Steven Uhly: Adams Fuge

The writer Steven Uhly has been in the German press rather a lot recently - firstly for winning the Tukan literary prize with his novel Adams Fuge (Adam's Fugue) and secondly for taking part in a feature on the TV magazine Aspekte, in which he went to Jena and talked about how uncomfortable he feels in the former East Germany, prompting much indignation in said university town. I will mention only briefly that I find the feature's format dubious and superficial, especially bearing in mind that the very same team already used it during the summer to rush racist ex-politician Thilo Sarrazin through multi-ethnic Kreuzberg, enraging the locals there too. But I assume it's good for viewing figures and cheap to make.

Why Jena, and why Uhly? Because Jena is where the three neo-Nazi terrorists ("NSU") originated from who murdered ten people over the past 13 years before two of them were found dead in a caravan. And because Uhly's novel touches on one of the most scandalous aspects of this already extremely scandalous case: the V-Leute in neo-Nazi organisations.

I'm not sure how other inland security agencies work, but the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution uses long-term informants within groups it investigates, called V-Leute. They were originally called V-Männer (and Hitler was one too, according to Wikipedia) but they obviously thought up a gender-neutral term. They're not members of the security services themselves but they are paid for their involvement in the organisations in question, be they illegal or merely suspected of endangering the constitution. In 2003 the constitutional court found there was no case for banning the extreme right NPD party because its organisation and its policies were propped up by paid informers. About 15 percent of the top officials were secretly being paid by the government, as The Guardian reported at the time. Let's say it's a grey area as to how active these informers are. In the case of the terrorist cell from Jena, very grey: the three terrorists were considered members of the "Thüringer Heimatschutz" - a network masterminded by the V-Mann Thilo Brandt that forged links between neo-Nazis groups. There has also been speculation about a former security agent who was present at the scene of one of the murders. And certainly, the large amounts of money thrown at the V-Leute in neo-Nazi organisations didn't prevent ten people from being murdered and didn't lead to the terrorists' arrest.

Ulrich Peltzer looked at an informant within a left-wing group in his excellent novel Part of the Solution (trans. Martin Chalmers). Here, the V-Mann is the one who steps up the intensity of the group's activities, acting as an agent provocateur.

In Uhly's novel, the V-Mann is a neo-Nazi who creates a computer game in which players have to kill as many Turks as possible. He also seems to be double-dealing with all sorts of agencies and forces, from Mossad to Kurdish nationalists. But back to the beginning.

Adams Fuge is a very eccentric book. To attempt to sum up the plot: a boy is born to a German mother and Turkish father in Mannheim, the mother leaves her violent husband and he moves to Turkey with his three children. The boy joins the army and happens to kill a Kurdish rebel leader, more or less by chance. He is given a medal and sent back to Germany under a false name as a reluctant secret agent. His task is to get rid of the neo-Nazi but before that he finds his long-lost mother and her new family. There follows much bizarreness. More agents and double-agents crop up than in a Mission Impossible double-bill, but Adam/Adem is haunted by the people he kills on his rather clumsy trip around Germany, who help him to survive. His father is kidnapped by the Kurds, who demand a mysterious file which is embedded in the racist computer game and Adam/Adem and the whole reunited family set out to rescue him, evading the police as they do so.

Family secrets are flushed to the surface and, as one might expect, Adam's mother has the odd issue with her son committing rape and murder all around the country. And there's an extended family discourse on anti-Semitism prompted by the involvement of a Mossad agent. Having suffered a shot through the head, Adam begins to lose his eyesight under pressure, during which he comes across his childhood first love. A spot of romanticism between the sheets soon puts that right though and rids him of all those ghosts, just in time for him to save the day. If only it weren't for his bungling Turkish brothers...

The outlandish plot is a pastiche lightly camouflaging some deep-ish ideas about identities. Adam's official nationality wavers in the course of the novel as he is given one passport after another: from Turkish to German to Israeli to American. Like Adam/Adem himself, the other agents he encounters have rather fluid motivations (like the aforementioned V-Mann, who does of course come to a satisfyingly sticky end). All of them lead dual lives with multiple names, and almost all of them are double-dealing somewhere along the line, whether for pecuniary or personal reasons. As the narrator cack-handedly bumps off enemy agents (usually to his own great regret), their identities pass over into his own and they carry out dialogues inside his head – at times he's unsure who he really is. And of course he's half-German and half-Turkish, which prompts some thoughts on the issue of multinational origins. The Tukan Prize jury wrote:

The secret services play a double game and impose identities on their agents to replace their humanity. Only when Adam refuses to define himself via national or religious affiliations can he stop the killing. (...) In Adams Fuge Steven Uhly plays provocatively with our prejudices, only to demolish them in the end.

I'm not entirely sure that second part is true, although it may have been his intention. The characters do indeed seem like caricatures - the liberal German grandfather, the wife-beating Turk, the wandering Jew, and so on. But he doesn't have time to demolish our prejudices about them individually because he's too caught up in his fast-moving plot. So all the work of demolishing is done by means of rather clumsy inner monologues or discussions within the family. And perhaps I'm missing something, but there are times when these sections just read like bad writing and made me want to skip a page.

What attracted me to the book in the first place is that it's a rare example (in German-language literature) of a phenomenon that the scholar Katrin Sieg calls "ethnic drag". That is, donning a different ethnic identity on stage such as the Jew or the Native American. Another recent example would be Astrid Rosenfeld's strikingly similarly titled Adams Erbe, featuring a Jewish narrator. In this case, Uhly is of German-Bengali origin, "with partial roots in the Spanish culture" as it says at the back of the book, whereas his narrator is a Turkish German. I can well imagine he gave him this national identity both in the belief that national identities are bunkum and in the assumption that a book about a Bangladeshi secret agent wouldn't work terribly well. But because the characters are so two-dimensional I got the impression that he hadn't gone to much trouble to research that particular identity other than giving his narrator an affinity to minarets and an unhealthy respect for his superiors. Add to that the fact that he pronounced his name wrong when I saw him reading from the novel, and the whole effort seems to fall slightly flat.


