Tommie Goerz Im Schnee
[Snowfall]

This is a novel set in a village, but not the kind of book that bathes everything in warm nostalgia. Instead, it captures rural life as it is now, plainly, in detail, while glimpses into the past suggest what it once was. The village, Austhal, is fictional, but it feels rooted in Franconia, perhaps somewhere in the Fichtel Mountains. The author, born in 1954 in that very region, grew up in a small village there. The name Tommie Goerz is a pseudonym. He started out as a copywriter and creative before turning to regional crime fiction, an often distained genre. In Goerz’s case, unfairly so. His sharp eye for local dynamics has not come out of nowhere: he has written ten novels featuring his Franconian detective Friedemann ‘Friedo’ Behütuns, as well as a book about village pubs. He knows the terrain, but he doesn’t romanticise it or polish it into postcard charm.

The novel opens with an image that feels like a still-life. Max, an old man, stands at the window of his small house, looking out at the apple trees. Snow has begun to fall, and he gazes into a quiet, softened world. Then a sound breaks through:

‘Gradually, through the silence, the tolling of the death bell had penetrated, very faintly at first, that dingdingdingding echoing from the church tower as if from a great distance. Max
hadn't noticed it at first, and when he finally did, it seemed as if it had always been there. Amidst the falling snow, amidst the white caps on the fence, amidst all this serene whiteness.’

It’s Schorsch who has died, Max’s best friend since childhood and perhaps something more than that. Max never married. The novel doesn’t spell it out, nor does it need to.

The village is divided. Goerz never uses words like ‘structural change’; he shows what it looks like. There’s a new housing estate, whose residents stay apart from the locals. Max lives in a place nicknamed ‘Platform Three’, as it is so close to the old rail line that once carried timber away from the village. Now and then, a train still comes by, sometimes dropping off the odd tourist in search of a wholesome rural life that no longer exists. The baker and the butcher are long gone.

Schorsch is gone too. And what do the old folk do when one of their own dies? They gather at night, keep vigil, and tell stories. Through those stories, a kind of unofficial village chronicle emerges; old feuds, old customs, and the ways the place used to work. In an interview, Goerz recalled that he was born in Erlangen, but at the age of ten, in the mid-1960s, he moved with his parents to the countryside. It felt like a kind of freedom, he said, because he was allowed to speak in dialect. He’s close to his characters because he knows what lives inside them. There’s no mockery, no cheap critique.

The tone is exactly right. A quiet story, shaded with melancholy, but laced with dry humour. Goerz writes in a clean, unsentimental style, never florid, never overwritten, and in just under 200 pages conjures up a vivid portrait of this world. It is a self-contained social ecosystem and at its centre is a quietly remarkable man who doesn’t see himself that way. He knows little beyond the life he’s had and the landscapes he has lived in. He has his memories and his knowledge. That’s more than enough for a truly moving novel.