Jaroslav Rudiš: We have to take literature into the streets

In his debut "Heaven under Berlin" he writes about people who end their lives under the trains of the U-Bahn. In his second novel Grandhotel he writes about suicide cases throwing themselves from the walkways of the magical structure at the peak of the Ještěd mountain. And as if that weren't enough, writer Jaroslav Rudiš also revealed to me that the hero of Grandhotel was also originally going to throw himself into the Ještěd, but instead at the end he escapes his frustrations from the town he couldn’t quit in a balloon.

Jiří Leschtina: What attracts you about suicide cases?

Jaroslav Rudiš: I suppose the extremity. I imagine that there's a lot of courage needed for a person to hurdle over the limits of their own life. And it fascinates me what the end of a person can change into. When someone jumps in front of a train in the Berlin metro, the dispatcher doesn't notify the passengers that an accident has taken place, but that there's a malfunction on the track. Death becomes a technical breakdown. That's a strange end. Sad and somehow also terribly powerful.

JL: When did this recurring theme first come to you?

JR: When this Czech Railways engineer, this kind of long-haired rocker, was telling me in the pub "U Vystřelenýho oka" in Žižkov that he kept seeing the eyes of the man he'd run over. That man just standing on the tracks, him barrelling along at a hundred kilometres an hour; he couldn't stop and the man just stared into his eyes right up to the last moment. That train driver became the precursor to Günter in "Heaven under Berlin". The metro driver who ran over five people and believed that the dead stay in the metro like normal people go to heaven.

JL: Not to say that your stories are exactly gloomy, but they're definitely melancholic...

JR: Well, but I am more of a melancholic type. I always write better when I'm in one of life's melancholic traps. It pulls me north – I like the North Sea, Iceland, as well as the Sudetenland where I used to live. I can't imagine anything more terrible than wallowing on a beach somewhere by the Adriatic. But I can walk for days on end through the empty Jeseník mountains, through villages that disappeared along with their inhabitants. Only vague outlines remained. One would be afraid to spend the night there.

JL: Not sunlight but a lack thereof draws out your imagination, your fancy?

JR: I started to write Grandhotel specifically under the influence of atmospheric malfunctions and rolling storm clouds on the island of Sylt in the North Sea. I was there in the middle of summer, when it's relatively warm for a bit, then the clouds rush in, and wind, and rain. And I imagined how it all rolled on to Berlin and to Liberec. And I started to get this story about Fleischman, who studies clouds and weather and had never been outside the walls of this strange city under the Ještěd.

JL: Liberec is strange?

JR: Very strange. It's enclosed by mountains that don't let the clouds that come in go any farther. And so everything falls on Liberec. People there say: "If you can see the Ještěd, it's going to rain. And if you can't see it – it's raining." And then the fog, enshrouding the city's chequered past, as if the shadows of its original inhabitants were emerging out of it.

JL: Punker Petr Bém, loner Fleischman, and the other characters from both your novels as well are outsiders living on the edge, in the shadows. How can these solitary folk enrich those of us who swim with the tide?

JR: They're not complete and definitive outsiders. I'm following them at a moment when they have the chance to do something with it. When they're collecting the courage to step out of their own shadow. Either it works, or they fall back even deeper. Those are inspiring moments for all of us. There is a tremendous amount of tension concealed in outsiders, of suppressed desire and unrealisable dreams...

JL: Did you ever have an outsider period too?

JR: I felt like an outsider in Prague, for example, when we came here as students from the Turnov high school and gaped at that great big world, with the people walking around all dressed to the nines. And even today I live a bit like an outsider in Žižkov, kind of like in a village. We've got a group of people here, me and Jaromír Švejdík, the illustrator of our comics about railway employee Alois Nebel; we go to the same pubs. Žižkov is still a proletarian neighbourhood; I feel a lot better there than I do in Malá Strana or Hradčany.

JL: Prague doesn't strike you as magical?

JR: It probably was magical when Czechs, Jews and Germans lived together here. Nowadays it's a beautiful but very boringly monochrome city. A kind of shiny museum.  As opposed to Berlin where you have a hundred thousand Poles, a hundred thousand Russians, a few hundred Czechs, two hundred Icelanders and three hundred thousand Turks. Then there's a ruckus. One friend, whenever I go to Berlin, she always tells me: "Bring back some restlessness."

