Maxim Biller is a colorful, forthright character. But, as the 64-year-old Czech-born German author says, as a person of letters, to some degree or other you are always going to tell your own story. As such, having a clear idea of who you are, your beliefs, and your place in society can certainly facilitate the storytelling process and provide the requisite firepower.
Biller is coming to Israel from his residence in Berlin to participate in this year’s Jerusalem International Writers Festival, which takes place in Mishkenot Sha’ananim from May 19 to May 22.
In addition to Biller, celebrated Israeli writer and artistic director Julia Fermentto-Tzaisler has succeeded in securing the participation of other A-listers from abroad, such as controversial French novelist, poet, and filmmaker Michel Houellebecq; lauded compatriot political philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy; and Argentine writer, screenwriter, playwright, and documentarian Ariana Harwicz.
As always, the Israeli literary community will be in high-profile attendance as well, with the likes of internationally renowned novelist, children’s book writer, and screenwriter Dorit Rabinyan; author and photojournalist Lihi Lapid; literary researcher, editor, and media personality Bilha Ben-Eliyahu; and poet Bacol Serlui.
The human element
Biller is an interviewer’s dream. He speaks his mind, doesn’t pull his punches, and has nary a qualm about clashing with the PC police, although he tends to summarily ignore the whole concept.
“I always found the term ‘political correctness’ [to be] as dumb as the people who hate political correctness. I have nothing to do with this,” he declares. “I don’t care much about what people think about what I say or think.”
He also tells his own story in all his works, across a range of genres, age groups, and market areas. In the process, he has also culled a bevy of awards and, it must be said, attracted his fair share of vitriol, furor, and even a court-imposed ban on his 2003 book Esra.
The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany ruled that the tale was too close for comfort to reality and that the characters in the book, largely based on Biller’s previous relationship, resembled the actual people to such a degree that it would be damaging to his former lover and daughter.
There is always a quintessentially human element to Biller’s writing that makes it so attractive. One can learn much about him and his background from his books.
Take, for example, Sechs Koffer (Six Suitcases), which came out in 2018 and was shortlisted for the German Book Prize. The novel tells the story of a Russian-Jewish family that flees communism to the West. It also spins a dense web of betrayal and dark family secrets passed down through the generations.
It is not hard to decipher the numerous references to real-life events and familial offshoots, even though Biller parries my suggestion that, at the very least, that is the impression a reader naturally takes from it.
“Well, there is so much invented in it,” he remarks. “And most of the things I write in it – I don’t know, it’s in my head. There is the story of the father of the main character, who is telling the story, who might have had – or had – an affair with his sister-in-law. That’s total invention.”
That may be the case, but Biller’s family did actually escape to the western side of the Iron Curtain from Prague in 1968. Sechs Koffer mentions four brothers. Biller’s father had three siblings, and Biller’s paternal grandfather was, indeed, executed by the Soviet authorities as related in the book. “Yes, that part is autobiographical, but everything around it was invented.”
I took Biller’s word for it, but, at his own admission, everything he writes references something in his personal backdrop. “What else can I tell except for my story?” he posits. “I don’t have many characters who are completely remote from me,” he adds.
There is one. “I wrote a novel called The Daughter. It was published in 2001. It is a story of an Israeli guy who commits a terrible war crime with his best friend in the First Lebanon War.
“He runs away to Germany, has a German wife, and has a child with her and becomes even more unhappy. This is not my story at all, unless you say that when I wrote it, I had a German girlfriend,” he chuckles.
'My life is my material'
There are other conduits Biller employs to get his creative juices flowing. “That book was very much inspired by Married Life by [German-Jewish author and poet] David Vogel [published in 1929]. But for most of the things I write, my life is my material. Of course, what else could it be?”
That goes for all creative pursuits, regardless of the discipline. Painters, sculptors, playwrights, filmmakers – they all feed off their own experiences, pursuant take on life, and accrued wisdom, whether they like it or not. Of course, there are professional and artistic filters through which artists color and mold the end product, but the core is always inescapably fueled by firsthand knowledge and emotions.
The latter, for Biller, is a must. “There can’t be literature without autobiographical inspiration,” he determines. “You can, as a source, have the story of your family and Stalinism, fascism, or some Shoah story. But it can also be about a guy who is trapped in a room for a year. You can also write about that, but my cradle [or touchstone] is that you have to have felt something.”
Acclaimed men and women of letters also, naturally, provide him with a springboard for his projects. He cites the likes of feted Jewish Soviet author and playwright Isaac Babel, who, like Biller’s grandfather, fell victim to the Soviet regime. Biller’s new book about Babel is currently awaiting publication.
“[Celebrated American 20th-century writer J.D. Salinger, [Jewish Romanian Holocaust survivor poet Paul] Celan, [Jewish Polish Holocaust victim writer] Bruno Schulz – that was published in Israel [in Hebrew].” They may be all fascinating, well-documented characters who were not only supremely gifted and made a name for themselves, but they also cast a spell over Biller and share a degree of personal common ground with him.
“I take the story of a guy, and I write it. But, in the end, I say wow, of course, it’s about me. Yes, it is always about me.”
For Biller, there are no compromises on the personal creativity wellspring. He comes up with a seemingly fundamentally contradictory statement. “Writers who invent stories have no imagination. Yes, I know that is paradoxical. What I mean is they are not honest with their own lives. They don’t want to be attached to their own lives.”
