Schneckenmühle vs. Nilowsky

Is it particularly crass to write a joint review of two quite different novels, merely because their protagonists fall into the same sociocultural dynamic? Possibly, but I shall do so anyway.

Jochen Schmidt’s Schneckenmühle (emphasis on the third syllable) is narrated by fourteen-year-old Jens and set at a summer camp in the dying days of the GDR. The narrator of Torsten Schulz’s Nilowsky is another fourteen-year-old boy (to begin with) in East Berlin in 1976 ff. The characters themselves have little in common, as do the respective plots; and yet both novels slyly dose us with information on life in East Germany.

In Schneckenmühle, that underhand drip-feed is part of the novel’s concept, it seemed to me. Up until about halfway through, I’d been wondering when the plot was going to kick in before I noticed what Schmidt was up to. Off Jens goes to his last ever summer camp, his naïve voice sharing the joys and horrors of school holidays spent in a hut with his peers. Girls, bad jokes, nudity, illicit alcohol, bullying, not washing for weeks on end. On the surface, it’s all fairly standard stuff, even if you come from a country that doesn’t do summer camps. And enjoyable, of course, because Schmidt knows how to entertain his readers from his long experience as a Lesebühnen author (which I usually describe as slam prose, for want of a better analogy).

But two other things are happening in parallel. Firstly, Jens has a rather strange fixation with consumer goods. His mother writes him a letter and the most thrilling news is that she’s bought a pedal-bin for the kitchen. He can hardly wait to try it out. Or he buys a replacement glass liner for a vacuum flask as an exciting gift for his father. In fact, the highlight of every trip the kids go on is the shopping part. A jaunt across the border to Czechoslovakia starts with the lines:

Unfortunately, the shops aren’t right by the station; you have to walk a little way into the town and find them in the side streets. We storm the very first food shop, full of greed for the unknown sweeties in excitingly unfamiliar wrappers.

The main difference between the two countries in the kids’ eyes seems to be in their respective consumer goods: sherbet sweets, ketchup in tubes, rubber snakes, bendy erasers and rulers, table football sets – all the Czech excitement makes Jens ill.

And then there are the more subtle details: the people disappearing, Jens’ discomfort about openly displaying his Christianity, the kids singing Western songs at the disco, the Russian soldiers. And a rather strange night-time adventure kicks in to provide surface plot action. I don’t want to write a great deal about this aspect, because it’s one of the most interesting things about reading the book. Perhaps it’s enough to warn you to look a little deeper than Jens’s reading of events. In retrospect, I’m reminded of Irmgard Keun’s Child of All Nations, in which another young narrator narrowly misses the historical point. Very clever indeed.

And so to Nilowsky. As I mentioned, the two books have little in common in terms of structure. Schulz’s narrator Markus ages in the course of the story, going from fourteen to about twenty, with a brief epilogue some years later, and his voice is more mature than Jens’s. He’s a conscious storyteller, perhaps, rather than an accidental one. His parents have moved from Prenzlauer Berg to a dire corner of East Berlin for work. It could be the area between Adlershof and Spindlersfeld, still not exactly Berlin’s sunny side today, but in Nilowsky a reeking triangle between a chemical plant, a forest and railway line.

And here Markus meets Reiner Nilowsky, an inveterate trainspotter a couple of years older than him. Especially in contrast to Markus’s dreary life, Nilowsky reminded me rather of Astrid Lindgren’s Karlsson-on-the-roof – a mischief-maker extraordinaire with his own rules and theories of how the world works. In this book, though, the oddball character has a very dark side. We see him being beaten by his father very early on, followed by his despised father’s and beloved grandmother’s deaths. And we meet his love interest Carola, who has decided to remain thirteen even though she’s seventeen: anorexia.

