Jorg Fauser review ‘An Evening in Europe’ by Malcolm Paul
“The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era.[1] The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generationers in the 1950s, better known as Beatniks. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.[2][3]”
Wikipedia
Is the Beat Movement exclusively an American phenomenon with just some minor influence in the UK? With no wider international net?
Good question!
I touched upon the influence of the American Beat movement on UK writers in five interviews which I conducted last year with authors and musicians. Although not old enough to have been around when the Beats star shone the brightest, and the bongos got thumped, the fingers – clicked and Bird/ Coltrane/Miles split the musical ‘note’ as Jazz’s own version of the atom splitting Robert Oppenheimer were discovering their own individual ways of understanding and absorbing the life and works of the American Beats.
These writers musicians/writers certainly wrote early novels and poems and Dylanesque lyrics that were directly influenced by their American Beat cousins searching for an alternative way to live, write, experience and transcend.
They acknowledged a cultural debt and then artistically moved on When one of the five, the novelist Geoff Nicholson was asked about Beat influences on his own writing – he replied “the author is never the best judge of his own influences”. His first novel ‘Street Sleeper’ certainly took us on a UK road trip that satirised the Brit Beats, and had them running out of road and more likely to ‘fade away than burn out’ (apologies to Neil Young).
Geoff Nicholson then moved to LA for 13 years and roamed on foot and by car the vast empty spaces and highways of America – just as the Beats themselves had done decades before.
How much more of the Wikipedia definition did they embrace? Spiritual searching?
One author, Toby Litt has become in recent years a Zen Buddhist
– author of the brilliant English ‘road novel’, ’Beatniks’. The book, a satire that almost earned him a fatwa from the Beat Purists. Perhaps they didn’t like the idea of the would-be Brit Beats listening to ABBA on the car radio.
At least two of those interviewed have developed an almost Pantheistic interest in tending their gardens i.e. Brian Patten and Geoff Nicholson.
One CJ Stone has an interest in paganism and folklore, all things magical.
The one musician interviewed, the legendary Jazz Blues singer Carol Grimes went on to help found RAR (Rock Against Racism) – defend and promote Feminism/ Human Rights and the Environment – while still performing kick arse gigs at the young age of 80. And recently eloquently chronicled her early Beatnik years in her book ‘The Singer’s Tale’ and subsequent interviews (including mine).
So Beat isn’t unique to America! Or being that rebel Beat passenger disembarking at Liverpool, Cardiff or Belfast, who ignited the creative impulses/ the mojo output of generations not only British and pan Europeans but international artists, musicians and writers.
Brian Patten the Mersey Poet (temporary membership only) said in response to my question: “How did you feel when Allan Ginsberg said ‘Liverpool was centre of the human consciousness in the human universe’ replied ” He said that in Milwaukee as well”, but Brian also added that reading Ginsberg’s ‘The Howl’ was a pivotal moment in his decision to become a poet at the age of 15, so the American Beats definitely helped create the poets who later became the ‘Children of Albion’.
The Americans lit the fire and the Beat configurations spread worldwide.
The Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama had a major retrospective exhibition at the Photographers Gallery in Soho, London recently – Feb 2024. One whole section was entitled: ‘On The Road’, and it was a photographic roadtrip/ odyssey that Moriyama undertook when young and inspired by Jack Kerouac.
It’s a long way from the cross-country American highways and heartlands of San Francisco and New York, but the spark reached Daido in Japan as well.
Just as it did Jorg Fauser and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, two of Germany’s most talented contemporary poets, known and appreciated in their own country. Despite that indigenous recognition little known outside of Germany and certainly not sharing a place in the Beat Pantheon, on a plinth that they richly deserve to rest.
It is Jorg Fauser in Mark Terrill’s translation that I want to talk about here, in particular ‘Evening in Europe ‘.
Jorg Fauser the contemporary German poet who was born in 1944 and died in 1987 at the age of 43, having wandered onto the autobahn and got hit by a truck.
Most mini biographies of Jorg Fauser are prefaced with the comment:
What do we know about Jörg Fauser?
Outside Germany, not a great deal.
Niall Griffith – author who wrote the introduction to the English translation of Jorg’s semi autobiographical novel ‘Raw Material’ – also commented on the lack of recognition for Jorge’s work.
Jorge has one other novel in English translation: ‘The Snowman ‘.
Excellent translation by the veteran (50 books+) English German translator Jamie Bullouch. He does for these novels what Mark Terrill does for the poems.
