Mistake! Mistake said the rooster…. and stepped down from the duck
Lumiar Cité
Curator: Jürgen Bock
Artists: Gabriel Barbi, Hubert Fichte, Ramiro Guerreiro, Ana Jotta, Euridice Kala, Simon Thompson
The first project station of Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology is Lisbon (including the nearby seaside resort of Sesimbra). This stop refers to Fichte’s novel Eine Glückliche Liebe (A Happy Love), set in 1964, and completed by Fichte during his visit to Grenada in 1984. Even before he completed it, it was apparent to the author that this working holiday for a writer and photographer from Germany would serve as something of a prelude to Fichte and Leonore Mau’s multi-year research trips on both sides of the Black Atlantic. Nevertheless, Fichte narrates from the vantage point of the not yet successful but already recognized young author who would go on to write a best-selling novel (Die Palette) during his stay in Sesimbra and Lisbon.
Not only is the novel a working journal and detailed documentation of Portuguese society under Salazar, particularly the human rights situation in general and especially for gay men. It is, more than anything, a love story: a “happy love” between the mismatched couple of Jäcki and Irma, Fichte and Mau’s alter egos. But more than anything it is sexual love, which manifests itself in many forms, the gay and heterosexual subcultures of a small fishing region in the midst of a transformation to tourist center, and Jäcki’s love for Mario, whom he cannot bring himself to invite for dinner with Irma. And even more than this it is a revelation of a new side to gay love, which Jäcki discovers for the first time on the now penniless couple’s chaotic return trip across the better part of Europe: „– I don’t think you’d let yourself, Irma remarked. — I’m letting myself now. To Jäcki it seemed like the only transformation, other than birth itself, offered up by nature. That was the something else entirely. (…) Jäcki had been transformed once more.“ Jäcki’s shattering sexual experience in a Parisian steam bath contrasts with the extraordinary harmony and intimacy detailed in the dialogue between the couple, Jäcki and Irma, on the topic of happiness.
Eine Glückliche Liebe is the fourth volume of Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit (The History of Sensitivity). It is preceded by the novel Hotel Garni, set in the late 1950s, in which Jäcki and Irma recount their earlier lives to one another. In Die zweite Schuld (The Second Debt), the setting is Fichte/Jäcki’s residency at the Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin, and the interactions of the German literary elite of the early 1960s with their gay, Jewish, and surrealist colleagues. In Der kleine Hauptbahnhof oder der Lob des Strichs (The Little Main Station; or, In Praise of Cruising), a depiction of cultural and literary life in Hamburg in the early 1960s is set against scenes from the city’s sexual subcultures.
