Jörg Fauser — a Quarter Century Already

Started the day thinking on an old friend, the German writer Jörg Fauser, who was hit & killed by a car 25 years ago today — when at the tailend of his 43rd Birthday party he crawled through a fence & onto a highway. Am packing & getting ready to catch a flight to Europe, so no time for detailed reflections — just to say that Jörg, though on the surface readable from over here as a traditional sixties hippie/dopey with Beat, Burroughs & Bukowski leanings, was something more: the alienation that drove him was also deeply rooted in his need to distance himself (for very cogent reasons) from the über-self-satisfied, money- & media-wise very successful bourgeois literary world of the Bundesrepublik. In that, as in a number of other ways he reminds me of another German poet friend who also was killed by a car (a London taxi) a few years earlier, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann.  The one memorial piece in the German press I was able to locate this morning is by Jan Küveler in Die Welt. Küveler suggests that “German literature has not yet recuperated” from this loss. The title of his article translates roughly as And No Need for Asslicking which is an accurate descrpition of JF’s mindset.

Here’s a self-description:

“I’m not a nice guy,
I’m a writer,
thus one of the darkmen
who work for the world’s oldest agency —
the agency for language and doubt…”

You can check out these 2 sites: the official Fauser site, which has an index of work with links to book buying (can’t get the new kindle e-ditions from Germany in this country however) here, & the site where the one book of his in English can be bought, here.

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