feels for his subject, and doesn’t deny it. Nor does he seek to make excuses, to win us over, to make of his father an anti-hero, or anything so glamorous or larger than life. Meckel’s father was a scared man, a hurt man, finally a broken man. His caste of spirit, his inborn arrogance, his blithe self-absorption—Meckel nails them all. The father’s tragedy is his soul’s wounded terminal immaturity. But to nurture that soul, to rescue it, is what Meckel proposes. As the Buddha said: “Only love dispels hate,” after all.

Of course at times it all but turns the stomach, but not through its depiction (virtually non-existent) of gore. This is not the prison camp depravity of Borowski, but a domestic, drawing room depravity: the naive arrogance of a sheltered second-rate poet given to yearning for “action and manly adventures” when literary dinners get too slow; who believes himself “heir and DESCENDENT of the German Spirit” (the capitals are Meckel’s, as if to mimic the “nationalistic clichés” whose “vapours” dope his protagonist); who is “carried into the barracks in the sedan chair of a master race”, though of course he’s just “CANNON FODDER” like them all. And whereas Borowski’s protagonist has no illusions, Meckel’s takes his to his grave, resists “the proper definition of his self” and dies believing (or professing to believe) his every act of cowardice courageous, his every betrayal a sacrifice for the greater good.

He never again came so close to knowing himself. [...] There he confronted—INWARDLY MOVED—the insight that there was such a thing as German guilt. [...] But personal guilt—NO. He had wanted what was worthy and had done his best.

So though Meckel “would like to tell tall tales for his benefit”, for the most part he can do no more than watch as the story unfolds, all the while weighing the influence on his own life, wounded in turn. (“He stood like a black cloud between the child and the world.”) Nonetheless, by the story’s end, in an inspired act of creative courage, he liberates his father’s child-soul.

Can you dilute the water?
Child’s play.
Can you eat the darkness?
You know I can.

Which goes to show, Christoph Meckel isn’t naive at all, only determined to not lose sight of the childlike, in this book of all books, with his father’s child-shade looking on. If The Figure on the Boundary Line was like Paul Klee “taking a line for a walk” (“The highest purpose,” said John Cage, “is to have no purpose at all”) then Image for Investigation: About My Father, while its route is still governed by the “divining-rod”, digs a line deep in the sand, a moral boundary. Meckel’s compassion, his dexterity with the knife, his lack of sentiment when sentiment would only slow his hand, his seeing around his subject, his willingness (an artist’s) to explore—these traits make Image an uncommon work of biography, a hybrid which, in places, is hardly biography at all. Perhaps the older Meckel’s true achievement was his child’s “unnerving education at the hands of language”, for which we thank him, even as we mourn.

A second volume of memoir concerning Meckel’s mother exists but is not yet translated into English. I trust it and other works will eventually appear in our language.

(Taken from the introduction to the new Verbivoracious Press edition. Thanks to Eddie Watkins for the Klee connection and Fionnuala and Scribble for their interpretations of the titles to the German and French editions.)

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant short portrait of the author’s father, a failed poet and writer, written in sparse reflective prose—the sort of perfect slight book one exits with a beaming smile and a simple nod of “YES.”