Markus falls under the older boy’s spell but is equally drawn to Carola – again, nothing we haven’t read before. But Nilowsky is his gateway to an otherworld, a GDR populated by drunks, old ladies and guest workers from Mozambique. As in Schneckenmühle, Schulz gives us a rare insight into a particular aspect of life in East Germany, in this case racism. Fawned over by the old ladies, the Mozambicans live in barracks in the forest and are generally condemned by everyone else, including Markus’s father, who is in charge of them at the chemical works. They are expected to work hard, learn their trade and then return to the “brother country” to aid the revolution. As far as I’m aware this was standard practice in the GDR. I’ve met people who came over as students and were treated similarly, but managed to settle here after the Wall fell. In fact the SPD is now fielding its first black parliamentary candidate, Karamba Diaby, who originally came from Senegal to study in Leipzig. For our adventurous Markus, the Mozambicans are enticing as rebellious heroes, and one of the most bizarre things Nilowsky does involves some kind of voodoo ritual. I wondered at times whether the author hadn’t created rather two-dimensional stereotypes, but I decided the very fact that he portrays Africans in the GDR is pretty groundbreaking, and what he shows us is how people saw them. And that no doubt included a good pinch of racist clichés.

Torsten Schulz has a background in screenwriting, and as such his plotting is more robust than Schmidt’s. After crises in the family and his friendship, Markus moves away again and loses touch with Nilowsky for a while, marking the apex of the novel. But the rest of the book deals with his attempts to grow up and away from his strange friend. As he gets older, Carola becomes a more realistic prospect – except of course that would mean betraying Nilowsky. And Nilowsky’s life becomes darker and darker while Markus’s grows more and more conventional. The ending is melancholy with a tinge of iconoclasm. Throughout, Nilowsky's unconventional voice stands out, making for some excellent writing.

Two fascinating novels, both featuring stories well told. Go ahead and read them both.

Eugen Ruge: In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts

In Times of Fading Light is a complex and beautifully written novel infused with subtle humour, about four generations of a German communist family. Eugen Ruge has fictionalised his own family history, looking at how the generations relate to political ideology as time passes.

The novel is structured into twenty chapters, each focusing on a different character’s experiences and jumping to and fro in time. One particular day (1 October 1989) is told several times over from different perspectives. The book opens with Alexander (Sascha) visiting his now senile father, the former historian Kurt, at the family home in 2001. Having learned he has inoperable cancer, Alexander steals money his father has forgotten even exists and decides to go to Mexico, where his grandparents survived the war in exile. This present-day strand also accompanies us throughout the novel, with Alexander becoming the character with whom we most identify – and clearly the closest character to the writer himself.

The family consists of Alexander’s grandmother Charlotte, an ambitious self-made woman who leaves behind an unhappy petty bourgeois childhood and loveless marriage when she joins the communist party. She meets Wilhelm, a working-class man utterly loyal to the party with a slightly comical craving for espionage. While the two of them end up in Mexican exile, Charlotte’s two sons Werner and Kurt arrive in the Soviet Union as teenagers. They fall victim to Stalin’s purges, Werner killed and Kurt sent to a gulag. Eventually released, he spends several years banished to a remote Siberian town where he meets his future wife Irina. Alexander’s mother Irina is the liveliest character, sexy, always stylish, a born survivor and a fantastic cook. We also meet the Russian grandmother Baba Nadja, a simple woman who grew up in abject poverty and later moves to the relative luxury of the GDR to live with her daughter. Finally, Alexander’s son Markus grows up with his hippy mother, is estranged from his father and rejects any and all ideologies beyond hedonism.

The earlier history is told in narrative flashbacks and memories, the actual action starting in 1952, with Charlotte longing to get out of the oppressive circle of political exiles in Mexico to the new German Democratic Republic. At the same time, she has to suppress fears of Stalinist bloodletting that come to a head when she and Wilhelm do arrive in Germany. We then follow the family history from different members' perspectives – young Sascha easily dominated by his grandmother, who by 1961 is installed in a responsible position but still plagued by envy and annoyance at Wilhelm’s natural authority, although he only has a minor position in the local party hierarchy of their village outside Potsdam.

