Jörg Fauser’s West Berlin

Paul Sullivan explores 60s-80s West Berlin through the writing of Jörg Fauser…

 

They were all the same, communists, Nazis, parents, church, book reviews, features section, editorial, revolutionary struggle, Baader-Meinhof, capital, television, Club Voltaire, pacifism, guerrilla, Mao, Trotsky, Red Student Action, the underground scene and Germania Security. They were all part of the same idea, they knew how things ought to be, they had a monopoly on consciousness, love, human happiness.” — Jörg Fauser (Raw Material)

Jörg Fauser in Munich, 1976.

Jörg Fauser was nobody’s man. He very much walked his own route through life and continued to walk it right into death too, sauntering drunkenly onto a Munich motorway in front of a speeding lorry at the age of 43.

Although relatively young when he died, Fauser had already lived several lives. Born in Frankfurt am Main to an artist father (Arthur Fauser) and actress mother (Maria Razum) while the city’s historic centre was being violently pounded by Allied air raids in 1944, he began writing in his teens, publishing in the Frankfurten Neuen Presse and, later, the Frankfurter Hefte.

By the age of 20 he had declared himself a conscientious objector, preferring to work in a Heidelberg hospital, where he became addicted to heroin. Having broken off his academic studies (Ethnology and English), he next travelled to Istanbul where his opiate addiction continued, sustained by casual jobs: labourer, airport baggage handler, night watchman.

In the late sixties he returned to Germany, bouncing between West Berlin, Frankfurt, Göttingen and Munich. Replacing the heroin with a steadily escalating booze addiction, he managed to pick up writing again. Along the way he became influenced by beat literature; as well as meeting William S. Burroughs (who helped him quit heroin), he later became friends with Charles Bukowski after interviewing him, in 1977, for German Playboy in Los Angeles.

Jörg Fauser with Charles Bukowski, date unknown. 

Fauser ended up translating some of Bukowski’s short stories into German, and the two remained pen pals; when Fauser died, Bukowski wrote a poorly composed but heartfelt homage called ‘Joe’, paying tribute to Fauser’s ‘authentic’ inner toughness—calling him ‘Cement Man’, ‘Human Tank’, and ‘Iron Guts’—in contrast to his own ‘fake’ tough guy reputation.

But to call Fauser a ‘beat writer’ or leader of the ‘German beat generation’, as many have, is to do him a disservice. Fauser had his own distinctive writing style that was distinct from the likes of Bukowski and Burroughs, more akin overall to the American crime writers like Raymond Carver and Dashiell Hammett that he also admired.

Throughout the seventies and eighties Fauser produced several novels—mostly fast-paced thrillers featuring underdog protagonists—alongside co-editing literary newspapers and penning short stories, poems, radio scripts, essays and articles. A self-confessed ‘gun for hire’ with a special passion for underground counter-culture, he also found time to translate works and song lyrics by John Howlett, Joan Baez and the Rolling Stones into German, even hitting the German pop charts with lyrics written for rock singer Achim Reichel: one of their songs, Der Spieler (The Player) from the Blues in Blond album, made it into the German top ten.

His collected journalism alone, published in 2009 by Berlin’s Alexander Verlag extends to almost 1600 pages of essays, book reviews and feuilletons. But his commercial breakthrough came in 1981 with the hardboiled crime novel Der Schneemann (The Snowman), which sold over 200,000 copies and was made into a film in 1984. He followed up with the semi-autobiographical Rohstoff (Raw Material, 1984), Das Schlangenmaul (The Snake’s Mouth) in 1985, and—just before he died in 1987—Kant, which appeared in installments in the Wiener newspaper.

It was Raw Material that broke Fauser outside of the German-speaking world, thanks to an English translation by Jamie Bulloch published in 2014 by London’s Clerkenwell Press. The story, which has no conventional plot as such, follows Fauser’s alter ego Harry Gelb as he drifts casually around Fauser’s old haunts—Istanbul, Frankfurt, West Berlin—with an old typewriter and a novel-in-progress (Stamboul Blues), which he tries to sell to various small and generally luckless publishers. He works dead-end jobs to pay the bills, undertakes occasional romantic and sexual encounters, lives in squats, hangs out in dive bars—all the time searching for that ‘raw material’ that will keep his writing alive.

The novel is set between 1968 and 1973, a volatile time in Germany—especially in West Berlin—which was walled in by the GDR and attracted a heady mix of students, left-wing activists and underground artists, largely thanks to it being the only place in the country where military service was…