The childhood terrors of Judith Hermann

Spectator

21-05-2025

The German writer Judith Hermann burst on the literary scene in 1998 with her short story collection Summerhouse, Later, and was soon heralded as one of a new wave of Fräuleinwunder – girl wonders who were writing fiction that felt fresh and uninhibited. Now she has produced a memoir of sorts – in parts slyly moving, in others so stony-faced and self-serious as to border on the parodic.
First the parodic. The book opens one night in Berlin with Hermann running into the psychotherapist she has been seeing three times a week for ten years. Over the course of these sessions, she recalls, she fell in love, then out of love, with him, though he hardly spoke to her at all. This encounter feels initially charged and full of promise, but it leads nowhere in particular. Dr Dreehüs orders Hermann a gin and tonic, they chat, then she leaves. Readers who aren't signed up to the whole Hermann Fräuleinwunder thing might reasonably wonder why they should care. Later they might ask themselves the same thing when the author recounts, in grave detail, her dreams.
But eventually Hermann turns to childhood, and things get interesting. Brought up in a large, gloomy flat in Berlin, she was bullied by her father, who 'had a clear desire to frighten me'. He would work himself up into violent rages and once told her, to her lasting terror, that they had a lodger – a stunted man who lived in the suspended ceiling. This disturbing portrait is complicated when Hermann describes her closeness to her father in later life.