His father Kurt struggles to find a morally acceptable way to deal with a colleague’s political denunciation, while indulging in one of many brief flings and coming up against his rebellious son. He is a man of great mental discipline who rarely allows himself to think of his time in the gulag. In one beautifully orchestrated scene, Kurt emerges from his memories of the camp to the bathos of an anonymous couple making love in a Trabbi in the woods.

My favourite chapter is set on Christmas Eve of 1976. Irina lovingly prepares a goose with all the trimmings, having gone to great lengths to procure all the ingredients. We get a great deal of very sensuous descriptions of the cooking mingled with her memories of her awful childhood, her terrible relationship with Charlotte and her extensive renovations to the house. Over an excruciating Christmas dinner with all the associated tensions, we find out that not only is Sascha’s girlfriend Melitta a vegetarian – she’s also pregnant. And Irina’s not even fifty yet!

And then in 1991, Irina cooks another Christmas dinner. Beautifully echoing the partner chapter, this time everything goes wrong. The ingredients are much too easy to get hold of, Irina can’t stand Sascha’s new girlfriend and is scared the house will be taken away from them and they won’t have enough to live on, Kurt and Sascha argue about politics – and Irina gets drunk as a skunk on the single malt she thought was cognac for the dried fruit stuffing. On to 1995, when Irina’s grandson Markus receives an invitation to her funeral. His mother Melitta has married a pastor from the East German opposition, who is now a conservative politician. Markus has as little interest in the church as he has in his estranged family’s politics, and this is a bleak and angry chapter. In the end he attends the funeral and remembers Irina fondly, but his father doesn’t recognise him.

In a third strand that holds the novel together wonderfully, we see one particular day through all the main characters’ eyes (although the narration sticks to the third person throughout the novel). It is the day of Wilhelm’s ninetieth birthday party and he's due to receive yet another medal. Irina spends the morning annoyed, plagued by nervous calls from Charlotte and waiting for her beloved Sascha to arrive from Berlin. But Sascha calls instead – he's escaped to West Germany. Irina is devastated. Her mother Nadyeshda Ivanova sees events through a veil of confusion, as she has never learned German. She confuses West Germany with America, hearing a familiar word of Russian in the buzz of conversation – Gorbachev. She rounds off the party by singing a folk song and deciding to go back to Siberia.

Wilhelm, now a respected figure in the village, is on the verge of dementia. Still capable of lucid thoughts, he has trouble expressing them. Naturally enough, the inveterate hardliner is horrified by the political developments of 1989. He too sings at the celebration – a hymn to the party, in the later abandoned Stalinist version, of course. Twelve-year-old Markus doesn’t understand much that goes on either, focusing more on waiting for his absent father and admiring Charlotte and Wilhelm’s collection of Mexican artefacts.

Kurt’s version of events is the most cynical and revealing. He provides explanations of all the characters we haven’t quite grasped in the previous narrations, capturing the petty tedium of life in the closing days of the GDR. He feels schadenfreude about Sascha’s escape from the country but his mother doesn’t listen when he tries to tell her. Despite a strict ban imposed by Charlotte (a woman fond of prohibitions), the drunken guests start talking politics. Kurt clears us up on Wilhelm’s official and unofficial biographies, hating the hypocrisy that has wiped the slate clean of communist cooperation with the Nazis in the early 1930s. He considers the party hymn fundamentally wrong and knows the song his mother-in-law sings – what the forcedly jolly guests take for a drinking song is a cautionary tale about goats getting gobbled up by wolves. While a minor official holds a formulaic speech, Kurt gets caught up in sexual fantasies about Melitta – another masterful and very funny piece of writing. He tells her the news of Sascha’s flight to the West, whereupon the buffet table collapses and an upset Melitta leaves. Kurt rounds off the evening with a spot of infidelity, finally deciding to write his memoirs about his entire time in the Soviet Union.