Nevertheless, it's worth reading for the sheer fun of it all.

Feridun Zaimoglu on Fifty Years of Turks in Germany, and Jewellery

You gotta love him, eh? Kiel's most famous literary type Feridun Zaimoglu gets all hot under the collar at Zeit Online - he loves Germany, he can't stand Germany, he loves Turks, he can't stand Turks. And then there's this:

I was angry back then (when he wrote Kanak Sprak). I still am. I don't want that anger to go away, that furore that I've ruined a lot of things with. I mean, I could say: Feridun, take off all that metal, all the tasteless oversized rings on your fingers. It's bad style. I do know the rules in the German culture business, all I'd have to do is take off my rings. I'm not considered a serious writer. (...) I love these rings. When they touch each other while I'm typing it sounds like the cows coming down from the pastures.

Please, Feridun, don't take off the rings. I may be the only person reminded of Guy Ritchie-style lovable London lads' signet rings, but I'm sure I'm not the only person who loves all that metal. And we have plenty of sensible writers already.

On a more serious note, Zaimoglu laments the lack of respect for what the first generation of Turkish immigrants achieved in Germany, while not holding back on young lads who can't spell the word "respect". All this comes after fifty years of immigration from Turkey - once the Berlin Wall was built it was a matter of months before West Germany needed extra labour and signed an agreement with Ankara.

Celebrating a Marriage of Convenience

The festival Almancı! – 50 Jahre Scheinehe celebrates and reflects 50 years of the "marriage of convenience" between Germany and Turkey, initiated by a recruitment agreement after the Berlin Wall was built. Mainly at the Ballhaus Naunynstraße in Berlin-Kreuzberg, there's theatre galore, a film festival, music - and the fantastic and amazing Vibrationshintergrund literary festival marking three generations of Turkish-German writers*.

Plus there'll be a literary flashmob this coming Wednesday - turn up at Café Kotti (up the stairs in the NKZ) at 3 pm to participate - the first 100 get two free tickets to a reading of their choice, I think.

Here's what they say about the festival:

"What if the production factor labour, ordered in from Turkey, starts to speak? About as much of a shock as if the conveyor belt were suddenly to throw off its sprockets and cogs and sit itself down at the typewriter. The first generation of Turkish writers from Germany wrote in Turkish. Their works were translated and published for a German market. All that is fifty years ago now.

The production factors could not only speak, but also procreate. Among their offspring are German-language writers. What does a speaker have to say if her parents were not just simple production factors but foreign production factors? How does this speaker deal with an art that's administered by elites? How does she change the art and its administrators? And in this case the language and society?

Literature is also always a recollection and a fracturing and altering update of all that came before the act of writing. In hardly any other sector are such apparently contradictory ideas, once considered unchangeable, negotiated and renewed. The production factors for car components and washing machines have grown into the producers of today's Germany. Some find that frightening, others celebrate it – writers with vibration backgrounds tell their stories, including: Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Hatice Akyün, Dilek Güngör, Imran Ayata, Selim Özdogan, Feridun Zaimoglu, Zafer Senocak, Hakan Savas Mican, Mutlu Ergün, Mely Kiyak, Hilal Sezgin."

Obviously, you have to go to as many of these readings as you can. I'll be on a panel with Oliver Kontny of Ballhaus Naunynstraße and Deniz Göktürk from Berkeley, talking about the usefulness of categories and the representation of the Other in German literature. It says here. To make a premature start, I'd like to make a plea to just go ahead use that epithet above (*) - Turkish-German writers. Because as the title of the festival, based on this short piece by Selim Özdogan, points out - all the labels and categories for "migrant writing" are often little less than tongue-twisters that don't get us anywhere, when we could be talking about the literature itself and indeed what it's doing to German society.

Nicol Ljubic: Stillness of the Sea

Last week I had the pleasure of interpreting for the Berlin writer Nicol Ljubić at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Luckily they paid in advance, because Ljubić actually speaks very good English and there was little for me to do. But I did read aloud a short extract from his novel Stillness of the Sea, capably translated by Anna Paterson.

There's a reason why there seems to be an article missing in the title. The book opens with a short and clever prologue explaining the historical context behind the massacre of Muslims in the ex-Yugoslavian town of Višegrad, related in the voice of a lawyer at the International Criminal Court in the Hague. But it kicks in proper with a very short scene between two lovers by the sea, in which a young woman tells her boyfriend about a word that only seems to exist in her language - bonaca means literally "sea stillness".

Robert is in love with Ana, very much in love. He's a young historian in Berlin, where he meets a literature student and is instantly bowled over. But all along, he defines her by her national identity - Ana is Serbian, while Robert has a Croatian father but only speaks German and has no strong connection to the country. He tries to cook regional dishes for her, gets hold of a pebble from her favourite beach as a gift, and asks her all sorts of questions about her former home. She had to leave Višegrad as a young girl and later experienced the bombing of Belgrade, but remains tantalisingly vague on certain subjects. In a sense, Robert seems to be trying to create his own Yugoslavian identity through Ana, despite her obvious reluctance. And it is the secrets Ana keeps from him that ultimately mean the end of their relationship.

But Ljubić intersperses scenes from his love story with others describing Robert watching a court case in the Hague. It soon becomes clear that the defendant is Ana's father, a man she adores. He's accused of luring 42 Muslims to a house and locking them in, only for them to later be burned to death by a relative of his. A sole witness survived and is now testifying against him.