JL: You went to high school in Turnov when communism was on its last legs. Could you feel it?

JR: Yeah, and it really moved me forward. For instance thanks to my Czech teacher, who is today the principal of that school. When he used to play Garáž, Nohavica and Lou Reed for us in class, that was like a revelation for me. Just like when a friend leant me Škvorecký's "Cowards", which preordained my becoming a writer, if it can be called that. Not long ago I read "The Cowards" again; it's an amazingly well-written novel. So musical. Škvorecký's jazz-man style of writing led me to creating a kind of private soundtrack when I'm working on my books.

JL: How does that look?

JR: I listen to songs that emotionally or rhythmically resonate with what I'm writing. For "Heaven under Berlin" I tried to give the text a punk rhythm. Lots of zip, short sentences, like it's just plugging away, rushing right to the point. But in Grandhotel there are more meditative passages too, the whole book is quieter, there's not as much sound and noise.

JL: What was the soundtrack for that – Goth rock, new romantics?

JR: Something like that. There's lots of romance in Grandhotel, lots of poetry. I'm not ashamed of that.

JL: Yet people also write about you as a creator of literary pop, whose books are entertaining but for many literature lovers unattractive. How do you deal with that?

JR: Someone even once accused me that my books are too readable. And just what should they be? I'm interested in intelligibility. And for it to be really powerful and compelling. Writing for me is like divining. I do have the story made up ahead of time, but then the undercurrent carries me somewhere else anyways, I submerge into myself. That's why I believe that there's something deeper in those stories that has a more substantial effect than just entertaining.

JL: Like what for example?

JR: Someone wrote about "Heaven under Berlin" that it captures the feeling of the generation of thirty-somethings that is constantly running away from something, and most of all from themselves. I think there's something to that. I ran away for a year to Berlin, not from a girl but from adulthood. I feel that with some of my friends too. This kind of dilemma whether to start being a family man already, taking out a mortgage and then just toiling away for the rest of their lives. Or to leave for Berlin or Copenhagen, be young for a little longer, a punk...

JL: What phase are you in now?

JR: I'd like to know that myself.

JL: You said after your time in Berlin that the Berlin Wall has moved into Germans' heads. What do you mean by that?

JR: Say in West Berlin I met people who had never been in the eastern part of the city. And they didn't even know why they would go there. They have this kind of emotional distance. And in the east I have an acquaintance who wouldn't go to the west to go shopping. He consumes exclusively "ostprodukts" – just things manufactured in the former East Germany. I told him that it's all the same today, that lots of those companies belong to owners from all different parts of the world. And he said: "No, for me it's important that this sausage is from our Thuringia."

JL: Why is it so important?

JR: Maybe it's a remnant of the shock from when that bizarre, artificially-created state they used to live in all of the sudden disappeared. And when from one day to the next hundreds of factories collapsed. I experienced it in the middle of the nineties when I was travelling to the former East Germany as an advertising agent for Staropramen. Say in Hoyerswerda, where East German coal industry businesses were completely falling apart, I used to meet people who weren't able to move anywhere where they would have a chance to make money and live. They just stayed in a dying city and bought Czech beer from me that they knew from their union trips to Prague. In remembrance of something that would never come back.

JL: But in your "punk" stories there's also a lot of reminiscing about Trabants, Rügen, Dean Reed and other East German trademarks. Didn't you catch ostalgia there?

JR: It's true that one German reviewer called my book "Czech ostalgia". I don't see it as a desire to return to communist times but as an understandable reminiscing about the period of one's youth, being in love. My girlfriend is from Jeseníky, and her grandmother lives there – a Sudeten German. Once when we came to visit her she pulled out her old photographs. And she reminisced about her youth, beautiful experiences that the pictures brought back, when they trained with the Hitler Youth as kids. And I said to myself, that's pretty psycho, but at the same time I understood her.

JL: Following your success with prose you unexpectedly came out with a comic book about railway worker Alois Nebel. Did you find something particular in comics that literature and film don't have?

