Going Dutch with German Writers (6): We talk about porn

Who?
Anna Blumbach has written two erotic novels, Kurze Nächte and Glitzerregen. They’re both about a woman called Eva with whom both of us have a fair amount in common: among other things, she shares custody of her son and likes going out drinking and dancing. Anna Blumbach is a pseudonym.

Where?
Wohnzimmer, Schwarzsauer, CCCP, Bassy Club, all Prenzlauer Berg/Mitte

What?
We start with cocktails – Anna has pina coladas and I have mojitos – then we switch to a shandy and a Coke, then beer, then we get a shot of vodka as part of the entrance fee at CCCP, and I have a last Club Mate with vodka at Bassy.

What did we talk about?
What did we not talk about? We start by talking about Anna’s work, pretty much. She writes about sex, but also about life in general. She tells me it annoys her when people ask her how authentic it is. Did anyone ask Stanislav Lem if he’d been to the moon? No. But people – men, in fact – who’ve read her books often want to talk about sex with her. I say I find it impossible to switch off my curiosity about how much of literature is “authentic”, how far a character’s ideas reflect the author’s opinions, whether the writer has experienced similar emotions, that kind of thing. But I don’t necessarily want to know about specific situations, I think I said rather coyly. In the end, Anna admits, everything in her books is related to her because it’s a product of her imagination. Maybe she has a sick imagination. I suspect no more than most people.
Yes, she says, it’s really hard to write about sex without it getting embarrassing to read. Her way of dealing with it is avoiding toe-curling euphemisms altogether and using colloquial language. Had I noticed that when Eva’s not really all that hot to trot she analyses the sex much more than when she’s totally turned on? Now that she mentions it… And when it’s really amazing all Eva can say is: Oh oh oh my God. Sometimes she laughs out loud while she’s writing it. It’s a lot of fun to read.
We talk about porn, the visual kind. Anna tells me about the first time she saw a porn mag, at the age of 16, and how shocked and horrified she was. I talk about a similar experience at a playground when I was about 12. We found a porn mag under the roundabout and all it reminded me of was the display in a butcher’s shop. Anna worries about her son growing up surrounded by porn, picking up unrealistic ideas about sex. I say it’s hard to cope with sex as a commodity because there’s an expectation that it has to be perfect, like a shiny supermarket apple. Women have to have great bodies and men always have to perform. Our parent’s generation was more laid back, she says. I’m not sure. Maybe they were in Germany. I love that kids here grow up with Bravo magazine with its naked photo stories and out-and-proud sex tips – it was such a shock to see that for the first time.
It’s not like I’ve never watched porn in my life, I say, but I don’t want those pictures in my head while I’m having sex myself. And that’s where erotic fiction is fantastic, because you come up with your own pictures. Anna tells me she read Henry Miller at 18 and loved it, although now she thinks he was a terrible macho. We talk a little about sex in German literary fiction – how very few women dare to write about non-traumatic sex but men are quite happy to do so. We’ve talked about it before though. The bar is filling up. We lean in close on our totally cute courting chair; we don’t really want anyone listening in on the conversation. As it turns out though, almost everyone around us is speaking English. As we’re leaving, Anna overhears a tourist’s scathing judgement on the bar and its crowd: overhyped and underfucked. She’s putting that scene in a book, she tells me, pleased as punch. She’ll kill me for stealing it.

Watching and Smoking

We’re both drunk already on our cocktails and the fresh air makes us giddy and happy. We try out a rockabilly bar but there’s nowhere to sit, so we end up at Schwarzsauer next. Anna tells me she often goes out on her own. She watches people and smokes, and part of it is collecting material to write about. Is it hard to switch that off? Yes, it is, she says; she has a phenomenal memory for scenes like that one just now. We talk about dancing as a wonderful way to switch off, to close down your brain and channel all your energy into your body, just moving naturally with the rhythm, and how easy it is and how you go into the perfect trance sometimes. It’s different to sex. That feeling’s crazy hard to write about, she says. I can see her point now. Not everybody gets it; the fact that both of us do is something special. I don’t know about Anna but I’m finding her more and more fantastic with every new subject we talk about now. I think the feeling’s mutual. I hope so.
What else? We talk about Eva, how she’s an eco-Nazi and how Anna’s going to make her confront her own contradictions in the next novel. About Tom, the man Eva loves – he’s a total macho but we only see him from Eva’s perspective. I like that; I’m not such a fan of omniscient narrators. Anna says, well, she loves Carson McCullers, who does that omniscient narrator thing, or maybe she does multiple perspectives, I can’t quite remember. We talk about friction, how you need friction and conflict to keep life interesting. I’m not sure about that. I need friction and conflict to keep literature interesting but I think there are people who want their lives to be harmonious. What we ought to be doing, according to Anna, is always choosing the path of the greatest resistance. But that’s so hard, I protest. But it’s not always obvious what that path is, Anna says. Sometimes it can be ending a relationship, sometimes it’s continuing it for the rest of your life. Still not certain, I say something that sounds deep at the time about always reconsidering your position in life. I’m still thinking about whether always taking a certain path is a dogma or not.
We decide to move on. On the way to CCCP we decide the rest of our conversation will be off the record. Let’s just say it gets very revelatory: politics, love, pregnancy, life. Anna isn’t as confident as she ought to be, but then who is? I tell her about a passage I found in a Philip Roth story, about how his mother could turn heads in a room simply by being convinced of her own gorgeousness, and how that sometimes works for me too. I hope Anna tries it. Time for dancing: we walk up to Bassy, passing Kaffee Burger. Wladimir Kaminer is standing outside; we don’t acknowledge his presence. A lot of scenes in Kurze Nächte are set in Kaffee Burger; Glitzerregen is more of a Bassy novel. The DJ’s playing rock’n’roll; Anna smokes by the dancefloor, reminding me of the book. I dance and dance and force Anna to join me for the slightly anomalous Northern soul crowdpleaser The Snake. I’m drunk enough to ignore everyone around me but not so drunk as to bump into people. It feels fine to be dancing while Anna isn’t. She’s cool like that. After a while we leave and walk home in different directions. I want to do this again.

Hangover?
I wake up far too early, singing The Snake. I am of course still drunk and it’s going to be a busy day. I wish there was a pill you could take to make you sober.