Whenever she learned that death was on her heels, her writing prepared her for it. Because Sibylle Lewitscharoff, who has now died at the age of 69, has always been a cheerful specialist in the ultimate things. Versed in the small border traffic between this world and the afterlife, she conducted spirit talks with strangers and with her own ancestors. As a religious studies graduate, she knew how to write a theologically permeated literature that knew how to ironically cushion all tyrannical truths of faith.
Whether she set off in “Consummatus” (2006) in the footsteps of Orpheus and Eurydice into a Swabian realm of the dead, through which Andy Warhol and Jim Morrison also haunted, or whether she traveled to mangy Bulgaria in “Apostoloff” with the coffin of a suicidal gynecologist in the luggage, in which Leviticaroff’s own father, who came from Bulgaria, could easily be recognized: in a suada-like tone, she liquefied the heavy black lump that can form when talking about death and grief.
Lewitscharoff, born in Stuttgart-Degerloch in 1954, asked Franz Kafka questions under a Robert Walser sun. So she dabbled in meditations on sin, paternity, hope, and the true path, and immediately nullified their metaphysical weight with an effortless tone of delight, whose cheerfulness she innocently transformed into something charmingly malicious. “Love cannot keep the dead in check,” the first-person narrator summed up, “only good-natured hatred.”
With Dante on the Aventine
She liked to talk to the big ones. But her cleverness and her intellectual ethos compelled her to accompany the storytelling, which was her element, with exhaustive preliminary studies. For Blumenberg (2011), her novel about the philosopher Hans Blumenberg, she delved deep into the thoughts of the equally evasive and productive Münster native and emerged with a genuinely literary commentary on a life in secret. And for “The Miracle of Pentecost” (2018) she became a Dante specialist who could gloriously mock the 34 fictional academics who were arguing about the “Divine Comedy” on the Roman Aventine.
At that point at the latest, she herself had reached somewhere between hell, purgatory and paradise with her MS disease. Lewitscharoff, who liked to be the center of attention and actually held court in front of her friends, didn’t let that bother her. For a long time she still appeared at events with a walker before her illness tied her to the house, where she defied the bitter truth with her own mixture of cheeky mouth and perfect form.
All of Schwäbin, who had earned her living as an accountant for years, was proud that her money, well invested not least thanks to the Büchner Prize in 2013, enabled the services of a loving housekeeper and home care in her Wilmersdorf old apartment. It was the environment that testified to life together with her husband, the painter, draftsman and graphic artist Friedrich Meckseper, who died in 2019. Some of his works accompany the two Insel volumes in which Lewitscharoff resurrected the title hero of her debut novel “Pong” (1998).
Calligraphic billets and objects
She was talented in drawing herself, with an almost calligraphic handwriting, in which she wrote notes that she sent to selected admirers of her art. And she passionately built three-dimensional scenic objects on topical themes of her writing, including a Dantean inferno world. Last year she complained that the Marbach Literature Archive, which published three attractive brochures with her visual works as part of its magazine series, showed too little interest in this aspect of her work.
She was shaped like a Pietist who didn’t want to hear it when she was described as a desire de-Catholic. But in her certainty of faith, which was based on a literally heavenly revelation, her extraverted demeanor and the colorfulness of her language, which happily jumped back and forth between the sublime and the blasphemous, the sober Protestant was just as far from her as any pious inwardness, despite all the strong Lutheran German.
Their cultural conservatism also fitted more into the Catholic milieu. Later she could only scoff at the left-wing dogmatism to which she had succumbed as a short-term Trotskyite at high school and then as a sympathizer of the Socialist Bureau in Stuttgart. Its bourgeois decline, political correctness, was no less a thorn in her side. When she and her fundamentalist-Catholic friend and fellow writer Martin Mosebach pulled off the leather against the hedonism of the modern world, not a dry eye stayed.
Invective against test-tube children
Her temperament was then able to get away with her and unfold hurtful sharpness – as in her Dresden speech in March 2014. In it she criticized the complete availability of life and death, which had found its way with medical devices, with good, rationally understandable reasons at any time. But with her invective against test-tube children, which she called “half-beings”, she overshot the mark. The scandal surrounding the Lewitscharoff authority was perfect, and it cost her a lot of effort and regret to be seen again in the philanthropy of her work.
The sovereignty in the mediation of the earthly and the supernatural, that “message traffic between above and below”, which she reports on in her poetry lectures “Of the Good, the True and the Beautiful”, was not given to her from the start. It took her a whopping 40 years to publish her first book, 36 Just, in 1994, after countless failed attempts to write. And even then the mercury, the overflowing, sometimes even over-the-top quality of her early prose had to be mentally tamed.
In 2012, Sibylle Lewitscharoff complained about the death of her parents in an interview: “One of them committed suicide in an unworthy manner, and the mother also put on an unworthy death drama.” The life we lead has “influence on the way we die . Whether we can find some peace, whether we can be satisfied.” Now that German-language literature is losing one of its most playful and profound voices in Sibylle Lewitscharoff, one can only hope that she made her peace in time.
