Reading: Norbert Gstrein reads from "Im ersten Licht"

Description

Gstrein's century panorama "Im ersten Licht" begins in 1920. In a rural area of Austria, horribly disfigured soldiers from the First World War live in a villa converted into an invalids' home. Among them is Ernest Eller, a son of the noble owners of the estate. His family has declared him dead because he does not want to face his fiancée as a monster. Gstrein's protagonist Adrian Reiter, who works as a hotel porter near the villa, has known Ernest since childhood and cares for him. Ultimately, he cannot help him: Ernest sets the villa on fire and shoots himself. Reiter limps: his father, an imperial and royal postal clerk, made him a cripple with an axe blow to the leg so he wouldn't be drafted into the First World War. Later, thanks to the Eller family's support, he can study; he becomes a high school teacher and marries a colleague. The heroic deeds of the Austrian army become his obsession. His student Martin Baumgartner, who admires him, fights in World War II as a soldier of the Wehrmacht in the East. During a front leave, he visits the teacher. The teacher takes the soldier's reports as calmly as those about the deportation of Jewish families. Adrian's wife can no longer tolerate her husband's opportunism. She leaves him shortly after the war ends. He later, in 1961, meets Vivian in the South English Downs, who becomes his second wife and helps him start a new life, although she also carries a dark story. Norbert Gstrein is one of the most renowned German-speaking writers of our time. The mathematician by training has distinguished himself with novels, stories, and essays, for which he has received numerous awards. His most famous works include the novels "Die englischen Jahre" (1999), "Das Handwerk des Tötens" (2003), "Die Winter im Süden" (2008), and "Als ich jung war" (2019). Gstrein has a talent for creating complex stories and characters in his unmistakable, simultaneously sober and poetic language that one does not forget. In the novel "Im ersten Licht," Adrian Reiter is a vivid character: an observer and accomplice, everyman and outsider, a person capable of nuanced perceptions yet simultaneously ideologically influenced, one who becomes guilty through looking away and inaction. But he is not just an antihero. He is close to us; we understand him better than we might like. His life, like Gstrein's labyrinthine novel, does not follow straight lines, impressing with its arch architecture as much as with its precise language. Its strong plot has a highly sophisticated ending in the coda set in 1988. After the reading, there will be the traditional soup.

Highlights

• Reading by Norbert Gstrein
• Excerpt from "Im ersten Licht"
• Venue: Garage Wetzikon

General Information

Norbert Gstrein presents his reading from the work "Im ersten Licht," set in 1920. The event takes place at the Garage Wetzikon and offers insights into the complex themes of war and opportunism.

Location

Bahnhofstrasse 24, 8620 Wetzikon ZH, Switzerland

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