The book, Nicol told us in Edinburgh, was his attempt to address a complex moral question: what would happen if you fell in love with the child of a war criminal? The father character is closely based on a real-life professor of English literature and Shakespeare expert, who also wrote ultra-nationalist political tracts. Like his character Robert, the writer himself went to Bosnia and met people who knew him in an attempt to understand what might make a man of letters turn war criminal.

Ljubić has clearly put much of himself into his protagonist, as emerged at the event in the capable hands of chair Serena Field. Half-Croatian, he doesn't speak Serbo-Croat either and had never been particularly concerned by the wars in the Balkans beyond watching the news. I have to admit I found the court scenes more convincing than the love side of things, which became a little insipid after a while. The structure is well done though, and a close reading turns up hints at a possible motivation for the crime. Plus Ljubić - and the court - fails to clear up the issue of innocence or guilt, making the novel a very intelligent and though-provoking read.

It was interesting that Ljubic was partnered with the British writer Penny Simpson, whose novel The Deer Wedding is set in Croatia. Where Ljubić focuses on one individual case through the eyes of a very specific individual, Simpson's book apparently spans several families and generations to take a very broad look at the historical context. I'm wondering whether that's a particularly British approach to take, converting even relatively recent events into sweeping historical fiction, but not having read the book I don't think I can really comment. Interestingly, the subject of authenticity was raised, and Simpson had to defend herself by referring to her involvement in human rights work, research trips, etc.

Now while one reviewer in the Scottish Review of Books seemed to think Stillness of the Sea had been translated from Serbo-Croat, Ljubić too comes at the subject slightly obliquely, as a German rather than as someone directly involved. Yet he clearly got bonus points in the authenticity stakes at the event, because he put so much of his own experience into the book. Another German-language writer, Saša Stanišić, comes from Višegrad and reworked some of his experiences into the novel How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, which also went down terribly well in the UK. So it seems a shame to me - as you might expect - that British readers don't have access to more authentic writing in the form of translated fiction.

European Literature Night

I've been away over Easter doing mainly non-German-book-related things. But while I was at it I met the gregarious British journalist and fellow foreign literature missionary Rosie Goldsmith, who was wearing a lovely ring shaped like a big pink rose. We were at the London launch of Dalkey Archive Press's Best European Fiction 2011, where free wine was served in thimbles and I didn't say hello to editor Aleksandar Hemon, even though he seemed eminently approachable. That was partly because I'd cleverly invited more people to come along than I could actually talk to in one go. And also possibly because the thimbles of wine ran out very quickly.

Anyway, the gregarious British journalist with impeccable jewellery taste and a foreign literature mission Rosie Goldsmith was evangelising - as well she might - about European Literature Night. She's presenting the London event - one of 18 consecutive presentations across Europe on 11 May. Information is slightly sparing on the official website, but the British Library tells us the London night will feature "six superlative writers of fiction and poetry, both emerging and established: Emil Hakl (Czech Republic), Nora Ikstena (Latvia), Anna Kim (Austria), Peter Terrin (Flanders) and Bożena Umińska-Keff (Poland)."

Now I let out a little cry of delight at seeing Anna Kim's name on the bill (remember those thimbles - I wasn't sober). Because I've had dealings with the delightful Anna in the past and I didn't even know that her excellent novel Frozen Time had been translated! Ariadne Press, Austria specialists, brought it out last year in Mike Mitchell's translation. The book is beautifully written and shocking stuff, looking at war crimes in Kosovo and what they did to those involved and those on the periphery. As far as I can remember.

So please do go along and be delighted and stimulated by the readings and conversation, as they say. Or indeed attend one of the other seventeen events elsewhere. I'm a little skeptical about the actual benefit of holding readings in eighteen different places at once, but I suppose at the very least it raises a bit of a buzz and saves on separate websites.

Dear Selim Özdogan,

Dear Selim,

How can I possibly review this book? You know I've read it twice, first at the manuscript stage and now the finished, printed product: Heimstraße 52. Did I tell you, by the way, how truly honoured I felt when you sent me the manuscript? I read it through in one night, cold and uncomfortable at my computer, making notes to tell you what I liked and what I didn't. I've just checked my notes and seen that you ignored almost everything negative I said, apart from the thing about the ships being a bit of a corny metaphor. That makes me laugh - you know what you're doing and you just go ahead do it.

And here's what I still love about the book: I love Gül, a character almost like the women in all those nineteenth-century American novels I used to read as a child, led by her conscience and love for her family - a Turkish Laura Ingalls Wilder. I love her drunken husband Fuat, who rounds in the course of the book from an uncaring ne'er-do-well to a three-dimensional man with a wonderful sense of humour and way with words. I love the descriptions of working life in the book, the details like the wheels blocking in the wool factory - too many German writers pretend there's no such thing as work in their novels. I love the quirky character who predicts a dark future for Turks in Germany, and the literature student with his wonderful analysis of German society, even though he's never been there. I love the calm, collected pace and Gül's simple but wise thoughts, which sent tears to my eyes on many occasions as I read the book more slowly.

I've seen you read from the book twice now too, and I really do hear your voice as I read certain passages, especially Fuat's tirades. And those sad moments when you, the story-teller, look ahead and warn us that things won't go according to plan. Having fallen for Die Tochter des Schmieds all those years ago with its tantalising flashes of future tense, I was so pleased to find them again in What Gül Did Next (I'm guessing you've probably never read Susan Coolidge though).

Now I know you hate to be the token Turk and I know you hesitated to write the novel. Turkish family moves to Germany in the 1960s, the immigrant life, the perfect gift for every social worker, the perfect response to Sarrazin. But first of all I agree that it would be just as foolish not to have written the story, cutting off your nose to spite your face. And secondly, hey, nobody else has written it. I genuinely believe that stories can help people to understand the world, and if you can do that without being dragged kicking and screaming onto the "ethnic writer" bandwagon, then Selim, you've done a fantastic thing.

