Judith Hermann Ich möchte zurückgehen in der Zeit
[I'd Like to Go Back in Time]

Barely any book has given rise to such heated debates in recent years as this one. Has Judith Hermann, some reviewers asked, capitulated in the face of her subject? Is she not up to tackling it? The writer’s 2022 essay collection, We Would Have Told Each Other Everything, illustrated how subtly and elegantly she reflects upon her own writing. In it, Judith Hermann essentially tells a series of classic Hermann stories while apparently giving away their narrative tricks, yet she never reveals their secrets. There are doors, crates, boxes (one of Hermann’s favourite motifs), which the writer does not open. That does not mean, however, that these crates might be empty. They certainly aren’t, yet one of Judith Hermann’s principles is to create worlds that only come to full fruition in her readers’ imagination.

This premise must guide our reading of I’d Like to Go Back in Time, a book structured in three parts. At least the first part, so the writer has said in interviews, is autobiographical: her first-person narrator travels to the Polish town of Radom. Two incidents have prompted her to embark on the journey. Her mother suffers a temporary loss of her memory. And she finds – in a box – a photo of her grandfather in 1941, posing on an SS motorcycle in Radom. The occupying Germans set up a ghetto in the town, from where at least 20,000 Polish Jews were deported to Treblinka concentration camp. Judith Hermann never met her grandfather; he died six years before she was born. The narrator rents an apartment in Radom and walks around the town in search of traces, people to talk to. The tone is the classic, unmistakeable Judith Hermann sound, restrained, hovering above it all, emphasising gaps and vacant spots. And this grandfather is just that: a vacant spot. In Radom, the writer-narrator at first makes no progress. The people she tries to speak to reject her attempts. And then something astounding happens: Suddenly, doors open. Suddenly, people want to talk to her. And one day, by chance, the narrator finds the place where the photo of her grandfather was taken. And what does she do next? She packs her bags and leaves.

What has she learned? Judith Hermann says her narrator has found out that her grandfather lived a good life there, in Radom. And that that is a pretty terrible thing to realise. An important character in I’d Like to Go Back in Time is the narrator’s mother. ‘You’re making it into literature’ – that’s what the mother accuses her writer daughter of, more than once. In other words: You’re dramatising. The writer’s interest is not of a historical nature. Her grandfather committed crimes, that much is certain. What exactly he did remains unknown. He is no use as a literary character, instead haunting a tightly knit family as an eternal ghost. Judith Hermann narrows her gaze onto details. We see, for instance, a ladle the family has always used at the dinner table. Only for the narrator is it significant that it was a gift from the grandfather to his daughter, a few months before his death. For all the others, it is nothing but a ladle. As so often in this book, the mother has no wish to know. But she does know, she knows a great deal. And now and then, she opens up a door to the past. And then swiftly closes it, almost shocked.

I’d Like to Go Back in Time is not a book about a Nazi grandfather. It is a book about families; about a silence that runs between generations. The narrator continues her journey from Radom to Naples, to her archaeologist sister. This sister keeps the grandfather’s story at a distance from herself and her family, regarding it, rather like her excavations, not as an open case but as a closed one. She accuses the narrator of building up a death cult around their grandfather. In an interview, Judith Hermann herself has spoken about how this grandfather came close to her while she was working on the book, in an unsettling way and against her will. That same effect comes about as we read it: involuntarily, we begin to fill the gaps and vacant spots Judith Hermann leaves in her writing with questions about our own family histories.