Author Markus Gasser

Dangerous: when stubbornness becomes a symptom

Author Markus Gasser focuses on high tension and scary moments in "Lil".

(Bild: Gian Carlo Castelberg)

A woman tries to free herself from the clutches of psychiatry in the 19th century: With "Lil", Vorarlberg author Markus Gasser has produced an exciting historical page-turner - and the story of female self-assertion. In this interview, he talks about what it means to be a man or a woman and whether that is even the right question.

"Krone": Your novel "Lil" is about a woman who falls into the clutches of a psychiatrist at the end of the 19th century and ends up in an insane asylum. Madness was still a great unknown at the time, but very specific treatment methods were already available. How should we imagine that?
Markus Gasser: Back then, psychiatry was still a mixture of half-baked insights, esotericism, theosophy, the Far East and lots and lots of speculation ... In the end, the psychiatry of today was formed from this, of course in many, often sensible stages of development. The most important man in those years was Richard von Krafft-Ebing with his standard works on mental illness. To this day, his definitions can be found verbatim in the current classification systems. Among other things, he defined "persistent grief disorder". And that is what Lil Cutting was diagnosed with: Krafft-Ebing did not allow anyone to grieve for more than six months - irreverent. Anyone who went beyond that deviated from the norm. But the norm was set arbitrarily. So you were quickly considered psychologically damaged.

Your book is oppressive in places. Because it was so terribly easy to lock up women like Lil.
Psychiatry at the time worked with circular reasoning, as it still does today - as psychiatrists themselves openly admit. Anyone who suffered from a persistent grief disorder and associated depression and refused treatment, i.e. did not submit like Lil, immediately had an "oppositional defiant disorder". According to the diagnosis, this in turn deepened the depression and grief disorder - and so you find yourself in a vicious circle that is almost impossible to get out of. My book is not against psychiatry, but against its abuse. And there is a difference between a cardiologist, who can measure what is wrong with your heart, and psychiatry, which is still groping around in the twilight. I myself was once diagnosed with a psychological problem due to headaches - with the prescription of appropriate psychotropic drugs. As it turned out, this was a misdiagnosis, in reality it was a cluster headache.

The book is also about how peculiarities can quickly end up on symptom lists. You could ask: where is this leading, is the original person going to die out?
Freedom is, as the legal scholar Hans Kelsen said, the primal urge of human beings. If stubbornness is pathologized, we have a problem. Moreover, almost everyone is already psychiatrizing themselves today. Even putting off work, "procrastination", is now considered a pathological disorder. We should also be careful with the word "depressive", as the term has withered into a fad.

(Bild: C. H. Beck Verlag, Krone KREATIV)

Perhaps this is due to the rampant desire to optimize?
I would speak of self-optimization mania, clearly a phenomenon of our time. We constantly want to get better, correct ourselves and not get any older - even though we can't prevent it at all. In Don DeLillo's novel "Zero K", people are frozen in order to escape death - a kind of super hell.

There are readers who were disturbed by a dog talking to itself in Bonnie Garmu's "A Question of Chemistry". In "Lil", "Miss Brontë" appears - a dog who even talks to the narrator Sarah Cutting.
For me, it's not about the fact that "Miss Brontë" talks, but whether she actually talks to the narrator Sarah - and if so, why? Is Sarah just imagining it, yes or no? In any case, Sarah wants an expanded world in which animals can also speak. Anyone who is bothered by a talking dog has missed the point. Nabokov once said: "There are certainly bad writers, but unfortunately there are also bad readers."

Now, even in the Bible, it is disreputable to work with money. But if a woman does it, then of course it's a disaster!

Markus Gasser

Women who were not harmless and well-adjusted lived in constant danger of being labeled as "man-wives". It was said that they almost provoked humiliation from men. At least that's how it's put in your novel.
Yes, that comes directly from Krafft-Ebing's writings. That the violence that men use against women is provoked by the natural stubbornness of women. You have to imagine that! And that could simply be asserted as psychiatry didn't have to prove anything. There was a respected psychiatrist in the USA at the time. His most popular method was to pull out all the teeth - when diagnosing female melancholy. The removal of the uterus and clitoris was also common - for masturbation. But even the "clinical picture of homosexuality" was only removed from the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) in 1991. In my novel, however, the psychiatrist is called to account for what he has previously done to many women ...

