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To mark its 70th birthday, the author Bodo Kirchhoff looks back on his early years in a new novel. In this one he also reveals very freely his first erotic experiences – including abuse.
The writer Bodo Kirchhoff turns seventy. (Image: Imago / Stock)
Somewhere there is always a naked man. And at a certain point, Bodo Kirchhoff's characters reliably land in a bed (which does not have to be a bed: an air mattress or a bench in a sauna). Moreover, it is a constant in Kirchhoff's work that his staff suffers from sexual desire rather than appreciating it. Again, this is not due to lethargic eros or missing opportunities. On the contrary, too much adventure and exquisite digression complicate life.
A naked man is still waiting somewhere between the pages of Kirchhoff's novels. You can call it a whimsical attitude of a novelist who manages his subject. Or, in instinct, one can recognize both the most intimate driving force that produces an overpressure and continuously fuels the fury of Kirchhoff's narration. Sometimes every year, but usually every two years, Kirchhoff launches his novels – and often not too thin ones – on the market. But this breathtaking pace of production has something compulsive: the author leads
Crossing the Border
"These are always the dark sides of our biography that accompany us where another is waiting for us naked . " Where the sea begins "from 2004. It was a programmatic phrase that could constitute an inscription on the whole of Bodo Kirchhoff's work. The fact that he has always visited the dark pages of his biography with each of his many books would be a truism (since it applies to all authors in one way or from one to another). another), if that did not really mean the brilliant heart of his work. in Kirchhoff's work on the point where "another naked is waiting for us". Once he is the cantor in a boarding school, once a sports teacher, sometimes a half-naked mother or a classmate waits. The desire knows no bounds in this novel because it has always exceeded all the limits in the life of its characters – even as a child.
Kirchhoff has never made a secret of the fact that his autobiographical material is treated in his characters. It is not surprising that in his "first years novel", published by the writer on his 70th birthday, not only older book scenes reappear, but also their sinister figures: the cantor and the sports teacher, the young student abused at the boarding school; the young mother who carelessly confronts and confuses the child with his unfulfilled erotic desire
The reader as a voyeur
We have already read all this, one way or another, in the work of Kirchhoff. What makes it amazing, is the innocence with which Kirchhoff, in turn, invites his "novel" to a "sentimental educational" crackling erotic that forces the reader into the role of voyeur. a sexual excitement completely devoid of feeling. Kirchhoff was neither prosecutor nor victim. Here too, the moderate kitsch master plays on his usual keyboard
The point of this sweet, perhaps even unknown, pornographic perspective is that free gaze makes the reader an accomplice of events. The contempt for abuse or sexual ambiguity with regard to children should not be in vain here: only on the reflection on their own point of view and on their own desire. Then all reflexive indignation is rapidly and permanently transformed into more complex trains of thought.
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