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Oliver Storz
Die Freibadclique / The Lido Clique
a novel
256 pages
fall 2008
Longing for the girl in the red bathing costume, with the sea-blue eyes
They long for swing and big-band sounds, for Lore in her red bathing costume and the end of eternal marching… For the lido clique, all born in 1929, the prescribed heroism no longer had a spark of significance. In an unusually vivid book combining poetry with a raw, laddish atmosphere, Oliver Storz recalls a memorable summer at the end of the war.
‘Somehow we’d gone wrong. We skipped school and Hitler Youth service, at night we hid under woollen blankets listening to foreign radio stations that played Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller, in short we weren’t much use, at least not as heroes…’
In the summer of 1944, somewhere in Swabia: Knuffke, Bubu, French-Kiss, Rosenacher and the narrative are fifteen, and they have their minds on anything but National Socialism. They want to know what being with girls is like, how to get through school and how to avoid the SS recruiters. But they have a sense that in spite of their well-trained casualness it’s survival that’s at stake. Then in April ’45, when they have to join the National Militia, their numbers are soon reduced to three; Rosenacher goes missing, French-Kiss had already snuffed it in a cornfield on the Siegfried line. When the three survivors risk their lives to make a getaway, they have no idea what’s going on at home, the US Army might even be there already… And eight weeks later, when school starts up again and they’re sitting at the same old desks, their stammering teacher comes in and asks, ‘S-s-s-so, then, wh-where were we?’
Three passages from this book have already been published in the weekend edition of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. (August 2006, July 2007, December 2007).
‘The western allies were approaching Aachen. The Russians were outside Warsaw. Bubu and I were jumping from the ten-metre board. For Lore. She was eighteen, and watching us anyway. When we climbed out of the pool she gave Bubu a kiss on the cheek. I would have got one too, but just at that moment her lieutenant from fighter-pilot school showed up, and she strolled off into the jasmine bushes with him. Even today I can see the movement with which she pulled the red bathing-suit out of her bum-crack. It was a closing image. Fifteen was a crap age to be.’
Oliver Storz was born in Mannheim in 1929 and grew up in Schwaebisch Hall. After a short time as a teacher, in 1957 he became the culture editor and drama critic of the Stuttgarter Zeitung. From 1960 he was a scriptwriter, producer and dramatic adviser at Bavaria Atelier, since 1976 he has been a freelance author and director. His films have won numerous awards including the Grimme Prize. His most successful recent film was the two-parter for ARD, ‘In the Shadow of Power’ (2003), about the Brandt-Guillaume affair. Oliver Storz has just finished shooting his latest film, ‘The Woman Who Vanished in the Forest’ – a major genre picture about the supposedly prudish 1950s.
All translation rights held by: SchirmerGraf Verlag, Munich
For further information please contact:
nina.beck(at)schirmer-graf.de