The multi-talented Lea Draeger is an actress at the Maxim-Gorki-Theater in Berlin, visual artist and author. The main character and first-person narrator in her highly acclaimed debut novel “If I Could Tell You” is a woman who refuses to eat at the age of thirteen and is committed to a psychiatric hospital. Her serious illness prompted her to take a critical look back at her family history.
The family fled from Czechoslovakia to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1968. She was persecuted by the ruling communists and felt betrayed by her own country. Nevertheless, feelings and attitudes remain ambivalent. The generation of grandparents did not succeed in the hard break with their Czech origins and full integration in Germany. Bitter memories of the hated German occupation during National Socialism are too strong. The opening image is oppressive: the then twelve-year-old grandfather desperately clutches his father, who has just hanged himself. The women hardly resist the structures of power and violence, they are more patient players of the patriarchy, here and there also accomplices.
The main motif is silence, which may have inspired the ambiguous title “If I Could Betray You”. Breaking the silence about the grievances would be condemned as treason. Lea Draeger dispenses with a stringent plot structure. She works with time jumps, loosely connected episodes. Much remains fragmentary, and one may doubt that all thematic repetitions are intentional. One of the strengths of the text are partly expressive, partly pointed images, which sometimes turn out to be drastic. The preceding warning against “explicit descriptions of psychological and physical violence” may seem superfluous, but it is not wrong.
Lea Draeger: “If I could tell you”Hanser, 288 pages, 23.70 euros
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Source: Nachrichten
