speh:
Post war poem. When I was young I received luncheon vouchers instead of pocket money. Every Sunday, I got a poem written by my mother’s hand and decorated with florets even if the verses were desperately unhappy and depressing. Bachmann, Celan, Plath were served as a matter of course alongside cake, usually Frankfurt crown cake, because once my mother had mastered making it, we could no longer wrest the butter cream syringe from her. I had to read the poem out loud. She’d look upon me with pride while my dad looked like the young Thomas Bernhard: somewhat repugnant with his half-open sulky lips and large, protruding, yellowish eye-balls. He slowly, rhythmically opened and shut his eyelids like a breathing toad. The final event of every Sunday family event was the waltz that I had to dance with my pygmy sister while my parents felt each other up on the couch as if we weren’t in the room. I usually closed my eyes and tried to escape to the inside of my head. I always felt like the envoy of another, braver world, who’d only come to cancel the show and to send them all home, knowing that their homes were gone: the whores and schlehmihls, the wasted poets and post card painters, who had survived the war. I stuffed myself with cream cake and longed for better days, quietly burping Beethoven’s Fifth.
Photo: Heike Reichenwallner.