When it comes to the immigrant experience, you've parceled up so many key elements - without wagging a didactic finger. The German neighbour who explains the strange local rituals, the ignorant comments on public transport, the widening of horizons even in a fairly insular community, the envy back home. Even things as banal as language problems are in there, but what you've succeeded in doing is making them peripheral issues. The stories and the characters and the writing are what counts, and they're thoroughly convincing.

Here's what I wish for you (and for me): I wish that an English-language publisher will finally snap up both Die Tochter des Schmieds and Heimstrasse 52 - or 52 Factory Lane as we've christened it. I wish I get to translate them both (and the third part of the trilogy, whatever that may be called). I wish you crowded readings where you play your music and read your stories and the pretty girls in the front row laugh and twirl their hair, and you go home to Maria and all's right with the world. I wish people go out and buy your books and write you fan letters and tell all their friends to read your books too. I wish the kids in the schools where you read are inspired and write books of their own and ask you for a quote for the back cover. I wish everyone learns to pronounce your name, and mine, or at least that they ask beforehand and give it a try.

And thank you so much for putting my name at the back of your book. It's never happened to me before and it made me feel like a million dollars. It just means I can't possibly review it.

Zsuzsa Bánk: Die hellen Tage

This is a slightly adapted version of a report I wrote for New Books in German, just in case it sounds vaguely familiar to anyone. If you're interested in books written in German and don't read it, you're missing out. Basically, they send out dozens and dozens of books to a small army of readers and we tell them whether they're any good. Then they choose the best and publish reviews, news and features - the new issue includes interviews with my friend Lyn Marven, the British writer Michael Rosen and publisher Barbara Schwepke. The best thing for publishers is that if a book is reviewed in NBG, they can get a grant towards its translation costs.

Anyway, here goes.

Zsuzsa Bánk's Die hellen Tage is a magnificent novel about three children and their mothers, about childhood and how it affects us as adults, about women surviving and bringing up children under tough circumstances. Seri, Aja and Karl grow up in a small town in 1960s Germany. The best of friends, they experience the bright days of childhood hailed in the title at Aja’s Hungarian mother’s ramshackle wooden house by the edge of the fields. Endless summer evenings, birthday parties, swimming in the lake, climbing trees, ice skating, cartwheels, cakes, poppies and long grass.

Yet all is not quite as idyllic as it seems. All the children’s fathers are absent; Seri’s died shortly after her birth, Karl’s withdrew into his shell after his younger son disappeared, and Aja’s father Zigi is a trapeze artist who visits from afar every autumn.

In between her childhood descriptions Zsuzsa Bánk focuses on the mothers and their stories, showing the hardships each of them has suffered. The lynchpin of the novel is Aja’s mother Eví, a former tightrope walker who fled from Hungary in 1956 and chose to settle down with her daughter, while her husband boarded a ship bound for further shores. We watch her develop and form friendships with the other mothers, going out to work, learning to read, starting a business and helping the others to overcome their own problems. And always with a cartwheel at the ready to cheer up her daughter and her friends – a cake-baking, party-throwing, soul-soothing cross between Mary Poppins and Pippi Longstocking.

In the second half of the novel, the three young adults move to Rome, ostensibly for their studies but of course to escape the narrow confines of small-town life and to cut their mothers’ apron strings. There, their troika turns into a love triangle, and each of them learns or reveals a secret about their past that puts their bonds to the test. How have those bright days of childhood shaped their lives and personalities? And if what they grew up assuming is not actually true, are they still the individuals they thought they were? In the end, two of them return home and there is a resolution of sorts.

One of the most moving episodes is the way Eví gradually lures Karl’s father (who is never named) out of his shell. First dropping his son off at his shuttered house and greeting him on the street, she finds odd jobs for him and then asks him to deliver the cakes she bakes for sale. Painstakingly slowly, he rediscovers a reason for living and eventually starts to speak again, going back to work as an architect and recreating Eví’s little house all around the town. When Eví needs help towards the end of the novel, he repays the favour as best he can.

Zsuzsa Bánk has returned to the characteristic style that won her so many fans for her debut, The Swimmer - and she has a heck of a lot of very vocal, mainly female fans. Beautifully done, the narrative adds detail sparingly as the children get older. So while the early chapters are sketchy and dreamlike, the later sections reveal more and more. For instance, we only learn the mothers’ names when they finally make friends with Eví, and the fact that Zigi lives in New York only really becomes clear in the closing chapters. And as the narrator Seri gets older so Bánk's prose becomes more precise, with some beautiful descriptions of Rome and rural Italy in the second half.

Bánk subtly tackles immigration issues, from language problems to prejudice to Eví’s first German passport, yet they take a back seat to the touching family stories. As in The Swimmer, political realities give the book its factual framework and are not ignored – the novel couldn't be set in any other period, for example, with changing women’s roles playing a key part – but they're not its focus. Instead, Die hellen Tage is a deeply moving story of individual fates that will appeal to a broad audience. It’s absolute Hollywood material with its many gorgeous episodes and strong female characters – I can imagine Helena Bonham-Carter as Eví and Natalie Portman as Aja – except that it would have to be a mini-series at the very least, what with its absolute wealth of material.

Long awaited, this is a beautiful and heart-warming novel that touches on many universal issues, with characters to die for. My only problem with the book is that it scrapes very narrowly along the boundary of kitsch - not that that's a hurdle in the English-speaking world.