There is no wiggle room here. “When young writers ask me how should I do it [write], I say, first of all, you need to have a talent, you need to be able to use language like [Daniel] Barenboim knows how to use the piano.”
That sounds perfectly reasonable. The straight-shooting, no-nonsense Biller kicks in. “Second, write only things that will make your relatives and friends angry because they don’t want you to write things they don’t want other people to know. The total truth is so important.”
Say what you want about Biller, but no one could possibly accuse him of falling on any of the above. In Six Suitcases, for example, there are numerous references to the Jewishness of the characters, to the point of alluding, in robust fashion, to subliminal Jewish attributes and features.
At the end of the day, there is no escaping the fact – not that he makes any pretense – that Biller is undeniably Jewish, a German-speaking writer, and an escapee from Soviet totalitarianism. He is also something of a fish out of water.
“I came to Germany when I was 10 years old. When I was 15-16, in 1976, I was in high school surrounded by German youth who were left wing; they didn’t understand what they were reading [about politics]. They were against nuclear power stations, and they were extremely antisemitic.”
With his innate knowledge of how things really were on the Communist side of the Iron Curtain and his Jewish roots, Biller soon found himself looking in from the outside. That hasn’t changed, almost half a century on.
“That is when I said goodbye to the Germans,” he states. Pointing out the obvious, I reminded him that he still lives in Germany.
“I only have non-German friends,” he qualifies. “I hardly have any German friends. It’s a paradoxical Diaspora situation.” And Biller has no intention of settling that. “Don’t tell me to go and live in Israel because everyone is where he is,” he adds. Ne’er a plainer truism was spoken.
A 'big Zionist'
There are, I learn, all kinds of twists and turns in Biller’s familial plot. “My father helped the refuseniks in the ‘70s when they left the Soviet Union and [were] on their way to Israel – supposedly. They would stay in our home, sometimes for weeks. He was a big Zionist. Many of the refuseniks ended up in Australia, Canada, and New York, but not in Israel. He stopped talking to them.”
The apple, it seems, did not fall too far from the tree. “Despite all that, my father lived in Germany. So maybe I am becoming like my father.”
That is not entirely to his liking. Then again, it is not all bad hereditary news. “I want very much to be special like my mother, and I want partially to be like my father. But I don’t have this.” How about just being like Maxim? I venture. “Oh, I have a very strong character. Don’t worry about that.” You can say that again.
Biller’s stories are told fluently. Even his 2015 book Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz, which wends this way and that as it straddles the ostensibly disparate lines of biographical fact and surreal fiction, makes for a compelling, freely flowing read.
The Holocaust features here, notwithstanding Biller’s claim that he has no related trauma, only Soviet Union-related baggage. The story seeps through powerful, often biting, imagery as we follow the hero as he does his damnedest to avert inevitable disaster.
His latest novel, Mama Odessa, which came out in German in 2023 and which Biller would very much like to see published in Hebrew, finds the writer once again mining his seemingly inexhaustible domestic seams. It tells the story of a family who, like Biller’s own, fled the Eastern Bloc in the 1970s. They may have relocated corporeally, but the past just refuses to go away.
The Berliner is also well capable of delivering tongue-in-cheek lines and dropping a funny once in a while, albeit of a pretty murky hue. “Yes, my humor is dark, but it is also tragic, and it can be grotesque,” he notes.
While that may sound a little challenging to some, Biller says we could all do with a few more doses of that Reader’s Digest recipe of yore for a better life, as proffered in its regular “Laughter Is the Best Medicine” feature. Things, he says, are pretty desperate on that front.
“I have the feeling that almost no one in this world has humor. I just don’t know where it went.” He says he started doing his bit for the cause a long time ago. “I started telling Jewish jokes when I was 20.” His domestic backdrop helped.
“That is what I heard at home a lot, from my father and from his friend, who was a Polish Jewish writer. I don’t know anybody else who tells jokes.” Presumably, there are a few comics out there who would strenuously debate that notion, but that’s the way Biller sees it.
Biller is also something of a musician
In addition to his literary work, Biller is also something of a musician and has even put out a couple of albums over the years. Music, and its interfaces with Biller’s daytime job, crops up a couple of times during our conversation. “You have to have a talent for language. You can’t learn [how to use] language. Louis Armstrong couldn’t have become a great trumpeter if he didn’t have that talent. And you need to work,” he cautions.
I am not surprised when I hear that Biller prefers traditional instruments for his music-making endeavor, as well as in other genres. “I don’t like these cheap synthesizers they use now in Arabic music. I love [late Egyptian diva] Umm Kulthum and [now 90-year-old Lebanese singer] Fairuz.”
Biller says he gets a lot out of his sonic pursuit, and it benefits his writing. “Music is not my hobby. I am not a professional musician, but it opens my head and opens my heart to something else. By making music, you train your feeling for the rhythm of language. That’s very important.”
On May 19 (at 7 p.m.), Biller will appear via Zoom to converse with literary scholar Yaakov Herskovitz about his new novel, the role of the Jewish writer in Germany, and the shifting attitudes of German society toward him and toward Jews in general in the wake of Oct. 7. We will also get a sneak preview of Mama Odessa, with excerpts read by actor Yossi Marshek.
It should be anything but dull. Like Biller’s books.For tickets and more information
