Franz Hodjak the Boy in the Nagold Written After Spending May To

Franz Hodjak The Boy in the Nagold Written after spending May to August 1998 as Hermann Hesse Writer-In-Residence in Calw. Once, while I was driving with my wife from Pforzheim to Calw through the valley of the Nagold, I saw a boy holding a plastic sieve in his little hands, prospecting for gold and dipping it very professionally - so it seemed to me, at least - into the Nagold, and subsequently lifting, sifting, and carefully shaking it. We pulled over and I watched him for a while. In days gone by, very probably, there had been gold panners at work here. Why else should the river be called the Na - Gold . ? Whether they found any, and whether the find was an especially rich one, did not interest me. I watched the boy and wondered whether he was playing gold rush or was really serious about things. He.s looking to begin now that everyone else has stopped? Or was he just caught by the lust for adventure, one comparable to the fervour of anglers, who spend hours on end looking - or, rather, staring - at the float without it ever being pulled down a single time by a fish? Or did he enjoy playing, safe in the knowledge that he was only playing? Or did he just want to be important, like his forefathers who prospected for gold, at least for the time he spent standing with the plastic sieve in his little hands? Or was he not thinking anything at all, merely standing in the Nagold, concentrating on the plastic sieve in order to prevent himself from having to think of anything else? Once I had asked myself enough questions, we drove on. When I look out of the window from my desk in the flat for the Calw writer-in- residence, I fear that the houses on the side of the hill could suddenly slide down the slope. I imagine that the same applies to the other side of the hill. Why do the houses on both sides not climb up to the ridge of the hill in order to take a peep in the other direction? Or have they, perhaps, already been to the top, before recoiling in fright? This serves to reinforce the impression that, amid the general panic, they failed to find their way back, with the houses that were once on the northern slope now being on the southern, and vice versa. That is also why the swallows do not return. Pigeons are content to live on the wrong roof rather than in the railway station in Stuttgart. Why, I ask myself, do the houses that moved from the southern slope to the northern slope, and vice versa, not come back? Or are they afraid of once again seeing what they once saw on the ridge of the mountain? Do they prefer to be unhappy rather than curious? Do they believe that one can survive in misfortune? And do they believe that curiosity and knowledge will burn them down to their very foundations? Perhaps, however, these thoughts and speculations of an itinerant scholar are superfluous. A little bug is crawling across the sheet of paper. It leaves no marks. How lonely must this bug . about which I know nothing and which leaves no marks on the curious sheet of paper - really be? Does it come from the east? Is it a Jew or an Arab, or Orthodox or Catholic or Protestant? Will it be deported? Is it homeless? What.s it called? Why has it chosen this sheet of paper, over which it is crawling so demonstratively, without leaving a mark? Is it seeking to dedicate a monument to anonymity? So many questions, so few answers. The guardian angels, banished from divine order, were ordered back shortly before they began to despair and, once entrusted with so many duties, the guardian angels were in greater demand than ever before. Hitherto, they had been allowed to do, or not do, whatever they pleased, always acting in accordance with their own requirements and at their own discretion, which ultimately drove them to boredom. Now, they have been given an order. They have been commissioned to buzz around us until they have compacted themselves to form bugging devices which pass on whatever we happen to be thinking, though to whom, they do not exactly know - yet it is precisely that which gives them a sense of enormous importance, the likes of which they have not previously known. The buzz they get out of divulging information, without knowing to whom, drives them wild. Now, they really can play the role of destiny. The fact that the guardian angels have been elevated to one of the most important authorities flatters them. Boundlessly. Looking out of the kitchen window, I see to the left the rear façade of the .Hermann-Hesse-Haus,. somewhat tatty and in need of repair. A terrace connects - pretty scruffily, for this I can find no comparison - the house of Hesse.s birth to a Sparkasse building, standing to the right from the kitchen window, and on one of the two windows sits a feeding bowl divided into two sections with food and water for a tomcat, the owner of this terrace, it would appear to me. The tom.s name is definitely not Narziss or Goldmund. Yet perhaps it isn.t even a tom but a cat. And how could a cat be called Narziss or Goldmund? If it is a tom after all, it might be called Garibaldi, that would somehow be alright, and even Leo would be just about acceptable. All other names are unacceptable. And one dare not even contemplate what name this tomcat was given. If it were called Horsti, that.s the way it would look, so thank God it isn.t called Horsti. Were it called Frieder, it would be pampered by a lady called Friederike but who doesn.t want to be named. Were it called Kurt, it would behave like a Kurt, but that it doesn.t do. If it were called Fritzchen, it would wag its tail. So what is this tomcat.s name? Perhaps that.s why it looks up at me so sadly, and then I try to explain to him that my name is Franz, and this name doesn.t mean anything to me either. I want to comfort him. But the tomcat runs off. Yet then it creeps back again, and I keep trying to tell him that, when I say the name Ceausescu, it should emit a wretched shriek. I hope that, by the time I leave Calw, the tomcat will have understood this. If I put the right question, there is only one answer. If I put the wrong question, there are countless answers. Normally, therefore, I put the wrong questions because I am also interested in the other possibilities. One can also live here, or there, or elsewhere - all you need are wings that are curious and unobstructed by obstinate roots. The gesture of being able to fly is played out to us by any tin Christ nailed to the wayside by some local public servant or other. His arms and legs clatter in the wind out of desperation and powerlessness. One leaves everything behind - the graves, the hope, the brand of cigarette, the other language, the time; all that one takes with one being memory. Every place is worth it, every place in its own way, although, secretly, we would make the memories - these witches and heretics, because they get us confused - disappear, in line with the principle of the Inquisition, yet the catacombs are all occupied, the ponds, the stones, the bonfires. Talking of stones: If our head hits a stone, the stone is hurt. We interrupted it while it was thinking. It is the source of the raw material for monuments, facings, paperweights and, occasionally, for metaphors and myths and phrases and sayings. Using hammer, chisel, axe, saw, whetstone, we fashion it into human form. Occasionally, it is the product of our kidneys, gall-bladder, or bladder. It resembles us, we can shape it but we cannot soften it. During revolutions, it allowed itself to be hurled through the air by us, from one direction in the other. The stone wishes that it were less burdened by us, yet we need the stone even beyond death, as a visible mark of our dubious presence between stones. Calw, was this town a home to Hermann Hesse? In the early prose, it probably was, as a Something, a place in which one felt secure yet from which one can break out at all times, at least in thought. It may well be that, at some point, that shattered his inner being. I believe not out of fear but out of helplessness. And then came the contrivances, the contrast between spirit and sensuality. This made it a demonstrative prose that had reality not in its sights but reality in its head, which became something in its own right . - is that to be welcomed or lamented? The language that carries these contrivances is anything but lumbering, in no sentence are there traps that one could fall through into the bottomless void. The bottomless is merely described. I know that sounds presumptuous, little Franz Hodjak finding fault with the great Hermann Hesse. Yet I may, after all, be allowed to speak. It is freedom that I want to practise, like a sportsman going for a record. I know it is a misery I carry around inside me. I come from a region in which bats used to ring the bells at night.

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