Judith Hermann: On Writing We’d Have Told Each Other Everything (Translated by Katy Derbyshire)
In the late summer of 2020, the Goethe University in Frankfurt invited me to give what they call their Poetics Lectures, an annual series in which a writer examines and presents their own poetics, their writing strategies and the way they work. A tradition going back more than sixty years, the prestigious lectures have become more or less ritualised. An invitation is a friendly gesture but something of a pretence; it is an invitation that’s impossible to turn down. Three lectures on three spring Tuesdays in the Goethe University’s Auditorium Maximum on Theodor Adorno Platz, in front of an audience made up of German literature students, serene middle-class intellectuals and thorny publishing professionals, the lecture theatre a cauldron with steep tiers around a tiny circus ring in which the writer, entirely at the mercy of the situation, searches for words at a lectern; the Frankfurt Poetics Lecture was, all in all, a nightmare for me to begin with.
But then I got to write my three lectures in the second year of the pandemic – in the countryside during Germany’s rigorous lockdown, in self-imposed isolation and at great distance from the world; the thought of ever having to present what I was writing to anyone was as unlikely as the thought of ever hugging anyone again, ever being allowed to return to social normality, to a halfway normal everyday life. Like all definitive statements, statements about my own writing terrified me. The thought of being allowed to read these statements aloud in a lecture was an escape route for me – a lecture would remain with me, I would only read it out, there would be no audio recording, no video and above all no manuscript for me to hand in, in which a reader might read what I’d had to say about writing – whatever was quoted after the lectures finished would be a game of ‘broken telephone’, an individually tinted, incomplete and imprecise retelling for which I was no longer responsible; figuratively speaking, I would perform a glittering trick behind a veil of smoke and would have left the room before the audience came to their senses.
Today, I remember the writing of those three chapters, the three lectures, as a markedly happy time. The happiest of times. I was alone, the world around me standing still in a puzzling and shocking way, I got to stay in the house, didn’t have to pack my cases and travel, didn’t have to speak to anyone, I could legitimately keep everyone and everything at a distance. Despite all the dread, it was an unrepeatably concentrated, dense and significant time, and I was more at peace with and in agreement with myself than I had usually been in my life. I wrote in the early mornings, into the morning and noon, I took long walks in the afternoon in a landscape devoid of other people, absolutely abandoned, during which I discussed what I’d written with myself in complicated detail, I sat in the kitchen in the evenings with a glass of wine and the radio for company, I thought about how I’d go on the next morning, and the figures who turn up in the text sat down at the table with me. They had ideas and they made suggestions, they were very bold, the thread of the story passed through their hands. The notes I made on those evenings were fragile and literally papery, they were brittle. But the morning after, the world was still quiet and empty and the ideas and thoughts were still there and they were alright, amazingly, they weren’t ridiculous, didn’t fold in on themselves or melt into air. In a certain way, this writing was similar to the writing of a very first book – writing into complete nothingness. Addressed at nobody. Knowing nothing of any reader, certainly knowing nothing of the rest of the proceedings. Nobody would read this text. It would stay with me forever, a never-ending and tender story told only for myself.
It’s very simple. Had I known that We’d Have Told Each Other Everything would become a book, I wouldn’t have written it. Things really do reveal themselves, as we all know, when we don’t expect them, after we’ve said goodbye to them. I stayed three weeks in Frankfurt, that spring of 2022. I rented a small dark flat with a view of a Frankfurt backyard and I bought myself an old bicycle and cycled along the river, across the river to the university, and after the lectures back to the flat, and especially after the second lecture I cycled along the river, across the river no-hands. To be honest, I cycled no-hands and singing. I was surprised to find that I had, by my standards, passed a unique test of courage.
(c) Judith Hermann
Translation (c) Katy Derbyshire
About We’d Have Told Each Other Everything:
On a dark night in Berlin’s Kastanienallee, acclaimed writer Judith Hermann runs into her psychoanalyst — a chance encounter that begins an exploration of the fluid boundaries between truth and invention, memoir and fiction. Through three interconnected essays — in prose, precise yet dreamlike — Judith Hermann captures those moments when reality shifts: a friendship that unravels, salt-bright summers on the North Sea, an unconventional childhood, and the weight of familial trauma. Part literary meditation, part memoir, part novel, this work explores the delicate art of transforming life into literature, challenging our deepest and sometimes darkest assumptions about memory, identity, and the stories we tell ourselves.
Very occasionally a book comes along that feels as if it were written just for me, and this is one of those rare books. All my life’s defining concerns, as a writer and a woman, are here – ageing, home, the past, losing people, secrets, childhood, strategies of disclosure, the purpose of art and the relationship it has to life – god, that is an ongoing riddle – and Hermann conveys and examines them with generosity and honesty and insight. This book stimulated my mind and touched me to the core. Claire-Louise Bennett
Order your copy of We’d Have Told Each Other Everything online here.
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