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Do boys ever make daisy chains? No – and I get another of those looks.

© Katy Derbyshire

Going Dutch with German Writers (19): A Walk in the Park with Robert Seethaler

Perhaps failing to grasp the concept of Going Dutch with German Writers, Robert Seethaler suggests he and Katy Derbyshire meet up bright and early at the Hasenheide. A disarming morning overflowing with possibly Proustian thoughts and secret gardens is the result. Charmed? Oh yes, she was.

Who?

Robert Seethaler comes from Vienna and has lived in Berlin since 1998. He has written five novels, most recently "Der Trafikant" and the brand new "Ein ganzes Leben". I’m very impressed by "Der Trafikant" – set in 1937 Vienna with Sigmund Freud in a supporting role – and a huge fan of "Ein ganzes Leben", which is a man’s entire life story in 160 pages.

Where?

Hasenheide park

 What?

Coffee and cake

 What did we talk about?

I’m quite excited that Robert Seethaler has agreed to meet me even though he doesn’t know who on earth I am, and it’s hard to set a date so I eagerly agree when he says we should meet up on a Friday morning. I’m not sure whether he didn’t get the point at all or he’s just tactfully taken charge of the situation. Maybe he doesn’t drink. But we meet bright and early at Südstern station, I get a firm handshake and a blue-eyed flash and we go for a walk in the park. He wants to show me the animals. Yes, why not?

We turn a corner and come upon a turkey. It’s a huge and ridiculous bird, with a long red neck and a crown of feathers on its backside to make up for its hideous front end. Robert says if it were a person – we’re not anthropomorphizing here, no – if it were a person, it would be a rich old lady wrapped up in furs on her way to the Opera Ball.
We turn a corner and come upon a turkey. It’s a huge and ridiculous bird, with a long red neck and a crown of feathers on its backside to make up for its hideous front end. Robert says if it were a person – we’re not anthropomorphizing here, no – if it were a person, it would be a rich old lady wrapped up in furs on her way to the Opera Ball.

© Katy Derbyshire

I don’t know my way around the area, or indeed the park, and I suspect I might come across as a tiny bit ditzy. But I establish my Berlin credentials when we work out I’ve been here longer than he has. Beforehand, Robert claimed he was not very eloquent and would rather not talk much, or indeed at all. We could just watch passers-by, he suggested. I agreed, and perhaps that’s why we go to look at the animals. It’s certainly an excellent conversation-starter, and as it turns out Robert Seethaler is not only eloquent but also perfectly capable of talking. We start by talking about the surroundings: do I know what that building is? I’m a tiny bit taken aback by the fatherly tone, especially because I know full well it’s the Vatican embassy. But I forgive him instantly because he lowers his voice to a whisper to tell me that the pope slept there when he came to visit. As if he had superhuman ears that could hear us talking about him.

Between the embassy and the animals, Robert says something so eloquent that it stops me in my tracks. He loves the idea of London, he says, because he went there a few times as a teenager, on language courses and the like. But it’s not so much the place he wants to go back to – which has gone now – it’s his youth. Not Fernweh but Jugendweh. Really, this is the most reflected thing a complete stranger has ever said to me at 10 o’clock on a Friday morning, and I can’t think of anything to say because it’s so, so true. I tell him about all the people I know who yearn for the Berlin of the 90s, all the books coming out and all that nostalgia, and I think part of them just wants their young days back. Looking back at it now, I think: oh, Proust! But that doesn’t make it any less impressive a thought.

Our next stop is a café. I’m not allowed to tell you where it is because it’s a perfect enchanted garden and Robert wants to keep it all to himself.
Our next stop is a café. I’m not allowed to tell you where it is because it’s a perfect enchanted garden and Robert wants to keep it all to himself.

© Katy Derbyshire

There are comical pigeons and chickens to bring us back down to earth, with feathery shoes. The cockerel has a fabulous footballer’s hairdo. Animals drive him crazy, says Robert, because he can’t possibly fathom what they’re thinking. I suspect they’re not thinking very much at all, but I don’t say so. The easiest solution to that problem, I say instead, is to anthropomorphize them, to put human thoughts into their minds, but that’s nonsense of course. Oh no, he doesn’t do that – and I approve. A little later, we come across two elderly men who are doing exactly that. Neither of us comments.

Then there are emus, pretty deer and Highland cattle – with the most enormous and terrifying horns – and "Do you know what these animals are called?" I don’t know the answer this time, and again I forgive him for verging on patronizing because he’s so utterly charming about it. They’re not llamas, they’re alpacas. There are goats, and he seems to know about goats, and he points out that they like to climb, and I ask if he feels very close to nature, because of all the mountains and nature in his new book. Well, he’s not a country boy but he’s Austrian. It’s a small country and the mountains are very important to the Austrians. He doesn’t romanticize the mountain life in the book – believe me, he doesn’t – it’s incredibly tough, but being in the mountains is an elemental experience. Have I ever…? Well, we don’t have any in England, but I once climbed a big hill in Ireland and I remember the moment very clearly. I suspect he finds it ridiculous that I climbed a big hill rather than a proper mountain, but what can you do? I’ve always been a city girl through and through.

