Volker Braun's 'Le Grand Bousillage' Explores Work and Madness

Volker Braun's novel 'Le Grand Bousillage' (Métailié) follows foreman Flick, a man in his sixties laid off from a lignite mine in Lauchhammer, Lusatia (southeastern Brandenburg, near Poland). Flick, too old and specialized in a dying industry, becomes unemployable and descends into a comical, unstoppable frenzy. Accompanied by his hipster grandson Luten, he takes on absurd jobs: in factories, hospitals, picking strawberries in the Pouilles, wielding a chainsaw in Spandau, even guarding art at the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin. Braun, born in Dresden, worked as a printer, studied philosophy in Leipzig, was a young dramaturge at the Berliner Ensemble under Heiner Müller, and later a poet and essayist. He was surveilled by the Stasi after the 1968 Prague Spring but received major literary prizes, including the Georg-Büchner Prize in 2000. The novel examines work in East Germany, after reunification, and today. Braun's ironic style blends picaresque tradition with modern critique: Flick's antics create a new form of 'ready-made + body art.' A blank page (139) echoes Laurence Sterne's 'Tristram Shandy.' The name Flick also references Friedrich Flick, the Nazi-era industrialist who later became a major Daimler-Benz shareholder.