The final chapter on the day of the party is written from Charlotte’s perspective and set in the evening. Still a very angry woman, she now thoroughly despises Wilhelm. He gets all the recognition and she gets all the work, he breaks things all around the house but the doctor refuses to put him into a home. She is permanently embarrassed by his boorish behaviour, which everyone else seems to lap up. What is to be done?

The book closes with Alexander in Mexico. Having tried throughout this strand to re-connect with his grandmother by visiting her former home in Mexico City and other sites she told him about, he has been robbed and cheated and is thoroughly disgusted with the place. The hotels are bad, the water dirty, and he feels like a rich gringo who deserves nothing better. Beset by fear over his cancer, he finally takes a bus to a random town on the Pacific, which is where we find him at the end of the book. What he doesn’t know is that this is where Charlotte and Wilhelm spent a brief holiday described at the beginning of the novel. This is where they bought the conch shell that stood in their hall for years and where they were horrified by locals slaughtering turtles on the beach. In this more relaxed atmosphere, Alexander finds enough peace to read the personal notes he stole from his father along with his chess set carved in the gulag. The turtle soup factory is now a museum, which gives him some hope in humanity. Yet he is surrounded by poverty and inequality, and he reads a week-old newspaper over and over – 9/11, falling share prices, people whose bodies have adapted to living on Latin America’s rubbish tips.

Despite the very rich plot, the novel really is incredibly accessible. Ruge weaves in countless details of life in the GDR without ever expecting too much of his readers. What comes across wonderfully is the sense of making do, trading objects several times over to get hold of what’s really needed. And the oppressive in-fighting, the way the party and its rigid structures control all areas of life. Both Kurt and to some extent Charlotte feel fear of the state, but for both of them capitalism is worse. While for Alexander, all the GDR has to offer is hypocrisy and constraints. Yet Ruge hardly offers easy solutions with his bleak open ending.

The humour is very subtle at times but it does lighten the subject matter, which might otherwise be terribly depressing. And the writing is absolutely gorgeous. Each character has a very distinct voice, which adds to the amusement as they experience the same events differently. There are many beautiful descriptions of the two houses where the family members live, which are slightly reminiscent of Jenny Erpenbeck’s excellent Visitation, although the novels have little else in common than their Brandenburg setting.

Ruge tackles a lot of very rewarding themes, especially family relationships – there’s a nice big Oedipus complex in there, for example. He also looks at political loyalty and personal infidelity, aging, changing gender relations, the need for conviction or faith. This really is a novel that lives up to its ambitions. It's longlisted for the German Book Prize and English language rights have been sold - so you can look forward to it even if you don't speak German. There's been a lot of industry hype over this book, with Ruge winning the Alfred Döblin Prize for his manuscript two years ago, and I have to say this is one time it's justified.

Simon Urban: Plan D

A book I truly adore is just out now: Simon Urban’s Plan D. It’s a remarkable genre-busting detective novel set in Berlin in October 2011. There’s one slight difference though – the GDR still exists.

Martin Wegener is a detective with the Köpenick branch of the People’s Police, called in to investigate the death of a mystery man found hanging from a gas pipeline in the forest. All the initial clues point to the Stasi, which is still in operation although less powerful than before the ‘Revitalisation’ in the early 1990s. With important economic consultations between the new West German chancellor Oskar Lafontaine and the East German party chairman Egon Krenz coming up, a West German police officer is called in to assist after the news is leaked to Spiegel magazine.

The two men start their investigations, more hindered than helped by the Stasi, uncovering a terrorist opposition organisation and a separate conspiracy to introduce a ‘third way’ in the GDR – the Plan D of the title (D standing for Deutschland, right?). Bombs go off, spirits are drunk, sausages eaten, there are shady trips to secret prisons and conspiratorial meetings in an abandoned fairground.

Meanwhile, Wegener yearns after his ex-girlfriend, now embarking on a career in East Berlin’s key energy export and transit industry ministry, and has imaginary conversations with his former boss, a stubborn non-conformist who disappeared without a trace a few years ago. The plot twists and turns beautifully, with more deaths occurring and plenty of tensions arising between the East and West German detectives. Wegener is betrayed on both the professional and the personal level and the novel ends with a personal defeat for him. We do find out who the mysterious victim is and who killed him, but the whys and wherefores are much more important.