And it looks like it'll be translated as well, with Harcourt having bought the rights after publishing The Swimmer in Margot Bettauer Dembo's translation. And they do have a nifty little line of literature in translation - coupled with a very cute and enthusiastic blog. I do take umbrage at their witty tagline though: "We publish the best literature from around the world - so you don't have to." Because we're not letting other publishers off the hook that easily. And while I'm taking umbrage, well done for adding the translators' names to the catalogue - but you know they really should be on the covers. I know you do. Congratulations though for buying this fantastic book.

Dancing the Sarrazin

My head's still humming from last night's huge launch for the anthology Manifest der Vielen. I don't know about you, but typically I expect a book launch to be about twenty people sipping at white wine in a bookshop while a writer sits at the front and reads a bit. Instead, last night every last seat in the Maxim Gorki Theater was occupied, eight people read, three people were interviewed, there was a dancer and a slide show and live electronic music and a music video (which I'll come back to in a moment). There followed copious drinking and - yes! - actual dancing.

The book, which I've been bigging up for a while now, is a collection of pieces written by - as it says in this fascinating interview with the editor Hilal Sezgin - thirty German intellectuals with international backgrounds, in response to Thilo Sarrazin's mega-selling book Deutschland schafft sich ab. Its subtitle is "Germany reinvents itself". I haven't actually got a copy yet because of cashflow issues last night, but judging by the readings it covers a lot of ground. From Deniz Utlu's fiction to an interview with the actress Pegah Ferydoni to straight personal essays, the writers share their views on multicultural Germany, being a Muslim or not being a Muslim in the country, and just generally how they live their lives.

Not all of it was new - people have been saying for years now that the never-ending calls for integration are offensive and unreasonable, that they are essentially a demand for a homogenous society - but it's good to say it again. Several of the authors talked about how the debate has forced them to think about their own position in German society, how they define themselves. And in fact the event made me start thinking along the same lines, something I hope to come back to here.

But what was most unexpected about the event was that it was genuinely funny. A number of the writers have contributed humorous pieces, laughing rather than crying over what is often a ridiculous situation. And it was all held together by a really funny guy called Ali Aslan. I had to check that because he didn't introduce himself on stage and when I asked someone later she said, "Oh, you mean Ali?" Which was of limited use. Anyway, speaking of unexpected things, the guy is apparently known as the George Clooney of the German interior ministry. I couldn't see the resemblance, but then I was a very long way from the stage and when I saw him close-up later I was far from sober. Anyway, Aslan managed to get a lot of laughs out of some pretty serious subject matter, including the fact that one of the authors - the academic Naika Foroutan from the Heymat project - has received death threats for her part in revealing Sarrazin's misinterpretation of the statistics.

So, thus heartened, we all retired to the bar. Or in fact the canteen, where there was wine and beer and pretzels and rice pudding. And DJ Imran Ayata in the corner, who was having technical problems. But still, the beautiful people danced and danced - my favourite was a version of Oh Carolina in some unrecognisable language. And there were lots of sort of famous people there and I said hello to two of them and one of them even recognised me back.

And here's the most amazing thing I noticed. On one point, Sarrazin is right. A survey by the Süddeutsche Zeitung found out all sorts of interesting things about his readers. My favourite one: they responded negatively to the idea of "enjoying life to the full". Also, they're mainly men and the over-60s are overproportionately represented. So in fact, Sarrazin readers probably are having fewer babies than Manifest der Vielen readers. Because Manifest der Vielen readers are all very, very attractive and enjoy life to the full. Manifest der Vielen readers will reinvent Germany, populating it with attractive, intelligent, fun-loving little brown babies.

To finish off, a link to the video, a song by Volkan T. that plays on a text by Selim Özdogan.

Things I Am Looking Forward To in 2011

One of my favourite German rituals is the New Year's Eve tradition of "lead-pouring". You take little plugs of lead (actually aluminium these days), melt them down over a candle, and then pour them into cold water to see what shape they make and predict your fate for the coming year. Of course it's all in the interpretation, but this year I got a saxophone. Make of that what you will. I also had a fortune cookie that told me to "be patient and optimistic" - and chose not to apply that to my love life.

There a few German books I'm really looking forward to in 2011, in two different areas.

Firstly, in the patient and optimistic sector, two debuts of which I have no idea when they'll be coming out: novels by Jan Brandt and Sebastian Polmans. Brandt is a geezer about town I vaguely know, alway impeccably dressed and surrounded by hordes of women, and I'm curious to find out whether his writing's any good. So far I've heard one short story and was impressed - but found it slightly too smooth. The book's allegedly being published by Dumont. And Polmans was my favourite at the Open Mike competition a while back. He seems to write with a spirit of adventure and excitement, so again I'm very curious as to what his debut with Suhrkamp will bring us.

Secondly, I predict a major anti-chauvinist backlash against the likes of Thilo Sarrazin, in fiction and non-fiction. The most obvious title in this category is the essay volume Manifest der Vielen, edited by Hilal Sezgin and featuring pieces by all sorts of sensible writers. The publishers promise writing about their lives in Germany, home and identity, being a Muslim or a non-Muslim, focusing on critical analysis and personal stories rather than terms like migrants, Muslims, Germans, etc. Out in February from Blumenbar.

And after the exhilarating presence of "migrant writers" from all sorts of places all over last year's shortlists and awards (with Melinda Nadj Abonji taking almost every prize going for her beautiful but plot-disadvantaged novel about Hungarian-Serbian immigrants to Switzerland), this year promises more. Zsuzsa Bánk, feted back in 2002 for her debut Der Schwimmer, returns with a big fat novel about Hungarians and Germans growing up together, Die hellen Tage. Out in February from Fischer. And the same month sees the long-awaited follow-up to My Official Favourite German Book Ever, Selim Özdogan's Die Tochter des Schmieds. Called Heimstraße 52 (Aufbau), it follows the protagonist Gül and her family from Turkey to Germany, where Özdogan shows typical dramas, childhoods and working lives in Germany's industrial boomtime. Think Small Island applied to Germany. I love it already, and I think 2011 will be the year when writers whose parents came from abroad but who grew up in Germany, Austria and Switzerland themselves really come into their own. The postmigrant generation in your face, dude.

