The first world

The Swiss author Ju¨rg Amann has so far described mainly the dark sides of childhood and youth. Now he turns to the other, more difficult part: the description of the bright, the light. Which is what it takes in the end: to cast the shadows. Into what he calls "the first world". The world you find when you're born. Everyone has his, everyone has theirs. To counter the danger of idyll and kitsch from the outset, Amann set himself strict formal rules: He dedicates only one movement to each motif from the large field of childhood and adolescence. Everything that comes into the force field of specific memory must be captured in it. Only when this memory is exhausted, when the motif loses its attraction as the centre of gravity, does the sentence come to an end. And in the break, at the resting place of the blank line that separates one motif from the next, power is drawn again fu¨r the new jump, fu¨r the next sentence. So on and on, in a kind of - paradox ausgedru¨ckt - controlled écriture automatique, to the end of the chain of memory, to the very last point, more obeying the laws of music than the laws of prose. Everything is framed in an upbeat that sets the tone and a coda that makes it zuru¨cknimmt. The house is the centre, from the house the light wave spreads out in concentric circles and flows back into the house at the end zuru¨ck.