According to the Toby Press website, Hartmut Lange was born in Berlin in 1937 and is well-known in Germany as a contemporary novelist and playwright. He has been awarded numerous literary prizes.
Missing Persons contains three longish short stories, all in one way or another covering the theme of disconnection: a sense that all is not quite right, with unresolved questions left hanging in the air.
In The Poster, we meet Henninger, a German bank director, who has travelled to Vienna for business purposes. He sees a list of missing persons on a pillar and takes a pen and scrawls his own name on it, seemingly to proclaim to the world that he is not as he appears to be. The time comes for him to return to his office in Berlin, but while waiting for his flight at the airport, “it occurs to him that it might be possible for him to exchange his ticket to Berlin for a flight to Venice”. And so his adventures begin.
As with all acts of spontaneous rebellion, Henninger worries about the effects of his absence back home. He tries to send a telegram to his office, but realises the impossibility of making an adequate explanation for his whim and tears up the telegram form.
While in Venice Henninger meets up with a mysterious caped stranger who offers to show him around the city. Later, while waiting at the station to take the train back to Vienna, the same stranger appears and travels with him. During their conversation, the stranger suggests that they break their journey at the small town of Cividale where the stranger, who has revealed his name to be Ahmed Aghali shows him around various ancient ruins.
Having broken with the reality of his life, Henninger now finds himself wandering around the small town, eventually committing a small crime for which he is arrested. The destabilisation process continues for the rest of the story, with Henninger ending up in Cairo, eventually returning home to something resembling normality.
The story shows that once the chain of habit and routine is broken, anything can happen. Old unresolved conflicts rise to the surface and need dealing with. New unexpected situations arise but the old ways of dealing with them do not work any more. Henninger has become the existentialist man, adrift in his life with no anchors, reacting impulsively to whatever comes along. It may be disturbing but at least it is adventure, even if the adventure is underpinned by credit cards and a steady job to return to back home. Lange allows Henninger to return to his life with a striking souvenir of his travels to show him that what happened was not a dream. The missing persons list has been disappeared and we are left wondering whether it had ever existed.
In The New Tenant an elderly concierge, Frau Lehmann, is bewildered by the mysterious comings and goings of a new resident in her block of apartments. There is nothing “normal” about the young man’s behaviour. He goes out in the middle of the night. He sands the floors of his apartment at odd hours of the day. He seems to have no furniture in his new apartment.
Nothing much happens in this story, other than Frau Lehmann’s increasing obsession with the handsome young man. The story shows how someone who fails to communicate can give rise to false assumptions. Frau Lehman who is accustomed to forming working relationships with all the tenants finds herself increasingly inquisitive about the new tenant and builds up an increasingly unreal picture of him in her mind, eventually describing him as “beam of light”. The new tenant remains enigmatic to the end, but Frau Lehman is by that time deeply affected b what she imagines him to be, all of which is quite illusory with little bearing in reality.
I like this story, not least for its description of the closed world of a block of apartments, with its closely-negotiated and well-bounded relationships, so fragile and easily disrupted when a new factor is thrown into the equation.
In Defence of Nothingness (a title surely culled from the master of existentialist fiction, John Paul Sartre), a young boy, Antonio contracts a debilitating illness. His family’s inability to communicate with each other makes them unable to deal with the boy’s deteriorating condition, and their efforts to continue life as usual result in a disastrous outcome.
This story is about the gap that exists between people even within a closely-knit family. They have an “elephant in the room” and are unable to discuss how to deal with it. Ultimately it is this lack of communication which is their downfall, but I am left wondering why the author gave this story its title.
I am grateful to Toby Press for giving us this small collection from Hartmut Lange. There is enough here to make me want to read more, but alas, I shall have to wait for the translators to do more work for this is his only title in English at the moment. Helen Atkins has produced a fine text here which reads naturally and as far as I know presents us with something close to the original German version.
