Tim Krohn

Aus dem Leben einer Matratze bester Machart

«September 1935 was unseasonably warm, and the prospect of running down to the Ticino from Berlin in his open-top Isotta-Fraschini was irresistible.»

Immanuel Wassermann is a Jewish dyestuff manufacturer from Berlin. When he meets Gioia, a young, pretty girl from Sicily, in Locarno, they are both lost the moment they set eyes on each other. It's love at first sight and they get married the next day. They spend their wedding night on a brand-new mattress, which Wassermann is determined to buy from the hotelier, who runs the hotel they‘re staying in in Swabia – not only because it’s unbelievably comfortable, which it is! – but also for Gioia’s sake, because there’s a little spot of blood on the mattress, which won’t come out.
In Tim Krohn’s story «From the Life of a Perfect Mattress», this quality product finds uses way beyond the lives of the Wassermanns, whose marriage falls apart after only a short time. In an ingenious and entertaining tale, Krohn makes the mattress the indispensable element in a series of strange events spanning the whole of the 20th century. At one point, it serves as both mattress and temporary home for a poor couple, Rosi and Heinz Stalder, in their emergency accommodation after the Second World War. Years later, Lorenz and Sibylle take the mattress with them in their ‹Deux Chevaux›, as they make a futile attempt to drive through the Summer snow over the St Gotthard Pass. Via strange detours and by-ways, the mattress fetches up in Italy, first in Rome, then in the sea, where an angler falls into the water and has to swim for his life. And finally, its remains are washed up at Beaulieu-sur-Mer, near Nice – where this delightful, effortlessly told story ends in a most surprising way.

(Martin Zingg)

Recommended for translation by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia:
www.12swissbooks.ch

Translation of title: From the Life of a Perfect Mattress

Galiani Verlag, Berlin 2014

ISBN: 978-3-86971-088-4