Daniel Kehlmann ‘Tyll‘

Booker International Prize 2020: 6 Books shortlisted for this prize.

1. “Tyll”: In order of reading book number 1.

I don’t normally follow this prize in detail but I end up reading some of the shortlisted books, since, due to the confinement, the award has been delayed and I’m into my third book of the six, I thought here goes
In order to follow this event, hopefully I’ll manage to write articles on all six of the short listed books and propose my winner before the official announcement.

Visit the official site for more details: Booker International Prize 2020

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Tyll Ulenspiegel… sang a mocking ballad about the poor, stupid Winter King, the Elector Palatine, who had thought he could defeat the Kaiser and accept Prague’s crown from the Protestants, yet his kingship had melted away even before the snow. He sang about the Kaiser too, who was always cold from praying, the little man trembling before the Swedes in the imperial palace in Vienna, and then he sang about the King of Sweden, the Lion of Midnight, strong as a bear, but of what use had it been to him against the bullets in Lützen that took his life like that of any mere soldier, and out was your light, and gone the little royal soul, gone the lion! Tyll Ulenspiegel laughed, and we laughed too, because you couldn’t resist him and because it did us good to remember that these great men were dead and we were still alive, and then he sang about the King of Spain with his bulging lower lip, who believed he ruled the world even though he was broke as a chicken.

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Daniel Kehlmann’s latest novel places the legend of Tyll in the Europe’s thirty years war where some estimates suggest up to fifty percent of the population of Germany succumbed to war and it’s byproducts famine and disease. The book is organised into separate stories involving the jester Tyll and the events of this complex war of the early seventeenth century. As the book begins, near the end of the war, Tyll arrives in a village of about one hundred people, so far spared by the war and amongst juggling, theatre and tightrope walking he tells the story of the war so far as in the opening quote in a language that would be easily understood by the people at the time and is at the same time a prologue to the book we are about to discover.

We move back to Tyll’s youth and one of the events this war for control of Europe between the Habsburgs, catholics and the Lutherians and Calvinists becomes known for. A previous peace treaty had set that if the ruler of one of the areas in the contested parts of Germany should be of a religion, or convert then everyone under his rule should be of the same religion. Thus when two Jesuits arrived in their village at the behest of the ruler, Kehlmann uses the individual story as an illustration of the global situation as Tyll’s father is tried for witchcraft, with the full use of torture and the Jesuit’s reasoned explanation for their “fair” trial.

Tyll lives through a number of events, becoming the Jester to the Calvinist Winter King, Frederick V, whose reclamation of the kingdom of Bohemia was the event which started the war and who had been deposed after one winter. Frederick was married to Elizabeth Stuart and it is through her, years later that we visit the peace conference, a surreal process where none of the key protagonists were allowed to be present and their negotiators had little or no power to come to agreements.

On the road with Tyll we see the brutality and filth of this war with camps of one hundred thousand soldiers but no latrines, of the intervention of the king of Sweden on the Protestant side and eventually the intervention in the war of France, against the Habsburgs, and thus on the Protestant side.

If you know nothing of this period of history, and here I hold my hand up, this is a fascinating way of discovering it

First Published in German as “Tyll” in 2017 by Rowohlt. Translated into English by Ross Benjamin and published in 2020 as Tyll by Pantheon. Translated into French by Juliette Aubert and published in 2020 as “Le Roman de Tyll Ulespiègle” by Actes Sud