Lots of luggage: JanFactor traveling in the Slovakian Tatra Mountains in the winter of 1971/72
Image: private
Jan Factor literalised his life in picaresque novels. What happens if you question him journalistically about his journey from Prague to Berlin? He then tells how he once became a porter in the Tatra Mountains and almost a Polish writer. An encounter.
“Pankow is a bit boring,” warns JanFactor shortly before our meeting. We had actually agreed to meet on Friedrichstrasse, but then something came up. So the meeting point is the apartment where Factor has been living for a long time with Annette Simon, Christa Wolf's daughter. Today, big cars roar along the cobblestone streets, and yet in places you can still imagine the past quite well: in 1978, as some biographical accounts of Factor say, he moved from Prague to East Berlin, from one socialist country to a completely different one.
But how did this actually happen, how was that possible, and what happened before? The answer to this can be found in at least two of his books: the sprawling picaresque novel “Georg's Worries about the Past or In the Kingdom of the Holy Scrotum Bimba of Prague” (2010), which is about a youth in Czechoslovakia, and in his shorter, but not less mischievous novel “Trottel” (2022), which parodically alienates and narratively evades a traumatic life story from the arrival of a young man in the GDR to the present, which is similar to that of the author.
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