Helga Schubert: 'There's got to be distance between the writer and their story'

As the world lurches into 2025 we launch into another series of Fictionable podcasts. We'll be hearing from Joanna Kavenna, Rachida Lamrabet, Ben Sorgiovanni and Julian George over the next few weeks, but we start with Helga Schubert and her short story On Getting Up, translated by Aaron Sayne and Lillian M Banks.

Banks turns interpreter as Schubert explains how this story was awakened by an appearance on a panel discussing one of German literature's most prestigious awards, the Ingeborg Bachmann prize.

"The joke is," Schubert says, "the only reason I was even selected as a jury member was because I hadn't been allowed to take part when I was invited as an author in back in 1980."

It's a story that had to bide its time, Schubert continues. "I had to wait until my mother died, because I didn't want to subject her to the truth about this whole thing."

The stories in On Getting Up are all true, she insists, "They're all fragments, like ruins, or rubble I've come across in my life."

These pieces are then assembled in an almost mathematical construction to make a coherent whole.

"Everything has to add up precisely," Schubert explains, "nothing is coincidental… It's really as if I were building something, a house for example. It's as if I'm sewing a patchwork quilt."

Her training as a psychotherapist has helped the author distance herself from her own work – a vital skill for a writer, Schubert maintains. "Without this distance you wouldn’t be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel."

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