»I quite like reading autobiographies,« Adolf Endler admits, »but do I believe them?...That someone particularly in the twentieth century could be capable of `telling his biography` in a satisfactory way« he contends to be absolutely impossible. And if it is so with Nebbich, a book that he expressly understands as an autobiography, it is obvious that it does not have to do with the upright presentation of one`s own life in chronological order drawing near to an ending that is close to perfection. Endler`s
»autobiography of fragments« is - as we already got to know in a limited slice of time in Tarzan on Prenzlau Berg - assembled from journal entries and contemporary commentaries, collages of evilly sarcastic quotations, essay-like portraits of contemporaries and colleagues, and narrative fragments of an often phantasmogorical character. That one`s life is composed not only of »real »experiences but also of up to »three-fourths dreams and daydreams (`lengthy plays of thoughts`)« is indisputable for the author, who obviously uses the term career only with an ironic wink of the eye. What results is a kaleidoscope in which images of the memories of the fifteen-year-old high school student while riding the streetcar line 18 between Düsseldorf and Benrath fit in just as well as expedition journals that provide information about the language of the rainbow eaters. And of course there are wild notations of the Endleristic alter egos Bobbi Bergemann and Bubi Blazezak, which also no less importantly recover a type of history of East German far removed from any nostalgia.
»In the German literature with respect to the East, there is hardly anything comparable to Endler`s writings. Their originality, their content and their world have grown in an atmosphere that, up to a particular point in time, is found only at the place where they, the texts, occur...and they occur there in such an evident way that one tends to say that they themselves are this atmosphere.
For my part, I would know nothing about East Berlin without Endler’s text, even though I lived there for a couple of years.«
Wolfgang Hilbig
»Certainly Endler`s prose is rich in insinuations about the German Democratic Republic - but poor Joyce, if it had only been Dubliners who understood him.«
Manfred Behn