On the translation front, I'm looking forward to all sorts of goodies. First and foremost Helene Hegemann's Axolotl Roadkill in English, translated by - er, me. Out in April from Constable & Robinson. Then my translation of My Second Favourite German Book Ever, Inka Parei's The Shadowboxing Woman, published I'm not quite sure when by Seagull Books. Then I have two gorgeous young adult/children's titles by the delightfully talented Rusalka Reh coming out with AmazonCrossing in May and August.

Translations on the "to be reviewed" pile include Thomas Pletzinger's celebrated novel Funeral for a Dog, translated no doubt extremely well by Ross Benjamin, and Daniel Glattauer's Love Virtually, an internet romance romp rendered into English by husband-and-wife team Katharina Bielenberg and Jamie Bulloch. Both spring releases, I believe. I'm looking forward to two short books brought to us by Peirene Press - Matthias Politycki's Next World Novella (trans. Anthea Bell) and Austrian Alois Hotschnig's Maybe This Time, translated by my buddy Tess Lewis. Oh, and I don't know if it's actually coming out this year or not, but Open Letter are doing Benjamin Stein's jewel The Canvas.

Plus, 2011 sees the first books from the wonderful people at And Other Stories, who have confirmed two titles so far from Iosi Havilio (Argentina) and Juan Pablo Villalobos (Mexico). And who knows, maybe they'll discover a German writer to share with the English-speaking world as well. You certainly need to check them out if you haven't already.

So, join me in exercising patience and optimism, and let us all play our saxophones for fantastic German books in 2011.

Melinda Nadj Abonji: Tauben fliegen auf

Tauben fliegen auf is the title that won this year’s German Book Prize in early October, so my review comes rather late. There are a number of reasons for this, not least that the publishers, Austrian indie Jung und Jung, hadn’t anticipated demand and the book was pretty much sold out everywhere only hours after the award announcement. But it’s also a book that won’t be rushed – reading it was a slow process.

Melinda Nadj Abonji (the surname is a Serbian spelling of a Hungarian name, pronounced something like “nodge-abonyee”) comes from the Hungarian minority in the Vojvodina, part of what is now Serbia. She has lived in Switzerland since her childhood and holds Swiss citizenship.

And that pretty much sets out the lie of the land in Tauben fliegen auf. The novel tells the story of a family from the Hungarian minority who leave the Vojvodina for a new life in Switzerland, and what faces them once they arrive and come to modest success, running a café. Contrasting scenes set in rural Yugoslavia and a wealthy Swiss village, Nadj Abonji narrates from the perspective of the older of the two daughters, Ildiko.

The author has stressed in interviews, such as this one in English for Deutsche Welle, that language is hugely important for her. And she also describes herself as interested in musical and political literature. Her novel has all these elements. Its language is lilting and musical, highly characteristic not just because of her Swiss-German linguistic background, I would say. Nadj Abonji’s sentences are often long and beautifully rhythmic, and she often addresses differences between Hungarian and German. Towards the end, Ildiko has a truncated relationship with a refugee – he speaks Serbian, she speaks Hungarian, and they communicate in English.

And yes, Tauben fliegen auf is very political. Extremely, unapologetically so. We learn about historical developments in Yugoslavia – in one very moving section, the girls’ grandmother tells them the story of how their grandfather was arrested by the Communists, having resisted advances from the Nazis, and the family farm was collectivized. Later we watch relations sour between the Bosnian Serb Dragana and the Croatian Glorija as they work in the family’s café.

But above all, Ildiko has a watchful eye for racism in Swiss society. She points out organized forms such as the Schwarzenbach Initiative to limit the number of foreign workers in the country, deliberate racism such as an aggressive incident when an unknown guest soils the gents’ toilet, and more subtle signs of prejudice as voiced by many of the cafés regulars.

This is a lovingly told story, with many of the Vojvodina scenes of childhood pleasures and fears and later visits to the family very moving. My favourite passage is in the middle of a sentence spanning several pages, describing the mother’s fiftieth birthday celebration. She holds a speech and tells her guests about the communion dress her mother made for her:

…I don’t want to bore you and describe how the dress looked, but I wore that dress until I was fifteen, my mother sewed it specially so that every time she loosened the seam a little, a new pattern appeared, and when there was no seam left she sewed a little strip of lace onto the dress (mother, illustrating the words with her hands, asking me to translate lace and seam into German), and when I really didn’t fit into the dress any more she made cushion covers out of the cloth…

The characters are affectionately drawn: a sensible mother, a hot-tempered father, Ildiko always worrying about something and her daring and more carefree sister Nomi, a warm grandmother and many, many minor figures in both settings. And Nadj Abonji manages to transport the fear, guilt and impotence the family feel when the war breaks out in Yugoslavia.

Yet the novel has two major flaws in my view. The passages set in Switzerland, while not uninteresting, don’t shine the way the Vojvodina scenes do. Perhaps I’m buying into the good old Balkan exoticism cliché, but I genuinely prefer reading about drunken celebrations and feuding neighbours than sitting through long drawn-out explanations of how to make good cappuccino with the right head of foam. And the whole “mother and father work hard to give us what they never had in life and then we don’t appreciate it” thing felt rather been there, read that to me. Perhaps it hasn’t been done quite so much to death in German-language literature as it has elsewhere, but that’s no great consolation if you’ve already read the same stuff fifty times over in English.