JR: Illustrator Jaromír Švejdík and I primarily wanted to show that comics can tell stories with big serious topics too. It appealed to me that you can read a comic book story in thirty minutes in the tram. And then you can spend maybe a week discovering all kinds of coded things, hidden details that we put in there.

JL: Spectacled dispatcher Nebel is assaulted by hallucinatory fogs in which troubled spectres from our history come to life. Do you have your own fog too that your inspiration arises from?

JR: It's more like a kind of foggy blending of dreams and reality. Jaromír and I got into a state when we were writing the comics where we didn't really distinguish what's made-up and what's reality. But say the character Němý, the murderer, who is a kind of metaphor for evil, the eternal revenge hovering over the Sudetenland, has a real basis. Jaromír told me that in the Jeseníky mountains a person once showed up who sat for two days at the train station, didn't talk and didn't answer any questions. They arrested him and threw him in the madhouse. And a year later the Polish criminal police came, showed him pictures of this dead girl and asked him: "Did you kill her?" And he just answered in Polish: "Tak." And I knew that I just had to have him in that story.

JL: The theme of the Sudetenland runs through all your writing. As a Czech do you feel responsible for the expulsion of Germans?

JR: Not at all and I don't think it's even possible. I wasn't even alive then. It's more like I feel the need to write about it, that you can't just brush it aside, forget about it. But for me there's also a kind of excitement of the secrecy, of something unexplored that wasn't talked about under communism. One teacher in elementary school even told us that the Germans didn't come to Bohemia until after the war.

JL: In Grandhotel you have the figure of Sudeten German Reinhard Franz who transports the ashes of dead friends to Liberec in a coffee can and scatters them in his birthplace. Isn't that a kind of crazy motif?

JR: Sure it is a little crazy. But at the same time I would think that it's understandable. I wanted to have a compelling symbol there, a message that at the end of their life a person should return to where they came from. Some people accept that character, others take exception. But either way at least for a moment they see the human fate in Franz's eyes.

JL: But aren't you caricaturising a serious historical topic with that kind of picturesqueness?

JR: I don't think so. That character grew out of authentic experiences from when I was a porter at the Liberec hotel Zlatý lev at the beginning of the nineties. The hotel was profiting from Sudeten Germans who were returning to their home town in droves after the revolution, looking for their homes, which had often already fallen apart or been torn down. And in the evening they'd come back, sit crushed at the reception and recount things to me. Those were horribly strong moments. One Sudeten German even died in that hotel. His companions from the tour sat him in the bus as if he were sleeping and transported him across the border to avoid any complicated official procedures…

JL: Is it even possible though to openly come to terms with the expulsion of Sudeten Germans so that it doesn't fatally traumatise you?

JR: I guess the only way is to tell their stories, their fates, without any self-flagellation but also without trivialising it. Otherwise it will keep coming back. Some politicians will always have it in their pocket to rile up people's passions at the right moment. The fact that they didn't pull it out at the last elections was a minor miracle. This one Israeli writer was with me in Berlin on a scholarship last year, he was of sixty, fought in the six-day war. And he told me: "You here in central Europe don't even realise what a happy time you're living in. But it will change. I look now at what those twins are doing in Poland and I say to myself, it's going to change all around too." And I said to myself, what if he's right, you never know.

JL: You popularise your stories through dramatic readings where you perform with the punk band U-Bahn over roaring guitars. Some people see it is as clowning around unsuitable for a writer. Are they right?

JR: But those are those absurd snobby ideas that literature is something lofty, something above music or film. In Germany they struggled with this in the nineties, then literary cabarets started springing up, where writers reached a lot of young people and pulled literature back down to the ground. When I put out "Heaven under Berlin" with a German publisher, they automatically planned me out a tour. I criss-crossed Germany, reading, playing, screaming into a microphone on metro platforms or in a bunker from the time of the Third Reich and it always had an amazing atmosphere. Literature is not something dead. And if we want twenty-year-old girls to read more, to buy books and not just surf the internet, then we have to go out into the streets and get them.

Hospodářské noviny, 13 April 2007