They both give us a scorching introduction in English to the works of a Beat (and more) novelist and poet who should as a renegade genius be recognized in the UK as well as the wider world – far from the confines of his often temporary home in Germany. If you haven’t heard of and read the two novels I recommend that you do so.
So when, like me, you go in search of translated poems by Jorg Fauser you end up visiting the American poet/ translator Mark Terrill – now three decades in his permanent home in Hamburg, Germany. Mark is happy via email to pass on all he knows about Jorg Fauser and the other contemporary German poet (often mentioned as another German Beats) Rolf Dieter Brinkmann.
I get an email address that takes me to ‘Toad Press’ and ‘Vilez Books’ in Verne California and a whole bunch of ‘indie press poetry heads’, who are more than happy to pass on the one book of poetry that they have of Jorg Fauser translated by Mark Terrill – ‘An Evening in Europe’.
I snap up five copies, and the delightful Genevieve gifts me a copy of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’s book of poetry ‘Some Very Popular Songs’, again I find it in an excellent translation by Mark Terrill.
So after a literary search that’s beginning to feel like I’ve been riding ‘boxcars’, hopping on freight ships and hitching all the way from California via Germany, I am back in England writing this review.
Many thanks to my friends in Germany – Mark Terrill in Hamburg and Stefan Voit, in Bavaria. Stefan, journalist, author and gallery kurator, who after my recent visit to his hometown (to review an art exhibition) in Weiden, Bavaria, got me started on this search for the poetry and soul of Jorg Fauser and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann.
Little is known outside of Germany? Maybe? But sitting with my feet up in my garden chair on a sunny day, I slowly work my way through Jorg’s brilliant poems in the slim but incendiary volume ‘An Evening in Europe’.
Tom Waits meets Sartre’s ‘Intimacy’/ ‘Nausea’ via William Burrough’s ‘Interzone’ crazy stuff man.
We look for love and the desperation of the city, which is like some crazy aphrodisiac that has us hooked.
How can it be that poets like Jorg Fauser are living in the shadows of the ‘needle’ and the cheap wine flows?
In ‘Trotsky, ’Goethe and Happiness’, Jorg’s alter ego poet is “off the needle” and looking for love with a Rosa Luxembourg from the alley, who lives the revolution and rejects the booze and the poems.
And any possibility of love is dashed by the need for oblivion as opposed to the demands of the Third International.
The Revolution was named Louise,
who had unbelievably narrow hips,
sparkling eyes, fluttering black
hair, came from Paris
and was a Trotskyite.
How can the struggle of the “Shanghai workers” compare with the seduction of the “vermouth bottle” and the “pints of beer” bringing the easy ‘pick-ups’ home. It’s bound to end with the poet crashing through the revolving door. It’s a battle between the macro and the micro vision of the world. Darkness and Light, and how we exist in it.
Do we scrape the barrel of who we are, how we exist or strut like a billboard and proclaim that we are as normal as a pomegranate or are we as crazy as a fly that goes insane, tapping on the glass in a morse like way till it expires.
The closest friend the Beat poet has, is the street photographer. Winogrand, Meier and Frank, whose snapshots are like the lines of the Beats poems.
We get the city in a grainy image, and the people of the city float by like ghosts, bleached disconnected selves, unwired, the living dead!
Trailing behind them the discarded bunting/ dross of love, and what passes for the meaning of life in day to day existence.
Jorg Fauser’s poems are captured in the viewfinder. What ignited the poet’s vision?
We know that Jorg developed a drug habit whilst travelling. Never stayed in one German city very long. First Berlin commune experience in 1968/1969 and then back in 1981, with spells living in London and Istanbul. He kicked the heroin habit by the age of thirty but continued to drink alcoholically until his death.
William Burroughs helped Jorg kick his habit.
That must have been like setting a vampire loose in a blood bank.
Disillusioned with the sixties!
Wrote pulp fiction, 1500 + of pages of journalism/ essays.
Befriended Bukowski – allegedly interviewed him. Though no copy seems to exist.
travelling throughout his life, myth overflows from life’s beer glass- from the ‘gouged’ junkies’ needle.
(I’ve been there in the booze/ smack horror show. Jorg I’ve been where you’ve been, but I’m back now with a blazing sun in my backpack).
“If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” – Robert Capa.
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.” – Diane Arbus
“Photography is painting with light.” – Anonymous
“In street photography, there’s no hiding. You’re out in the middle of the action and have to rely on your own judgment, ability, and courage as a photographer to make a meaningful photograph.” – Alex Webb
Jorg’s photo-poem takes a snap of love.