Secondly, and more importantly for my taste, Tauben fliegen auf is simply not plotted. There is no narrative tension – or where there is, such as when a cousin is called up to the army, it is never resolved. The Serbian lover simply disappears mid-relationship, one of a number of characters lost to oblivion. While we find out the family’s history in dribs and drabs, the author rather wastes an opportunity by using up this material about halfway through. The only major development is when Ildiko leaves home; yet far from a satisfying conclusion, this is a huge anti-climax to close the book. I can only assume that Nadj Abonji didn’t want to stray too far from the autobiographical material by writing a more rounded plot.

There are books that work very well in the German-language world but not everywhere else; this, I suspect, is one of them. For German-speaking readers, the lack of plot may well be only a minor irritation. And in contemporary German-language literature, fewer stories of emigration and arrival have been told so far. The political issues Melinda Nadj Abonji touches on are perhaps of more interest on the domestic market than elsewhere, too. It’s a shame, though, because the writing in Tauben fliegen auf really is incredibly beautiful, and would no doubt be a pleasure to read in any language.

You can read a sample, translated by Rafaël Newman, at sign and sight.

Nino Haratischwili: Juja

Juja was recommended to me at the independent publishers’ fair back in the summer. Albeit by the publishers themselves, which is a bit like asking Muhammad Ali if he’s the best boxer. But then it showed up on the longlist for the German Book Prize, so I decided I really did have to read it.

It’s not a book you can read quickly. Almost 300 pages in small type, with a complex plot and chapters focusing on a number of characters in different times and places. To wit: a book as a character, set in Paris in 1953, narrated by a certain Jeanne Saré, who may or may not have existed. A young writer who moves from the provinces to Paris and gets caught up on the margins of the 1968 revolts. An art historian in Amsterdam, in the present day. A mother of a teenage girl in Sydney, also in 2004. A student in 1980s Paris and her friend. And “ich” – perhaps Haratischwili herself, a quiet voice adding the occasional first-person comment to the mélange.

As I noted in my lowdown on the longlist, the book revolves around a fantastic and fascinating teenage girl, Saré, and her adventures in an imaginary 1950s Paris, all unheated garrets and cafés and fairgrounds, opium and blowjobs and self-inflicted wounds. You can almost smell the Gitanes and taste the warm croissants, served up with a generous dollop of cliché. The book is an Axolotl Roadkill of its day, ending in Saré throwing herself under a train at the Gare du Nord. Saré’s book triggered a rash of copycat suicides, rather like Goethe’s Werther, when it was rediscovered by the feminist movement in the 1970s.

Haratischwili sends her characters into the fray, describing their interactions with the book. Olga, the Parisian student, finds it on the shelves of a second-hand bookshop and descends the stairs to the dark dungeon of depression, her friend Nadine powerless to help her except by launching a campaign against the book after her death. Laura, the Amsterdam academic, is persuaded by a student to travel to Paris and research its origins. Francesca in Sydney escapes alcoholism after a family tragedy by fleeing to Paris, where she comes across the book and with it a way out. And Patrice, the writer – well, he may have had more to do with the book than just publishing it, or perhaps not.

Written in rather jagged, uncomfortable language – the author is a playwright and no friend of that whole jaded “show, don’t tell” philosophy – this is a novel that nonetheless draws you in. The secret we’re chasing, of course, is “Who was Saré?” Yet all the sub-plots are part of the draw, personal tragedies large and small that suggest Haratischwili has a deep understanding of human nature, despite being indecently young.

Towards the end as all the characters – even Saré – find some kind of closure, almost disappointingly so, the book becomes more of a novel of ideas. It raises fascinating questions about the nature of truth and authenticity. And it asks what stories do to us as readers, and what we as readers do to those stories. That automatic assumption of authenticity is disturbing; here, the characters interpret all kinds of things into Saré that are really only reflections of their own issues.

A literary character as a canvas for the imagination – the whole idea actually made me wake up in a cold sweat last night. Why are we - or why am I in particular - so enamoured of teenage protagonists? Are we trying to vicariously relive our own uneventful youths? Are we looking for someone to love in our reading matter – a Juja, a person particularly worthy of love, and if they love us back it’s even better? In their press material, the publishers Verbrecher Verlag kindly included a review from 1978 of the “original” book upon which Haratischwili based her novel. The reviewer had her own projections, just as today’s critics initially found Helene Hegemann’s writing a testament to a youth unhinged:

A daughter has spoken. Her poetry confuses, shifts and maddens our senses and sense. Her own senses did not survive this shifting; they were defeated in the struggle against prevailing resistances.

Haratischwili plays with this pathos – her text ranges from the out-and-out teenage angst of Saré’s mythology and pain-laden writing to Laura’s pragmatic conclusions. My favourite line of hers: “All this suffering – doesn’t it seem stupid to you now? I imagine it must be so strenuous having to live with it permanently…”

This is an extraordinary debut that deserves the attention it’s been getting. It could have been more smoothly plotted, but then that would have taken the edge off it. It could have been more smoothly written, but then who wants smooth? You can read the first couple of chapters at Book2Look.

tausend worte tief / freitext

tausend worte tief is kind of what I'd been looking for. It's a regular readings series, and here's what they say about themselves:

And once we've arrived there, once we're a thousand words deep, then we'll have left our skin behind and climbed together into another. Perhaps then we'll manage, once we've climbed back, to see through our skins and skin colours, to hear through our different languages and to be reminded by a déjà-vu of the fact that we belong together.

Ummm, yeah. In other words, they combine literature, music and occasionally football – written by the postmigrant generation and the people who grew up alongside them. Last week they invited the writer Selim Özdogan to read some of his stories and share a handful of the songs that have influenced his work. I went along to the event at Neukölln's Werkstatt der Kulturen, suspecting it might turn out a little worthy.

