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Bodo Kirchhoff: “There was always a talk, only now Talk about it”

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A study shows that the mass abuse of children by Catholic priests – now the processing start, declares the Church. The writer Bodo Kirchhoff has done that for itself already.



“It’s always the dark pages of our biography, to accompany us there, where another naked waiting for us,” writes Bodo Kirchhoff 2004 in his novel “Where the sea begins”.

A programmatic sentence that could stand as a stone-carved inscription about his entire work. In his novels and short stories diving to his biography pictures rejected repeatedly: the half-naked Kantor in the boarding school, the sports teacher, waiting sometimes a mother half-naked in bed or a classmate. It pursued him.

His “abuse” began as an almost four year old on summer vacation with his mother, who took him to bed. The term “abuse” does not like Kirchhoff. It won’t help and will the contradictions of the personal drama is not, wrote Kirchhoff 2010 in a much-publicized Essay for the “mirror”. “The so-called abuse – of course, cross confessional, what else – leaves behind a tremendous voice hole. It is a hole, the word scar would be a euphemism, that neither the time processes can heal; the term Statute of limitations is in any case absurd.”

Successful writer: Bodo Kirchhoff (re) at the award ceremony of the German book prize in 2016

For Bodo Kirchhoff, 1948 born in Hamburg and as a child in the black forest and grew up, was to Write later therapy. The workaholism, the clean knees in the fates of fictional characters of the novel, did him good. The literary stories were his weapon, to deal with the past.

Speechless Child

With his novel “Infanta” landed the well-known German writer in 1990, a Bestseller for weeks, his book was ranked number one in the bestseller lists. Kirchhoff was a popular talk show guest. After that, it was difficult for him, to his success. What caught stopped him mentally, compulsive, unproductive, driven by recurring memories, he revealed later, and now, in his recently published autobiography.

Kirchhoff is one of the writers who have come out boldly and unequivocally in Interviews as “Affected”. In his Childhood he has experienced multiple sexual Assaults. As a boarding school student, just twelve years old. The culprit: school Cantor, his religion teacher: playing guitar, long-haired, Roth-Händle-Smoking, VW-Cabrio-driver and insinuating locker on it. A ruthless pederast in the service of the Protestant Church, the operation of the boarding school at the time.

Ignore, Look the other way, Cover up was Done, the answer to the monstrous, reported by Bodo Kirchhoff in Inteviews. “In the boarding school there was no scandal, there was only questioned by people who wanted to know everything exactly, to excite, rather it. I had to talk about something that had no language, I had to invent one, even so, you will be a writer.”

Urgent Openness

The abuse scandal at the Odenwald school brought him in 2010 to publish not the literary Packed, but something very Personal. Brave Bodo Kirchhoff wrote, in Public, the own load of the soul, in the Form of autobiographical Essays, published in the magazine “der Spiegel”.

Also at the Odenwald school, there was an abuse scandal

He could understand why none of the Affected had appealed to a perhaps protective of the Public. “It is better to retain the intimate dirt for themselves, as him for a dirt-hungry world to suspend, the only disrespectful shaken.”

“Writing is a craft plus its own abyss, the one without the other is nothing,” said Kirchhoff, the curious students in his Frankfurt poetics lectures in 1994. In the event, which bore the clever title of “legends of the own body,” he reported from the painful craft of the writer, whose personal history always writes. At that time, be careful confession was not met with open ears. The time was not ripe. Today, he would probably talk differently about it.

“Writing is the incarnation”

His latest book, “Twilight and turmoil. Novel of the early years”, which has in these days of his book launch, is a disguised autobiography. The title hints at the conflict that will pave in the early 1950/60s, the lives of the young Bodo Kirchhoff. A novel that appears at exactly the right time: a year after the global uproar by #MeToo, there are other Scandals.

The Chairman of the German bishops ‘ conference as a response to the recently published comprehensive study of the mass abuse of minors by representatives of the Catholic Church – on Tuesday (25.09.2018) a year-long Look the other way, Deny, and Cover-up officially granted.

Cardinal Reinhard Marx promised consistent detection of all cases of abuse

Cardinal Reinhard Marx found clear and unequivocal words: “I am ashamed for the trust that has been destroyed; for the crimes, the people by officials of the Church did,” he told the press. For the writer Bodo Kirchhoff the remains of a wound, there was a cope at the end of anything: “The true Drama remains almost always untold.”

 

Books by Bodo Kirchhoff:

“Twilight and turmoil. Novel of the early years” (2018), “chattel” (2016),”love Breviary for Advanced students” (2012), “love in broad outline” (2012), “begins The little Garbo” (2006), “Where the sea” (2004), “Infanta” (1990), “the loneliness of The skin” (1981)

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