Laudatio

Friedrich-Glauser-Award 2001 for "The Twin Trap" by Horst Eckert

Uta-Maria Heim: Tribute to Horst Eckert

Dear Horst Eckert, dear audience,

So I´ve finally gotten rid of the suitcase full of money which spent the year in my closet - empty, unfortunately; no, I didn´t fill it with dirty laundry. Now the suitcase passes on to Horst Eckert, fixed up, full of small used bills, and we hope he´ll bring it home safely. I´m happy for Horst Eckert. "The Twin Trap" is a great book.

The first impression was irresistible. I read "The Twin Trap" at one go. From Berlin to Stuttgart, and when the train stopped, I went on reading. The same thing happened to the other jurors. They couldn't stop either. "The Twin Trap", by Horst Eckert, was one of the few titles which gripped us from the first sentence to the last.

"The world was full of holes he fell into, landing in places he never wanted to go." With this brilliant sentence Horst Eckert opens the first chapter. Isn´t that a wonderful first sentence? It reminds me of world literature's brilliant beginnings. Such as: "I´m not Stiller!" Or: "So, this is where people come to live, I would be more apt to think it a place for dying." (That was Rilke.) But in fact "The Twin Trap" counts as light fiction. As so-called trash. The book is a "cop opera" in the best sense of the word: a mystery which heightens the professional image of the state investigator in solemnly bizarre fashion. "The world was full of holes he fell into, landing in places he never wanted to go."

"He" is "Rambo" Leo Köster, the number 1 man in a Düsseldorf special unit. A friendly 35-year-old redhead, once a cheerful victor type, who evidently suffers from Parkinson's. His right hand shakes. Köster combats his fear with cocaine. His therapy for loneliness (like Stiller) is whisky. Whisky loosens the tongue. Leo Köster has bad luck with women and problems with his son. But somehow he scrapes through anyway. He has the stuff of a tragic antihero, including a hopeful streak.

Köster alone would be enough to fill a novel. But then we have the beautiful, constantly mobbed special unit head Ela Bach and the sensitively cunning, brutally courageous Inspector Martin Zander from "Burglary", around whom all the other green and grey uniforms proliferate like leaves. Horst Eckert develops a biotope of policemen. Three main characters take center stage, all of them balancing on the edge of an abyss. And in their midst lies the trap, like a stagnant, stinking pool covered by a rusty net. Whatever corner of the net is raised, toxic clumps of mud and filth come to light, gradually giving shape to a premonition of the horrible affair.

At first the cases seem to be independent of one another. Arson, burglary, rape, a "dead bird", as a person who died a natural death is called - all these are things which occupy the police on a daily basis. Then the actual case begins to emerge from the routine, and we realize that everything has to do with everything else. Everything is connected, nothing is left to coincidence, and no one can escape this snarl of poison, corruption and perverted violence. Everything becomes worse and worse. And the full sweep of the catastrophe does not become evident until the end: a conclusion which spares no one and leaves no illusions. However, there is something more behind this devastating finale. There, in hints, a possibility emerges. Behind the final denouement is a big, questioning, grinning But.

This mystery embraces all social classes. It is infinitely complex, and the end of each entanglement leads to a new one, still more horrible and repulsive than the last. The "Twin Trap" is a quiet, precise, never clumsy book with a revolting message. Horst Eckert is never cynical; he describes instances of violence and sexism without exploiting them. What shimmers through is an unsparing love of humanity which makes crude functionaries into fascinatingly ambiguous characters.

My favorite moment is on page 262, 90 pages before the end. It is a key scene. Zander meets Ela, and in the course of their conversation one thing becomes clear: the profoundly corrupt and dilapidated structure of the police force is the exact mirror image of the devastating reality around it. Pursued and pursuer are interchangeable. That is also how I understand the deeper meaning of the title "The Twin Trap". On the literal level it refers, not once but twice, to half-siblings, and on a deeper level of meaning it refers to the interchangeability of the processes within society and state apparatus. In other words, the police force and the state are the spitting image of each other. The state is a police state to the same extent as the various levels of the police force mirror the deplorable state of society. The intermeshing of the police system exactly corresponds to the intermeshing of society. The dirty police are, so to speak, a metaphor of the dirty society, and that makes this so-called "cop opera" a critical novel of society.

We were at page 262. Inspector Zander meets Ela, and gradually the devastating truth emerges: everyone thinks only of himself. All are willing to do anything to get ahead. A career is an end in itself, and opportunism is common practice. Success is the only goal, and for that people will stop at nothing. The corrupt embroilments within the police force, twins to the perverted criminal embroilments of the case, emerge here in a stinking snarl. They bring Ela to a devastating conclusion. "That was the whole secret, thought Ela. Everyone uses everyone else. Everyone takes everyone for a ride. Or at least tries to. Those were the rules, and Ela could not change them."

Even though the police gradually begin to support one another, even though they go through a learning process, forming a moral social organism within a murderous structure, they are unable to change the deadly power of the status quo. All the same Ela keeps going in the end, Leo Köster keeps going, Zander keeps going. The heroes´ perseverance has a bitter and utopian core. For the world will continue to be full of those holes they fall into, landing in places they never wanted to go.

This is a mystery novel which fictionalizes a tiny cross-section of German reality, going under the skin in breathtaking manner. Twenty or thirty years from now, anyone who wants to learn about the turn of the millenium should read Horst Eckert.

A great book, an honor to the "Glauser"! We are delighted to congratulate Horst Eckert on it. Congratulations, Horst Eckert, for the "Glauser" 2001!

Quotes:
Horst Eckert: The Twin Trap, Dortmund: grafit 2000
Max Frisch: Stiller
R. M. Rilke: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

also read the review by William Adamson, Raymond-Chandler-Society