A gifted grump and poet talks about his life in a beer garden

It must have been a profound longing, if not a toxic kind of homesickness: Ludwig Fels lived in Vienna from 1983 onwards, and in 2018 he began writing a text about Franconia in Hesse, in which he once again delved deeply into the peculiarities of his birthplace: "A Sunday with Me and Beer" became an expansive reckoning between deep affection and profound mockery, a love-hate relationship that Fels delighted in writing. Now, four years after the poet's sudden death, the book has been published.

The Salzburg-based Jung-und-Jung publishing house, which oversees Fels's work, received the manuscript from the estate of his widow, Rosa Fels. So it's as if we're once again hearing the writer, born in 1946 in Treuchtlingen, Middle Franconia, reflect and remember, shuddering and joyful. A gifted grump, he meets us on a glorious day, which Fels spends resolutely and with a generous helping of beer in a beer garden. He cunningly places it in several places in Franconia: in Fürth, in Treuchtlingen, of course, but also in the open space of the Nuremberg Bratwursthäusle, where the tourists annoy him and the waitresses love him.

The setting: Fels is to be portrayed for television; at first, a camera whizzes around the grumpy man who really just wants to be left alone. But he is, after all, a specimen of a dying breed: "In reality, I'm not a working-class poet. If I am anything, it's a laborer's assistant writer with a typewriter arts and crafts diploma." The idea is to imagine a hard-working educated man with rolled-up sleeves, elbows in the toilet, who, on the side, "directs the muses like a swarm of mermaids gone wild." This classification really gets on Fels's nerves: He can't shake the image of the proletarian of poetry, just because in his Franconian youth, he wrote poems like an assembly line at the Werkkreis Literatur der Arbeitswelt (Workshop for Literature of the Working World) and novels on a construction site.

Of course, there's some truth to that. Ludwig Fels initially wrestled his art from his few free hours after work. And anyone who knew him would indeed have seen him late at night in some local pub, pen in hand, thoughts seemingly whirring around his quiet head. Fels persevered as a poet. Success with poems and eventually novels ("The Sins of Poverty," 1975, "An Abomination of Love," 1981) followed. But Franconia soon became too cramped, too stuffy, too burdened with youthful experiences that were anything but pleasant: for him, home was also poverty, deprivation, deprivation of love—nothing pleasant to remember. Of course, as a writer, he drew on these bitter experiences: In his books, he mistrusted the idylls, considering them murderous.

So now he's sitting in the beer garden, the unskilled laborer's assistant writer, babbling away to himself, playing with his hard-soft dialect like a puppy, smirking and letting it off the leash so that it can bite the calves of sightseeing strangers. He's a bit of an Achternbusch, peeping out from behind his beer glass, not saying anything good about the world. He dreams of success, which will surely follow after the next liter of beer, no matter how much the "Lideradurgridiger" may doubt him. There's a genius hidden in a rock, and in any case, the first Franconian Nobel Prize winner for literature. He sends a four-line poem to the "Nürnberger Nachrichten," which promptly prints it, and soon there are readings in the station bar, "which lasted twelve to thirteen seconds and was a complete success." A dreamer and self-lamenter who, unfortunately, doesn't pay taxes on his poetic lines.

At some point, this wonderfully comical text turns melancholy, and then it becomes a timid, almost sad autobiography, a piece about missed opportunities and the defiance of seizing them. Sitting at his desk in Vienna, the Franconian landscapes pass before him, and he encounters the people he both liked and despised. Fels sorts out his development, and it all culminates in the simple statement: "I'm here, I'm not saying anything."

Natascha Wodin has called this "Self-portrait in a beer garden" (as the subtitle suggests) the "powerful testimony of an incorruptible man." But there's nothing to add to that.

Ludwig Fels: A Sunday with Me and Beer. Self-portrait in a beer garden. Jung-und-Jung-Verlag, Salzburg 2025. 110 pp., Fr. 31.90.