But because in the earlier days of photography, you had to have the sun at your back, so it was staring love down in the lines of Jorg’s poetry.
No time for Monet rustic shades, Ansel’s Mogadin landscape prints, or sickly Dutch masters.Trash them all. Leave love naked pegged to a ‘dark room’ drying line slowly taking shape.
When we split up
We stayed in the same place.
And soon we lay in each others arms again
and called it love poem
But no poem explains to us
the fear of love.
Jorg, you swept through the cities – loving – intoxicating – bedding down with the ‘bums’ and rats.
“Berlin, Paris, New York”.
Definitely no ‘Lorca in New York ‘, no budget tourist sucking the life from the sights – but you are fucking the neon and the streets down which the dead float belly up. Beauty is a $50 hooker in a doorway asking you if you want ‘a good time’, when the city cannibalises you only the weak and doomed dream of escape.
Berlin,Paris,New York
A street corner in Schonberg
excites me more deeply
than the snow
on Mont Blanc
or the forests
In the lower Taunus.
Love the seasons, as Jorg does stopping to contemplate the horrors of Verdun – in ‘Autumn Poem’ and take a piss and contemplate the horror of war.
Men against men
women against men
each against oneself
history against all of us
Where was God when Jesus died
Only generals survive the war ,
only the State lives
from the triumph of violence…”
History is a SOB. It never leaves us alone. It camps out in our imagination.Even Jorg, the Beat can’t avert his gaze from the killing fields.
Read their Holderlin,here they were butchered
and butchered others
from here it is we come…
No reprieve? Maybe. (Volume 3 Sartre’s Roads to Freedom Trilogy)
‘Evening in Europe’ is a slim book, but it’s a perfect selection, and I have it on good authority that Mark Terrill’s translation is excellent.
We can but lament the unavailability in the English language of two of Germany’s finest contemporary poets.
You can hitch Beats to that wagon if you wish – but you wouldn’t be doing either Jorg Fauser or Rolf Dieter Brinkmann any favours.
In fact you would be in error. ‘Beat’ is a part not a sum total of a wider proficiency. It’s a poetic spectrum.
Being well traveled, hard living poets they certainly knew more than enough about life. (Jorg Fauser was a novelist and a journalist. Rolf Dieter Brinkmann more a poet when it came to writing).
Both died young. Rolf Dieter Brinkmann at 35 and Jorg Fauser at 43, in accidents where they were struck by vehicles and killed in twin tragedies. Still at the height of their writing careers. A loss not only to German literature, but to world literature.
In ‘An Evening in Europe’, as I have already written, Jorg (and to a lesser extent Rolf Dieter) are like the Street/ Beat photographers as omnipresent as the sidewalk buskers. Jorg has a wisdom cultivated living on the edge, battling cross addictions – kicking one – but still on the bottle – wandering the world being enlightened by life but scorched by existence at the same time.
Jorg, left us many fine highly original beautiful poems, showing us the world through a dark prism, while offering us thoughts and images that leap into life like grinder’s sparks.
I’ve written about three of the poems, but that’s a cursory peep into a bigger world – Jorg’s world/universe, whether that’s in Germany or on his worldwide travels.
No understanding of Jorg’s life and work would be complete without reading his semi autobiographical novel ‘Raw Material’ (excellently translated by Jamie Bullouch). I really can’t recommend this book highly enough. He brings America to life in ‘Holiday Inn, Great Falls, Montana’, where hotel room service is humorously juxtaposed with “Indians” riding into town to get drunk.
We’ve really come a long way ‘man, you and me
But where’s the room service?
Concluding after the chaos of the drunken “Indians” the poet is left telling us:
I’m the White Man in the Holiday Inn, clinging to drinks like totem poles
Not a good day for poems, also not for Senator Church, where the hell is that Bloody Mary.
If you want order in this world don’t stray into the poet Jorg’s world.
As he says in ‘Instead Of An Answer ‘.
What I’m waiting for? I don’t
Fire? A
legitimate happiness? Or winds
that blow the roofs off?
If you think I’ve given you too many spoilers. I haven’t.
You gotta read ‘Butcher Shop’
(Or: A Man can be Destroyed and Defeated),
‘Warm Waters’ and ‘Apartment House’.
Each one a poem that will fling open doors and windows of your imagination and let Jorg Fauser’s unique world vision fly in.
As Jean Paul Sartre wrote:
“He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.”
RIP Jorg Fauser master author and free spirit. As you wrote:
The beginning comes, when you’re alone again
Your angst is your second shadow
Your love is your second life
And the night is suddenly wider than the world
.