A REVIEW OF
THIS BERLIN SUMMER BY FRIEDRICH KRÖHNKE
The following review of German writer Friedrich Kröhnke’s ninth novel, Dieser Berliner Sommer – Erzählungen (This Berlin Summer – Stories), published by Rosa Winkel in Berlin in 1994 was published in issue 5 of Koinos Magazine, Amsterdam, 1st Quarter 1995, p. 24.
A collection of German short stories by Friedrich Kröhnke
by Martin Maassen
When going into psycho-therapy people are, more often than not, advised to keep a diary of their deepest pains and heartfelt desires. Writing is a good method of venting experiences, impressions and emotions. In the best cases it leads to a better understanding of the ego, in other cases it is applied mainly to deepen the writer’s vanity. The latter is especially apparent in people who choose to share their diary notes with a large audience. There is nothing against that. Better still: this “urge” has brought forth wonderful literary treasures!
Thus, full of expectation I started reading Dieser Berliner Sommer (“This Berlin Summer”), Friedrich Kröhnke‘s latest novel. Getting acquainted with Friedrich Kröhnke has been fascinating for me. P14, Kröhnke‘s autobiographical novel about the relationship between a “Wessi”-author and an “Ossi”-boy before the fall of the Berlin-wall, is regarded by me as an excellent piece of literary art. The meeting of the particularly vain author and the fascinated critic/interviewer has left its traces (see first issue of KOINOS).

The greater my disappointment as I turned the last page of Dieser Berliner Sommer. The book contains 21 short stories, only some of which are funny or surprising. Such as “Von dem König Salomo”, in which Kröhnke describes a meeting between himself and a dying, sadistically inclined pederast clergyman, who wishes to have his huge collection of pornography transferred to the “Archives of deviant sexuality”. In “Jan Dalleman” the main character travels to several Asian pleasure grounds only to come to the conclusion that boys in the different cities have already been “informed” by the Dutchman Jan Dalleman. Jan seems to have left his traces everywhere. So the main character, in desperation, decides to present himself with Dutch cheese in order to get the most beautiful boy...
The stories in Dieser Berliner Sommer have the feel of unshaped diary notes. They are presented to the reader in a messy and insufficiently adapted way. In the book the characters (man and boy) circle around each other and, apart from a lot of travelling to - and longing for - exotic locales, there’s a lot of jabbering. Rudi Heiser’s drawings, with boys’ lower body parts as their central theme, suggest a lot more than Kröhnke’s stories deliver. In some stories Kröhnke even tries to be exalted, which results in ludicrous rhetoric. In one of those bombastic concoctions however, the nail, in my opinion, is hit right on the head when the “I character” relates his wishes to a fish. After speaking out his wish for a nice house instead of his pisspot-bedsit dwellings, he further wishes for: “... a job which makes one a lot of money without having to work at all”.
This is quite appropriate to the impression Dieser Berliner Sommer gave me: that of a market-filling, easy little money-maker.
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