Here's what author Daniel Kehlmann said when he was two-thirds through writing Tyll: “When Trump won, I was so shocked and worried that for a while I couldn’t write anymore. But then I thought of Tyll’s resilience and his way of making fun of anything. It was revelatory because I’d never had any experience of my own character helping me to finish something or to cope.”
Tyll Ulenspiegel to the rescue, both for a sensitive young novelist in the 21st century and war-torn, ravaged Central Europe during the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648).
Tyll Ulenspiegel, energetic jester, circus performer, magician, ventriloquist, vagabond, hero of folk tales is given a flesh-and-blood boyhood and manhood in Daniel Kehlmann's striking novel written in eight loosely interconnected chapters.
The novel's opening short paragraph: "The war had not yet come to us. We lived in fear and hope and tried not to draw God's wrath down upon our securely walled town, with its hundred and five houses and the cemetery, where our ancestors waited for the Day of Resurrection."
So few words but words that capture much of the brutality and suffocation of the times. "The war had not yet come to us." An undeniable sense of foreboding - the narrator admits it isn't a question of IF the war will come to his town but only a matter of WHEN. Meanwhile, all the townspeople live in the grip of fear believing soldiers arriving to murder, pillage, rape and burn their town to the ground is evidence of God's wrath. In other words, death and destruction will be a consequence of their town's guilt and sin.
But then it happens: one sunny Sunday morning in spring, a wagon rolls into town. There's a old, leather-faced woman, a beautiful young lass with dark hair and freckles - and a man everyone recognized although they haven't seen him before. Voices cry out, "Tyll is here!" "Tyll has come!" "Look, it's Tyll!"
Statue of Tyll in the German town of Mölln
With lightning speed, the coach transforms into a stage. All the town's men, women and children quickly gather as the old woman sings and Tyll and the dark haired beauty begin performing on either side of the stage - Tyll leaping, dancing, twirling a sword as he battles dragons, witches, evil kings in his journey toward his beloved, the soles of Tyll's feet seeming hardly to touch the ground. The play lasts deep into the afternoon and concludes in Romeo and Juliet fashion with both Tyll and the dark haired beauty committing suicide.
The townsfolk are treated to more: after the tragedy, there's the comedy. The old woman beats a drum as Tyll and his freckled lass spring up and begin dancing. "The two of them threw their arms up, their movements were in such harmony that they seemed to be not two people but mirror images of each other. We could dance fairly well, we celebrated often, but none of us could dance like them; watching them, you felt as if a human body had no weight and life were not sad and hard."
Following the dancing, the townsfolk behold more, much, much more. Tyll sings ballads first of the deadly strife of politics, religion and war and then switches to a heartfelt song of love then finally music most sacred. The entertainment shifts again and again until Tyll is standing on a rope high above the stage, shouting down to everyone below. What follows is a stroke of Daniel Kehlmann storytelling perfection. And then, as suddenly and as magically as Tyll and his wagon first appeared, the wagon with Tyll and the others are gone.
Lightness, nimbleness, freedom - so deftly embodied and expressed by Tyll the performer becomes a constant light presence humming and skipping in the background for each ensuing scene chock-full and weighed down by joylessness and suffering in their many harrowing forms.
Oh, yes, so much darkness. We have two inquisitors hunting out those like Tyll's father Claus who not only is a Christian but ponders cosmic mysteries, chants spells and draws painted pentagrams on his door. Ah, a heretic in the grip of the devil! Or so claims the Church. Poor Claus is tortured unmercifully before being taken away to be hanged.
Another commonplace scene further along in the novel: "Now they were in the interior of the camp, among the soldiers. . . . Everything would have been normal if you hadn't seen so many sick men: sick men in the mud, sick men on sacks of straw, sick men on the wagons - not merely wounded men, but men with sores, men with bumps on their faces, men with watering eyes and drooling mouths. Not a few lay there motionless and bent; you couldn't have said whether they were dead or dying."
Even the nobility, eminent personages such as Elizabeth the Winter Queen (exiled daughter of King James of England) do not escape hunger and squalor. The author's episodes focusing on Queen Elizabeth and her weak King husband traveling though harsh, forbidding terrain underscore how the four horsemen of the apocalypse representing pestilence, war, famine and death ride in triumph throughout Europe's Thirty Years' War. And the four horsemen spare none.
None, that is, except jester Tyll. For when Queen Elizabeth offers Tyll the opportunity to return to England with her so he can enjoy daily soup, thick blankets, warm slippers until he dies in a soft bed, Tyll replies he knows what's even better - no dying.
Daniel Kehlmann's novel is a book to be relished. I urge you to pick up a copy and share in the triumph of lightness and art over the forces of stupidity, cruelty and barbarism no matter what point in history.
German/Austrian novelist Daniel Kehlmann, born 1975
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