(Bild: Gian Carlo Castelberg)

Were you never worried that you might be criticized for creating a female character as a man in the course of discussions about cultural appropriation?
A kind of gender appropriation? There is a tradition of this: many male authors write from the perspective of women, from J.M. Coetzee to Kazuo Ishiguro. Moreover, I don't make the mistake that Tolstoy did in "Anna Karenina": letting the woman run to her doom. I tell the story of self-assertion. There are also enough calls today, especially from female authors, who advocate that sophisticated literature should be allowed to do anything. If you start with Cancel Culture, literature becomes streamlined, boring, ideological. And my novel is precisely about what a man is and what a woman is - and about whether that is perhaps the completely wrong question. We are all always much more than we think at first glance.

With Lil Cutting, you have created a female character who doesn't have to fight her way from the bottom to the top - because she has already reached the top.
I thought about what it would mean if Lil wasn't a typical woman from back then, but a big businesswoman, i.e. a "capitalist"? I was writing against the anti-capitalist affect, which is often also interspersed with anti-Semitism. There were successful women back then too, but hardly anyone remembers them today: Hetty Green, for example, who was vilified as "the witch of Wall Street". Yet she was the oracle of Wall Street and anticipated Warren Buffett's investment techniques. Now, even in the Bible, working with money is considered disreputable. But if a woman does it, then of course it's a disaster!

You repeatedly emphasize the concept of freedom. What can we learn from "Lil the Kill"?
To go against any norm that the fashion of the time dictates if you want to do something different. The anarchic stubbornness, the love of work. A reader asked me why I, as a man, am getting stuck into this feminist topic. Quite simply because my mother brought me up in the spirit of Simone de Beauvoir. Her principles have stayed with me. Freedom is the most fundamental thing of all. I think an ethic could be built on a single sentence: Nobody wants to be locked up and tortured.

Who needs a pool? Instead of water, only the leaves of Markus Gasser's many books rustle here.

(Bild: Gian Carlo Castelberg)

On the one hand, it is always claimed that books will soon be a relic of bygone days, but on the other, online reading sessions with authors are booming - and the number of published books is not exactly small either. Your YouTube channel "Literature Is Everything" also attracts thousands. So we're not as lazy about reading as we're often told?
Enthusiasm generates enthusiasm. The channel was deliberately directed against the so-called gatekeepers who tell you what you should and shouldn't read. I divide the world of books into those that I am still too immature to love and those that I already love. There are no bad books. I have learned something from every book.

So you predict a happy and, above all, long future for the book medium?
I grew up at a time when the novel was declared dead. Then suddenly Süskind's "Parfum" and Kehlmann's "Vermessung" came along - wow! At last something was happening again in German literature. At the turn of the millennium, it was said that audiobooks were taking over from books. But the elevator hasn't replaced the staircase either. I am generally against the eternal talk of doom. Anyone who constantly conjures up crises and catastrophes wants them and has them. But what I miss is a powerful constructive orientation from critics like Reich-Ranicki, although as a novelist I could do without his occasional negativity ...

Are you currently in the relaxation phase after the novel?
No, in the tension phase: discussions with readers in digital reader groups such as "Whatchareadin" and "LovelyBooks", appearances in Dornbirn, Munich, Berlin, constantly on the road. Now you're stepping out of this author life where you sit at your desk, now you have to pay for what you've done.

Back to the dog: was there a living role model for "Miss Brontë"?
Yes, my German shepherd "Gandhi". I often think: If only he could talk for a day! If only I could ask him: "How can I make your life more beautiful?" If only he didn't just have to communicate with his paws and teeth. Just say a few sentences - a simple, beautiful, fantastic thought. The world comes alive through something like that. And "Gandhi's" portrayal of "Miss Brontë" also brings humor to the novel. Humor can be used to cope with all sorts of things, even the most terrible - right up to castration, as at the end of "Lil".