Garno Geiger was born in Bregenz on Lake Constance in 1968. He grew up in Wolfurt in the Vorarlberg region "between several borders - Swiss, Liechtenstein and German". He studied German philology, ancient history and comparative literature in Vienna and Innsbruck. From 1986 to 2002, he worked as a sound and video technician on the lake stage of the Bregenz Festival during the summer months.
He made his debut as a writer in 1996 with a reading at the Klagenfurt Ingeborg Bachmann Competition. In 1997, Hanser Verlag published his first novel Kleine Schule des Karussellfahren. His second novel Irrlichterloh (1999) is "a romance novel almost without love", his third novel Schöne Freunde (2002) tells of the consequences of a terrible mining accident and the survivors' departure into the unknown. Arno Geiger's breakthrough came with the novel Es geht uns gut, which is one of the most important historical and family novels of the present day and was honoured with the German Book Prize, awarded for the first time in 2005.
The prose volume Anna nicht vergessen (2007) tells twelve stories of failed and unhappy people, of life dreams and life disasters. Geiger's fifth novel, All About Sally (2010), is a sensitive portrait of a marriage in the middle years. It is an "adventure novel" about adultery with a happy ending, a novel "with a bit of everyday grime stuck to it", as Geiger said in an interview. The sixth novel, Selbstporträt mit Flusspferd (2015), tells the story of Julian's separation from Judith, of his summer with Professor Beham and his hippopotamus, which he cares for, and of his mysterious daughter Aiko, who turns his head.
Julian learns: Learning to live also means learning to understand the ambivalent and difficult.
Humble writing gesture
Arno Geiger's book Der alte König in seinem Exil (2011) dispenses with a genre designation. It is neither a novel nor a novella, neither a non-fiction book nor a scientific treatise. And yet it is many things at the same time: autobiography, family history, father's story, village chronicle, but above all an autobiographical poetic essay and a contemporary historical narrative about his father August Geiger, born in 1926, who showed the first signs of Alzheimer's disease in 1995. Arno Geiger treats the subject in a completely new way: He doesn't make diagnoses like Jonathan Franzen in the essay The Brain of My Father and the novel The Corrections. He doesn't settle accounts like Tilman Jens in Demenz. Abschied von meinem Vater, who accuses his father of having taken refuge in dementia out of shame over his membership of the NSDAP. It also differs from Burkard Spinnen's Die letzte Fassade. How my mother became demented (2016). Arno Geiger encounters the Alzheimer's sufferer with empathy, in a compassionate, almost reverent attitude that also fundamentally changes family life: a new solidarity develops between them.
The book is a linguistic event, a completely new tone in literature about fathers. It is not a "love that has been carried on", but one that was practised during the father's lifetime. The author is not interested in scientific findings, but rather in evoking the dignity of people with dementia and "creates a realm for the king in which he can not only grow old with dignity, but also be mad". He does not ignore the dark side: "It is as if I were watching my father bleed to death in slow motion. Life seeps out of him drop by drop" (12).
In his acceptance speech for the Hölderlin Prize, Geiger said: "My father would like to find the words he needs to say what he perceives and feels. His loss of language swallows up the world in slow bites."
His style of writing is "humble, modest, loving, grateful". "Since my father can no longer cross the bridge into my world, I have to cross over to him. Over there, within the confines of his mental state, beyond our society, which is geared towards practicality and single-mindedness, he is still a remarkable man" (11) - a king in his exile."
Writing is a crossing over
Arno Geiger formulated this attitude to writing in his acceptance speech for the Joseph Breitbach Prize as follows: "Writing a novel is always a crossing over. The starting point for me every time I start writing is curiosity, the impulse: I would like to understand it better, I have to go there. If I knew a lot, or even a lot, then perhaps I wouldn't write." Fortunately, Arno Geiger doesn't know everything and continues to write.
His latest novel Unter der Drachenwand is an attempt to capture a year of war, the year 1944, not only from the perspective of the hero Veit Kolbe, but from multiple perspectives.
He is suspicious of anything "total". His characters are not one hundred per cent, but grey. Extremists are obsessed, they only know black and white, they refuse to look at the world from any other perspective than their own. Hence his preference for polyphony in novels. Hence his preference for mixed characters.
"Art is not right or left in a very fundamental way, it doesn't take sides, it sits between two stools. Art is not objective, but in the depth of the narrative, in the depth of the form, literature, if it is great, encounters the fundamentally human. And in the fundamentally human, literature shares in the objective. But the objective is not its highest aspiration, its highest aspiration is the individual."
Poetological self-disclosure
Tonight, Arno Geiger will be reading from the book Das glückliche Geheimnis. It was published in 2023 and is something of a poetological self-disclosure. I've been trying to invite Arno Geiger to the Catholic Academy for years. In 2020, we had already printed the programme and then the coronavirus pandemic intervened.
Tonight therefore has a special kairos: Arno Geiger is taking us once again on his dives into the paper containers of Vienna and at the same time his new novel Reise nach Laredo (Journey to Laredo), which has been announced for the autumn, is already finished. But it seemed important to me to bring the most personal Geiger, his happy secret, to the audience once again, because it decodes the entire oeuvre of Arno Geiger.
A bookseller told me that she had fallen into a reading crisis, she couldn't read any more books. And that as a bookseller! A kind of occupational disability! Then she came across Arno Geiger's book and her fascination with literature was rekindled. How this metamorphosis came about will hopefully be unravelled this evening.
