Der Weg nach Oobliadooh

I knew a wonderful princess in the land of Oo-bla-dee. The longing motif of the youthful rebels Arlecq and Paasch originates from a phonetically altered and playful line from the bebop jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie: the outsiders dream of "decadent" music and Western literature, of a country that is not the GDR of the years 1957/58. Imagination without borders; Arlecchino and Pasquariello. The path to Oobliadooh, the spectacular literary debut of the then 31-year-old Fritz Rudolf Fries, a polyglot who grew up in Spain and a fantastically playful loner in the Leipzig province, did not lead to Bitterfeld in socialist literature, but rather into the language-artistic modernity of world literature. The virtuoso novelistic piece by Fritz Rudolf Fries naturally did not pass through censorship; it was published through the mediation of Uwe Johnson in Frankfurt am Main.