We Would Have Told Each Other Everything — Judith Hermann’s fascinating mix of memoir and autofiction

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German writer Judith Hermann’s new book is a fascinating creature. The inaugural release of Granta Magazine’s first book imprint, We Would Have Told Each Other Everything consists of three interconnected essays that read partly as memoir, partly autofiction. They were initially commissioned for Frankfurt University’s Lectures on Poetics series, but the tone is, refreshingly, far from pedagogical. Katy Derbyshire’s translation is elegant and polished.

The young, dreamy twentysomethings who populated Summerhouse, Later (1998), Hermann’s first short-story collection, which became an international bestseller, are now firmly in middle age yet as emotionally adrift as ever. Children are born and grow up, careers established and abandoned, love affairs, marriages and friendships made and dismantled. Contemporaries sicken and die, parents get old. The past seems stickier in one’s fifties and the reckonings loom large.

“Every story has its first line. Not the line with which the story begins in the book; the line with which it begins in my mind.” Hermann’s narrator-self has been in and out of analysis; she is as reflective and playful with sentences as she is with her thoughts. After drinking late one night in Berlin with “G., my only writer friend”, she catches sight of her former psychiatrist, one Dr Dreehüs. Their professional relationship had ended some time previously, abruptly, upon the death from multiple sclerosis of the narrator’s close friend Marco, part of a loose group who once spent time in Hermann’s family summer house by the sea.

Marco is part of her past, her Wahlfamilie, or chosen family, those replacements for the origin family which are so often made in youth. Living and dead, he looms large as a striking physical presence through the narrative; as does Ada, an equally charismatic, forceful character. It was via Ada’s recommendation that Hermann found the psychiatrist — at which point their friendship, intense but never close, ceased.

The psychiatrist and former patient, on this charged night, will drink together. But this is not the catalyst for any specified further connection between them — instead the book’s second section delves deep into the analysand’s exploration of her childhood and, subliminally, the reasons for her seeking analysis at all. It is richly presented — an itemised feast of memory and trauma, whether directly experienced or handed down, as Hermann builds up the story of her family and her place in it.

Her paternal grandmother was Russian: as a child “she had been brought to Germany on a sled during the revolution and sometimes wore a silver brooch modelled on a troika”. This relative occupies centre stage in Hermann’s upbringing in cold war “divided Berlin”, the East “foggy and lifeless”. Her mother works all day as a florist and her father is prone to severe and debilitating depression. “My father closed the curtains and cried and then he smashed crockery . . . My mother came home unfathomably late; sometimes I felt I had only imagined my mother.” Her father built his daughter a doll’s house and later a puppet theatre — what better symbols for a dysfunctional family? She remains obsessed with one doll, Anna, well into adulthood, and with a creepy children’s book, modelled on an apartment block similar to the one she lives in, called The Yellow House. Jung’s theory that the house represents the psyche is never more relevant than here.

In the third part we re-enter present day, and the recent pandemic. Hermann inherited the house by the sea from her beloved grandmother: it features in all her work. She is now divorced with a son, and in a tentative relationship with a photographer. A visit to her parents in lockdown holds all the tension of childhood and a deeper understanding, too. “Remembering is work,” Hermann writes. And it is the figure of the long-dead grandmother who dominates as she herself grows older. Her “beautifully sad, tough life” endures in this luminous dialogue of self and soul.

We Would Have Told Each Other Everything by Judith Hermann, translated by Katy Derbyshire Granta £12.99, 208 pages

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