The detective novel – amazingly done in the manner of a modern-day Raymond Chandler – would stand alone just fine, but Simon Urban has combined it with an ingeniously imagined modern-day East Germany. He obviously had great fun coming up with ideas about what might have been – from brand names for electronic devices more advanced than those in the West to oil-powered cars and blockbuster movies titles. And there are laugh-out-loud moments in which we come across genuine people in unusual situations – for instance a senile Margot Honecker singing along to Wolf Biermann records or the politician Sarah Wagenknecht as an action-movie heroine.

In one brilliantly written scene, Wegener stumbles around the labyrinthine underground ‘Molotov’ bar, looking for his workmates but growing increasingly confused and emotional. The place is a den of iniquity that serves rhubarb organic lemonade – the flavour that’s always sold out at the shops – with a shot of vodka, and scallops and chestnut puree and bacon and chutney and the best brand of East German sparkling wine, Rotkäppchen Superb, and offers darkrooms and boudoirs and bathtubs and willing waitresses, all in the name of a corrupt socialism on its last legs. As he wanders the dingy corridors catching sight of opulent scenes, he remembers the last time he was there – and the Russian waitress Magdalena with whom he was caught in flagrante in his cramped Wartburg car afterwards. The entire remembered episode is told in incredibly sexy, breathless long sentences, only for Wegener to wake up from his melancholy reverie and spot his West German colleague apparently flirting with Magdalena. Of course he instantly imagines the two of them stretched out in the other detective’s roomy Mercedes, but can’t find his way into the room they are in and ends up spewed out of the bar and onto the hard pavement.

The whole novel is beautifully written in impeccable and imaginative language. The protagonist Wegener is an impressively painted character, an aging cynic on the surface who is actually powered by love and idealism. But what makes the book so very special is the exuberantly portrayed vision of East Berlin under a collapsing socialist system – pockets of luxury for visitors and functionaries, surrounded by grime and decay and decorated with laughable political slogans. Urban raises questions about German history and about the integrity of our political systems, combining them with a real page-turner of a plot.

The only tricky thing about Plan D is the humour of spotting modern-day celebrities in odd what-might-have-been situations. Obviously it would be difficult to recapture those moments of recognition in translation – perhaps a glossary might be the solution? But actually, Urban doesn’t assume that his readers know a lot about the GDR itself so the book is very accessible.
I eavesdropped on conversations about the novel as long ago as last summer – this is the kind of book people get excited about, and rightly so. Unsurprisingly, it's nominated for the Hotlist indie book prize, which you too can vote on until 15 August. Urban’s mentor is Juli Zeh, already a success with her literary crime fiction in English translation (see my review of Dark Matter/In Free Fall). And I was lucky enough to translate a sample for the publishers Schöffling Verlag, an absolute pleasure. Publishers: please give me a chance to really get my teeth into the novel after that first tempting taste – you know you want to…

Note: this is an adapted version of a report for New Books in German.

2009 Kicks Off in 2008

Just in the nick of time, the TLS pipped the post and got in a pre-anniversary-of-the-fall-of-the-wall piece by Jane Yager asking What was the GDR? - with brief reviews of Tellkamp's long Der Turm, Marcel Beyer's dull as dishwater Kaltenburg, Ingo Schulze's charming Adam und Eva - and, er, Lukas Bärfuss' Hundert Tage (my review is here), which isn't about the former East Germany in any way whatsoever, but is well worth reading.

An interesting article, quirkily written if low on insights for anyone who follows German literature in general, but I presume that doesn't apply to all that many Times readers. The turtle Yager refers to in Adam und Eva, by the way, is a tortoise. Just so you don't imagine Adam sitting next to a sloshing aquarium on the passenger seat of his Wartburg all the way to Hungary and back.