West/East German Novel: “Guests of the Thunderstorm” by Dirk von Petersdorf. – culture

Last year, Dirk von Petersdorf He presented a new collection of his poems, where a lot is happening in front of weather backgrounds and summer and winter backgrounds, and this also applies to the things that children do in growth, and there it is especially touching. The family is an integral part of Petersdorf’s poetry, and this is the case in his new book.

Dirk von Petersdorff is a master mood maker and poet who knows how to prepare for looming disaster with clouds gathering and trees swaying in the wind. His new narrative work, a short novel, is called Guests of the Storm, because Petersdorf, a New German, likes to undo the forms of the classics, rhyme in poetry, and ode the thing, and now the manageable story is heading to a climax – you have to take the formal tradition Don’t talk too much.

“Guests of the Storm” is a story from our fragile days, surrounded by threats and unreasonable demands on all sides. Living in a town in eastern Germany, Friedrich and his wife Jenny moved here after reunification, and soon became aware of the idiosyncrasies and skepticism of the West and its heroes. At the same time, Jenny and Frederick are self-critical enough not to draw enemy lines in the sand, because after all they’ve moved here “to learn about a new area with different backgrounds,” as Jenny puts it. But everyday life is often difficult, in kindergarten Jenny is the unfortunate “Western Muti”, and hostile looks meet her everywhere.

It’s summer, an awkward summer in many ways. The weather results are on the first page: brown patches of grass, weeks of drought, today’s summer. Preparing for an evening party, Jenny invited a fellow Brandenburger, Rolf, who had already introduced himself over the phone using dubious side-thinker terms. Plus, there’s supposed to be Friedrich’s ex-girlfriend, Thea, and on top of that, a lot of mischief is going on in heaven. Storm clouds gather, and a drone launched by Paul, one of the sons, crashes into a tree. Paul is also completely lost to the local legend of a former Red Army soldier who is said to be in mourning for a comrade who died during the NVA maneuver and who haunts the area. Conflict zones wherever I look, strangeness and nervousness, homelessness and attempts at pacification – only the eldest son, George, is no stranger to the East. He has his friends here, including the Syrian Aras, who are familiar with the history of German emperors and are presented as a kind of original fusion.

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What’s brewing in the sky and the wind blowing through the door finds an atmospheric counterpart on the table once Rolf and his wife, Betty, arrive. A nice trick is to consider the conspiracy theory that Germany would be completely defenseless in the event of a pandemic: “We practically don’t have protective masks,” says an exasperated Rolf. It’s the summer of 2019. The “Prohibition State”, “democracy”, the rhetorical shield do not give way, even after the arrival of Taine, who is more and more flirting with his former love affair with Friedrich.

It is amazing how skillfully Petersdorff depicts a mental drama and the weather, in which almost all the participants lose the coordinates of their locations. Only Jenny insists on being in order: “This is my island, it’s all right here,” she said, but then a helicopter lands in the park, metaphors suddenly form, and at some point Jenny says the sentence the reader had heard from the start on the tip of his tongue : “All sensations come true.” “Gewitter’s Guests” is an iconic story by her own authorship that captures the verbal voice of the youth as well as the angry language of the supposedly careless, which of course does not always escape overbearing: “The smell of smoke from the nearby coal factory hangs over the scene like mild nonsense.”

One should not reveal too much about the events, because Petersdorff equipped his theater in the West / East Germany not only with carefully heard quotes, but also with all kinds of strong motives and allusions, which were all replaced in the plot. Above all, Petersdorff allows his light and dark theater to run, wind, dusk, rain, thunderstorms – there’s plenty of everything, but that’s not only because of the author, but certainly because of the global contemporary state.