March 28, 2024

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Jochen Schimmang: "Sleepers in the Lab" - The Collective Memory of FRG Half Asleep

Jochen Schimmang: “Sleepers in the Lab” – The Collective Memory of FRG Half Asleep

The hero of this novel is called Rainer Roloff and, like the author, was born in 1948, that is, about the same age as the Federal Republic. Therefore, it is the ideal subject for a long-term study of a sleep laboratory that wants to find evidence of “collective memory”.

The focus is mainly on about 20 minutes into the waking process: what happens in this “transitional space”, in this “mental sleep”, is precisely recorded. So it is not a psychoanalytic session, but a social experiment: in the waking phase, autobiographical fragments are remembered, seemingly incoherent details from previous lives, so slowly develop a picture of a puzzle from the emotional landscapes of West Germany.

scandal in modern history

Oddly enough, these meticulously but pleasantly recorded first half-sleep memories revolve around the 1987 “Barchel Affair”, one of the biggest scandals in modern German history.

Schleswig-Holstein Prime Minister Uwe Barchel was found dead in a hotel room in Geneva, and the background to this event, in which arms dealers and various secret services were involved, has not been clarified to this day.

This also includes the role of Rainer Roloff, who was supposed to act as a defense witness for Uwe Barchelle and who has the same name as the current protagonist.

Real and fictitious references

Schimmang is by no means a typical representative of the 68th generation. He describes the typical experiences of time from an ironic distance, knowing the futility.

Brilliant leaps in memory

One of the hero’s most interesting traits is that, in his words, his life really began only around 1980, around the age of thirty. This perception is triggered by a taxi ride to the sleep lab when the driver suddenly hears the record “Fear of Music” by Talking Heads.

This scene brings Marcel Proust’s memory prowess to the present in a comedic way. Other unexpected leaps in consciousness include “Toast Mozart,” introduced in the dining car on Intercity trains at the end of the 1970s – a highly sensual vehicle for a historical sense of time, even if it sometimes left a strange aftertaste in the tongue.
A sad and calm novel with unpredictable funny explosives.