We turn a corner and come upon a turkey. It’s a huge and ridiculous bird, with a long red neck and a crown of feathers on its backside to make up for its hideous front end. Robert says if it were a person – we’re not anthropomorphizing here, no – if it were a person, it would be a rich old lady wrapped up in furs on her way to the Opera Ball. I am distracted because the turkey has a floppy appendage of skin hanging from its beak. It looks like nothing other than a foreskin, and I apologize in advance for saying so at 10 o’clock on a Friday morning, and Robert takes a large step away from me. I blush. Then I decide he probably just wanted to get a better look. He’s incredibly tall, so maybe all his steps are large.

Would I like to buy any drugs? No thank you.

We sit on deck chairs in the shade and chat some more. The grass is dotted with clover and daisies, and Robert picks one and smells it and hands it over for me to smell too.
We sit on deck chairs in the shade and chat some more. The grass is dotted with clover and daisies, and Robert picks one and smells it and hands it over for me to smell too.

© Katy Derbyshire

After the animals we cross the park. Would I like to buy any drugs? No thank you. It’s a much less aggressive scene here than at Berlin’s other drug-supply hotspot, Görlitzer Park. I suggest that’s because this part of Kreuzberg is posher than the other part, and Robert bristles slightly. It’s calmer, though, he admits, because there are far fewer tourists. But he worries they’re going to build a drive-in McDonalds or something on an empty lot we pass by. Or luxury flats with a park view.

He was up late last night, Robert tells me, at a meal arranged by his publishing house for booksellers to meet him. At the Joseph-Roth-Diele. Ooh, that’s a lovely place. And it was good but it was a bit much, too much abundance – an Überfülle. I feel slightly stupid but I don’t understand so I ask him to explain. What was it he felt too full of? It was all that personal contact, although the booksellers were great – yes, they are, aren’t they? – but normally he sits at home on his own and suddenly he was in the midst of all these people telling him what they loved about his book. Does he not like the attention? Well, that would be silly, of course he likes the attention, those writers who say they don’t are being coquettish. But it was a very strange feeling. I still don’t quite get it. Does he not work as an actor as well? Is he one of those very shy actors? Oh, he gave up acting on stage years ago; that was awful, he always felt ashamed on stage, but TV and film is OK because there’s no audience in front of you, and it’s reduced to a technical process. Hmm.

Our next stop is a café. I’m not allowed to tell you where it is because it’s a perfect enchanted garden and Robert wants to keep it all to himself. We are in fact the only people there, and we get cake and Robert gets coffee and I get very excited because they have Old Jamaica ginger beer. It’s not actual beer, I reassure him, and he tries a sip and is surprised by the spiciness. We sit on deck chairs in the shade and chat some more. The grass is dotted with clover and daisies, and Robert picks one and smells it and hands it over for me to smell too, and admires the pinky-purple underside of the petals. Do boys ever make daisy chains? No – and I get another of those looks. So I talk about literary figures that have entered the public imagination and changed the language and the world, like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat. Robert hated "Alice in Wonderland" as a child; he spotted all the fears embedded in it. And he used to cry at a particular song, every single time, always at the second verse when a bird landed with a letter from a mother in its beak. He doesn’t know why. Robert Seethaler is a very tall, very grown-up-looking man. But I can imagine him crying as a boy and I start to feel sorry for him. I attempt to cheer him up – were they any books he loved as a child? Oh yes, "Das kleine Ich bin ich", by Mira Lobe. A rhyming book about an animal that isn’t a cow, isn’t a horse, isn’t anything but itself.

He’d just like to sit around under a tree and look at the world. And yet, although he finds reading so strenuous, he still writes? I try not to interpret too much into this, mindful of those animals we didn’t want to implant our own feelings in.
He’d just like to sit around under a tree and look at the world. And yet, although he finds reading so strenuous, he still writes? I try not to interpret too much into this, mindful of those animals we didn’t want to implant our own feelings in.

© Katy Derbyshire

And now? Does he read now? No, he sighs, hardly at all at the moment. For two reasons: he has very poor eyesight indeed so that makes it strenuous, and also he finds it too much. Again, all those emotions are too much for him. That’s one of the things I like about reading, the way a well-written book can make me think dark thoughts and put me in a bad mood for three days. Does Robert shudder? Possibly. No, he can’t take that kind of emotional overload, he says. He hardly watches TV either; it’s all too much. That must be terrible. Well, he knows how to deal with it, just not too much input. He’d just like to sit around under a tree and look at the world. And yet, although he finds reading so strenuous, he still writes? I try not to interpret too much into this, mindful of those animals we didn’t want to implant our own feelings in.

Unfortunately, his eyesight is good enough – with contact lenses – to notice when I manage to drop a large cake crumb up my own skirt. Have I remembered to put on sun cream? No, hence the shade. Robert kindly gives me advice on places to take a nerdy 13-year-old in Vienna: Prater, Schönbrunn and Café Sperl. Both of us dislike travelling – such hard work for so little payback – and we’re both quite delighted, I think, to find someone else who doesn’t feel the fashionable need to go everywhere and see everything.

We walk back across the park. I have lost all orientation, either because I’m so charmed by Robert Seethaler or because it’s a confusing park. On my way home I forget to change trains. I think perhaps I’m charmed.

Hangover?

No. But still kind of dazed.

Katy Derbyshire

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