Paula

Sandra Hoffmann's 'Paula' is a moving piece of autofiction about the writer's relationship to her grandmother, a devout Swabian Catholic who refused to reveal who fathered her child in 1946. Growing up in a family where silence reigns, Hoffmann asks: What kind of person, what kind of writer, does this environment produce?

Sandra Hoffmanns 'Paula' ist ein bewegendes Stück Autofiktion über das Verhältnis der Schriftstellerin zu ihrer Großmutter - einer gläubigen, schwäbischen Katholikin, die sich bis zu ihrem Lebensende weigerte, zu enthüllen, wer ihr Kind im Jahre 1946 gezeugt hat. In einer Familie aufgewachsen, in der die Stille herrscht, fragt Hoffmann: Welche Art von Person, welche Art von Autorin produziert eine solche Umgebung?

Sandra Hoffmann, 1967 geboren, lebt als freie Schriftstellerin in München. Sie unterrichtet kreatives & literarisches Schreiben u.a. für das Literaturhaus München und an Universitäten. Außerdem schreibt sie für das Radio und für Zeitungen. Und sie surft. Für ihren Roman 'Was ihm fehlen wird, wenn er tot ist' (Hanser Berlin, 2012) erhielt sie den Thaddäus-Troll-Preis, für 'Paula' (Hanser Berlin, 2019) den Hans-Fallada-Preis.

Sandra Hoffmann's 'Paula' is a moving piece of autofiction about the writer's relationship to her grandmother, a devout Swabian Catholic who refused to reveal who fathered her child in 1946. Growing up in a family where silence reigns, Hoffmann asks: What kind of person, what kind of writer, does this environment produce?

Sandra Hoffmanns 'Paula' ist ein bewegendes Stück Autofiktion über das Verhältnis der Schriftstellerin zu ihrer Großmutter - einer gläubigen, schwäbischen Katholikin, die sich bis zu ihrem Lebensende weigerte, zu enthüllen, wer ihr Kind im Jahre 1946 gezeugt hat. In einer Familie aufgewachsen, in der die Stille herrscht, fragt Hoffmann: Welche Art von Person, welche Art von Autorin produziert eine solche Umgebung?

Sandra Hoffmann, 1967 geboren, lebt als freie Schriftstellerin in München. Sie unterrichtet kreatives & literarisches Schreiben u.a. für das Literaturhaus München und an Universitäten. Außerdem schreibt sie für das Radio und für Zeitungen. Und sie surft. Für ihren Roman 'Was ihm fehlen wird, wenn er tot ist' (Hanser Berlin, 2012) erhielt sie den Thaddäus-Troll-Preis, für 'Paula' (Hanser Berlin, 2019) den Hans-Fallada-Preis.

Auteur

Sandra Hoffmann, 1967 geboren, lebt als freie Schriftstellerin in München. Sie unterrichtet kreatives & literarisches Schreiben u.a. für das Literaturhaus München und an Universitäten. Außerdem schreibt sie für das Radio und für Zeitungen. Und sie surft. Für ihren Roman "Was ihm fehlen wird, wenn er tot ist" (Hanser Berlin, 2012) erhielt sie den Thaddäus-Troll-Preis, für "Paula" (Hanser Berlin, 2019) den Hans-Fallada-Preis.

Résumé
Sandra Hoffmann's Paula is a moving piece of autofiction about the writer's relationship to her grandmother, a devout Swabian Catholic who refused to reveal who fathered her child in 1946. Growing up in a family where silence reigns, Hoffmann asks: What kind of person, what kind of writer, does this environment produce?Sandra Hoffmanns Paula ist ein bewegendes Stück Autofiktion über das Verhältnis der Schriftstellerin zu ihrer Großmutter einer gläubigen, schwäbischen Katholikin, die sich bis zu ihrem Lebensende weigerte, zu enthüllen, wer ihr Kind im Jahre 1946 gezeugt hat. In einer Familie aufgewachsen, in der die Stille herrscht, fragt Hoffmann: Welche Art von Person, welche Art von Autorin produziert eine solche Umgebung?

Échantillon de lecture
We have a word in German: schweigen . It means deliberately remaining silent; it is different to merely being quiet. Schweigen offers nothing to hold on to, not even if you reach deep into your pockets for a coin to flip between your fingers, or a shopping list on a scrap of paper. You hear, from somewhere else or from inside yourself, the dark sounds of muteness turning against you; you hear them as rumbling, as murmuring, as ongoing grumbling, muttering, somewhere far away and yet also near. As though all the unspoken words were seeking ways out of that mute body and into the room, forging their way to you. They rob you of your peace and of your sleep. Schweigen , when someone lives close beside you and remains so silent, swallows down every word so unrelentingly that there is nothing left over, not for you or anyone else. Schweigen , at the table when the knives and forks scrape against plates, when someone, just one voice, says: Could you pass the salt, please? And someone else passes it. And above it all, that deliberate silence that seems to eat you up, you and all your good summers and your few good winters. As though joy itself might never return. And you hear the sound of stockinged legs moving under the table and the dog brushing past a chair, a cough or a throat muscle constricting as glugs of water go down. When the sounds of bodies have occupied so much space that there's nothing but density in the room, a buffer against the outside world. That deliberate silence ends up trapped in every crack of a house; it radiates, emanates, makes a house into a fortress, and the only possible release is a drastic end. You can stay and die, or you can leave. In that quiet, though, even a tractor outside in the road would be a beautiful sound, a promise, someone mowing the field for the first time in the year, the day still light. The world would be there again. Bright light and language.

My grandmother Paula died on 10 November 1997 at the age of 82. She never talked about herself, not to the very end. She took her whole life to the grave, all her secrets and all her troubles.

When I run through the park in the morning, jog around the lake and hear the swans and waterfowl, when I watch the mandarin ducks, luminous like bright dots among the other birds, I often think of my grandmother, dead for 18 years now, and I think of my parents. I'd like to show them the park, the dogs I pass regularly on my run, the lovely spots on the side streams of the Eisbach, the water's surface occasionally brushed by willows. The men face-down on the ground next to their personal trainers, doing complicated gymnastic manoeuvres, or hitting a small punch bag suspended from a tree over and over and over, to make them feel strong for whatever reason. I'd like to show them the yogis saluting the sun, the Japanese woman swinging her arms oddly as she walks. I see the surfers on the Eisbach wave, and sometimes I stop to watch them. I watch these strangers and I'm glad of them, glad I can weave my way between them and, without speaking to them, I know: I'm happy that they're here. I'd like to say to my family: Look, this is where I live now. This is how my life has turned out, and it's fine. But my grandmother is dead. And my parents aren't really interested in any lives not directly related to theirs. I talk to them as I run; I show them my world in my mind, and it always makes me sad.

That deliberate silence has been passed down the generations.

1915 was the year of the wood rabbit in the Chinese calendar. The German politician Franz Josef Strauss was born, Ingrid Bergman, Edith Piaf too, Frank Sinatra, Pinochet. It was the second year of the First World War; the first International Women's Peace Congress was held in The Hague; Albert Einstein talked publicly about his theory of relativity; and Virginia Woolf published her deb