“All the people and stories are plucked out of thin air”: This sentence precedes Gerhards Roth’s 1984 book “Common Death”, which contains 800 pages of the records of an inmate. The fact that a work designated as a novel also needs this poetic evocation of fiction is perhaps due to the fact that Roth often writes in a documentary style or like a reporter. This becomes very clear, for example, in his volume of essays “Journey to the Interior of Vienna” (1991), which devotes itself to the city’s underground and uncovers abysses.
Roth, who was born in Graz in 1942 and after dropping out of medical school and working in a computer center, made contact with the avant-gardists at the Forum Stadtpark in Graz and eventually became a freelance writer, saw himself inspired early on by the connection between doctor and poet: he planned his way to the Finding writing about medicine “like Benn, like Döblin or Celine”. With these role models, it is natural to be confronted with an aesthetic of the ugly and terrible, and the early short novel “The Will to Sickness” seems to have been trained directly on Baudelaire. There it says, mind you from the point of view of a character: “The symptoms of diseases, wrote Kalb, must be regarded as works of art. (…). Imagine the beauty of epileptic seizures as the body tosses on the floor, or the aesthetics of hemorrhaging across a bed sheet!”
In the maze of images
Crises, including those of perception, are at the center of Roth’s writing, as is the case in the novel “The Quiet Ocean”, which was filmed by Xaver Schwarzenberger in 1983 and won the Silver Bear at the Berlinale. Roth’s personal connection to psychiatric issues has been known since his autobiography, which was published in 2007. Fascinated, he visited the Gugging State Mental Hospital for decades and documented experiences with patients and doctors in the text-photo volume “The Maze of Images”. His way of dealing with illness also has playful traits. For example, a sketch is entitled “Mad Tear of the Basic Institution”, which is also shown in “Common Death”.
Like many Austrian intellectuals of his generation, Roth saw his country shaped by ongoing National Socialism, concealed by a “sham morality”. In the intellectual climate he discovered “meanness and insidiousness”, which he attacked as sharply as Thomas Bernhard. In the seven-volume novel cycle “Archive des Schweigen” and the eight-volume cycle “Orkus”, he tried to cope with it in manic writing. Referring to Freud, Roth himself spoke of an attempt to analyze the “collective nightmare” and a “psychoanalysis of historiography”.
Between Shakespeare and football
Roth also wrote screenplays and plays; In the last decade of his life, he deepened his penchant for the crime genre in three parodic Venice novels, including the Shakespeare-inspired title “Hell is empty – the devils are all here” (2019), in which a suicidal literary translator refers to a comissario Galli meets.
What is missing then to a complete writer? The love of football, of course. Gerhard Roth was a fan of his hometown club Sturm Graz, but he dreamed of even bigger things. “Roth beats Leeds United” is the title of one of his short texts. This is, of course, the Munich player Franz “Bulle” Roth, who in 1975 at the European Cup in Paris, “29 years old, 1.78 tall and weighing 80 kg, put Bayern in the lead” – not realizing that he was doing it “helped a writer in the North Stand to get a headline that had been a great wish of his youth.” Gerhard Roth died in Graz on Tuesday.
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