novel

• 160 pages
• Series Main Works (Reihe: Die Hauptwerke)

978-3-933974-74-7

20.00 €           

available als audio book at O.skar Verlag 140min, 14,95 Euro

Kornelia Boje has been asscociated with litarary text for a long time, through her work as a announcer, where she has lend several others her voice. Apart form that there have been released several Cds with texts by Italo Svevo, Gianni Rodari, Raphael Chirbes, Rita Mea Brown a.o.

She has done german-russian readings togehter with musician, actor and director Jegor Wyssozki. Their repertoire consited of works from the poets: Jessenin, Blok, Achmatowa, Mandelstam, Zwetajewa as well as Kirgise Dschingis Aitmatow. As actress she was particulary emphazised her parts in film versions of Max Frisch, Dostojewski, Calderon, Kokoschka, Pavese, Somerset Maugham and Patricia Highsmith.

Now, through this novel, she has written a novel, which her love for past and present Russia through two cleverly entangled narrative threads.

The awakening protagonist is Ulla Hanson, a young fotographer, who has taken the young Russian Walodja as lover. Walodja has suffered as soldier in the second Chechenwar and afterwards as deserter from the russian army. The muderous circumstances of the russian army are discovered step by step, the Dedowtschtschina, who supplies part of the actuality of the novel.

Ulla likes Walodja, who stays illegally in Germany, partially because she is attrackted to Russia and the russian culture. Walodja and his friend and musician Mischa are thinking about how to break out of their underground existence.  From their naive perspective of the affluent society Germany, they perceive Ulla to be a walthy fotographer, hence an ideal source for money.

The brutal abduction by the two Czechs, who want to press money, leads to a psychologically high charged moment, when Ulla shoots both her abductors and tormented tormentors. Ulla awakens ftom the following shock. The fragments of memory, who become sharper through the novel synchronise the narrating and describe the abduction.

The novel expores in a suttle way the awakening from suppression of two genarations: Ulla’s as well as her mother Johanna’s, who is another one of the main characters and starts to reprocess her own familyhistory after Ulla’s improsonment on remand. The mother recounts tentatively about Ulla’s father, who was involved in the war crimes of the Third Empire and broke away from Germany after the war. However he came back only a little while later under a false name and ill used Johanna and his child Ulla for a disguise family for his new identity. Both mother and daughter did know. Both kept this knowledge from one another, surpressed it: the soon fleeting men, the soon vanishing father, the silent offender. Both killed them in her own way.

Their is also another book by Kornelia Boje: Jeremias oder wie ich «auf den PC kam«, 89 pages.

And as already mentioned, the book is available as a 140 minute reading of the author herself, at O.skar Verlag München.