Hanns Zischler's novel: The shadows also have their shadows

Blurred childhood memories of holidays in the south. There you sat in the midday heat in front of the fan, tried to read as prescribed, but secretly waited for only one thing: the postman. With his small scooter, he drove through the alleys and threw his shipments through the letter slot in the door. Unforget the exciting sound when the slot was squeakingly pushed on and a letter or postcard fell on the stone floor with a low emphasis. All expectation, all possibility was associated with this tone. The chance to experience something new or unexpected moved and delighted the child’s mind. It was not yet blunted by the permanence of the message, nor did any plump display tie its consciousness, nor did the prospect of receiving a message keep its mind awake and free. And then, when a card or letter arrived from a distance, the child left everything else aside for the moment and delved into the idea that a message had taken a very long way to get to it. Each time the child combined the reception of the mail with a small ritual, greeted and honored the piece of described paper as a sent messenger from a sovereign homeland. Hanns Zischler’s new novel “Yumikos Paravent” is again about letters. Not about “torn” (the title of his first novel published in 2020), but about secretly delivered ones. It is about the thaumatic dimension of the medium, about the claim that a letter is more than just a carrier of communication, more than just information. It is about the question of how a life can be composed of letter lines, a life that will be remembered by a secret love. “Ain’t no cure for love,” sings Leonard Cohen, and if that is true and there is no healing for love, but only ruthless feeling, then life needs help to survive. And this help is provided by words, spoken, but above all also written. Zischler’s book honors their life-saving efforts. It is a book that tells of the secret love between a woman and a man who write letters across the oceans for decades and thus conjure up their togetherness again and again despite the distance. When the woman suddenly dies, her daughter finds the letters inside an unfinished linen jacket. Her mother had moved to Kobe as a fashion designer because of her Japanese husband to open a legendary men’s fashion studio there. While her husband works as a senior engineer of an electronics company, Johanna combines robust textiles with traditional fabrics. In truth, however, she spends the days thinking of a man she left behind in distant Berlin: a painter who bears the Slavic-wanted name Kusmín. All letters carry their sender. They offer the surprised daughter, who has traveled to Japan to clean out the studio, an intimate look into her mother’s secret inner life. Reading the innumerable lines reveals to her a dimension of the Mother’s existence, which overrules all her calculations. The first letter dates from May 1995, the last one from March 2018 – 23 years have written the two letters. Whether they ever met again in between remains unclear. And yet, as one business partner recalls, Johanna’s face never took on a more resolved expression over the years than when another letter from Kusmín was in the mailbox. An incredible story – a metaphor for the bonding power of two hearts. Across the continents, they write their own life story, design their picture, tailor their clothes together. A story about dedication and hope, fidelity and discipline. An endless exchange of letters, without end, without farewell, which, in retrospect, the daughter explains, tries to “almost desperately rewrite the irretrievable closeness.” And to create something that seems incomprehensible: “successful remoteness”. There is a poem line that seems to hold this miraculously delicate novel of Hann’s Zischler together at its heart. It is written by the English Enlightenment poet Charles Churchill and reads: “Strange to relate, but wonderfully true, / that even shadows have their shadows too!” What it means that shadows also have their own shadow, this book is about. Namely, the secret and hidden, which copies itself and thus continues to work. The author Zischler, who as an actor all the world admires especially in the role of Thomas Mann in the film Fatherland, writes quite differently himself. Namely, cautious, groping, with an exquisite imagination, which in short sequences indicates itself more suspended than self-confident. Zischler’s second novel is reminiscent of a Japanese woodcut with its flat calm. The tone of his prose is gracefully mindful without expecting too much, without explaining too much. And then, every now and then, to find a sentence that offers support to the heartbreaking seeker: “He who falls in love, with whom the fantasy goes through, can not be saved.” There is no cure for love – there is only hope for a healthy expression. Hanns Zischler: “Yumikos Paravent”. Roman. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2026. 176 S., born, 23,– €.