But it didn't. First of all, the audience was utterly attractive. I was probably the oldest person there apart from the bar staff. Secondly, and you may have noticed this, Selim can do little wrong in my book. He's always good for an entertaining evening and he was on fine form this time, playing to a full house of appreciative people. And although I now know his work more or less inside out, this event was a little different to usual – it was actually fascinating to have someone up on stage talking about the links between music and literature.

And thirdly, curator Deniz Utlu conducted a nice wee interview in the middle that hit just the right spot. Utlu's obviously been thinking about writing in Germany from a postmigrant perspective for some time now, and congratulated Selim on maintaining his integrity – although he has a Turkish passport, he's not been co-opted as a spokesman for an imaginary Turkish-German/Muslim generation, or appointed "Minister of Turks" as Utlu put it. Can you guess who he was thinking of?

There are a number of overlaps between tausend worte tief and the literary magazine freitext, not least in the person of Deniz Utlu. The latest issue takes a stand against Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in art, essays, poetry and prose:

Writers from Muslim and Jewish backgrounds, but also writers from the majority society focus on stigmatization and discrimination.

And it's fascinating stuff. I have to admit I prefer the essays to the prose, which seems at times slightly laboured - although I enjoyed Mutlu Ergün's extracts from Kara Günlük - Die geheimen Tagebücher des Sesperado. But the magazine – now in its 15th issue – explores some interesting and important issues, from the imaginings and realities of gang culture in Kreuzberg to what it must feel like to be confronted with one's own inert racism, to an interview with Abdulrazak Gurnah of the British magazine Wasafiri, which has obviously been a source of inspiration.

So here we have two interlinked projects doing that thing I've been looking for in German literature – promoting writing about minority stuff from a minority and a majority perspective. Sounds dull, I know. But it's actually very sexy if you do it right. And they're certainly doing it right most of the time. I shall be keeping a close eye on these people – you probably ought to as well.

Sabrina Janesch: Katzenberge

Regular readers will know I’m far from impartial on the subject of Sabrina Janesch, having translated her entry for the Ingeborg Bachmann competition a while back, met her, thought she was charming, etc. etc. Unlike the most vocal of the judges at the competition, I found the extract from her novel, out now under the title Katzenberge, very intriguing. I enjoyed the blend of historical subject matter with tense writing underlain with threat. I didn’t particularly share the criticism that we found out too little about the narrator – but that point is well and truly cancelled out by the full novel.

That narrator is Nele Leibert, a young German journalist with a Polish mother, who travels to her family’s roots after her grandfather’s death. For her Polish family actually originate from East Galicia, now part of Ukraine. And her grandfather was one of the first Polish settlers in Silesia after the ethnic Germans were expelled from the region. So this is a story of shifting borders and the effects of world history on individuals, but also of a family itself.

The narration switches between the present and the past, opening on a misty early morning in rural Poland as Nele sneaks out of the family home to the graveyard, obviously planning something. And its tight construction keeps us holding out for that ritual until the very end, maintaining a great sense of tension throughout. We learn a little about the young journalist’s life, her budding career and her unfulfilling relationship. More interestingly, I felt, Janesch shows us the prejudices Nele faces as a Polish German – on both sides of the border.

The Polish are barely visible in the bulk of German literature, despite being such close neighbours. With one exception – my friend and fellow translator Isabel Cole has a theory that the Polish cleaning lady is the German equivalent to the Black mammy. Peter Stamm’s Sieben Jahre might be a case in point, contrasting an unattractive Polish woman with a successful and glamorous female architect, German of course. But then the very idea of it put me off so much I couldn’t bear to read it, so I may be wrong. The Polish-German writer Artur Becker has done much to right this imbalance, winning the Chamisso Prize for his work last year. Yet his best-known novels at least are set very much in Poland, not exploring cross-cultural issues to any extent. And from what I’ve read – only extracts, I’m afraid – Becker would appear to play rather a lot with the cliché of the vodka-swilling Pole.

Not that Janesch doesn’t let her characters indulge in a spot of vodka-drinking. There are family funerals and get-togethers with plenty of home-brewed liquor on the table. We see a close-knit family – but one with an unusual patriarch, Nele’s grandfather, a man who spurns Catholicism and most company. Very lovingly portrayed, he acts as a second narrator, telling his stories through Nele in a way that gets slightly less logical and plausible as the plot unfurls. But hey, by that point you’ll be truly caught up and you won’t even notice, I promise.

Because Nele sets out to return to her grandparents’ village in East Galicia. Not an easy task under today’s conditions, and with the whole family against the idea. One strand of the novel, then, is a road movie of sorts, with the narrator travelling in trains, buses, trucks and vans from Berlin to Ukraine, almost constantly delayed – much to her dismay as a punctilious German. Along her way, we learn about her grandfather’s life, first arriving in an abandoned farmhouse in Silesia where a sinister threat awaits him, then going back to what is now the eastern edge of Poland where he arrived as a traumatised refugee, and finally ending at the beginning in a remote Galician village where Ukrainians and Poles lived side by side until ethnic massacres began in 1944.

There is a dark secret in the family, of course, which emerges as the novel continues and drives the pace rather well. And the spooky elements from the extract are spread more evenly throughout the book, coming across as earthy superstition and folk magic, mainly in stark contrast to the modern-day characters and their lives. The novel bravely tackles a relatively unknown slice of history – conflicts not quite solved to this day between Poland and its neighbours on either side. Yet it brings that history down to a very personal level and ultimately has a conciliatory message, with the narrator coming across two women with rather ambiguous relationships to the respective “other side” on her journey to her family’s roots.

The prose and structure are tight and enjoyable, the narrator ever so slightly irritating in that way earnest young Germans can be sometimes – but she does develop a sense of humour and relaxes as the story goes on. All in all, Katzenberge is a very well-rounded novel that I can envisage would work extremely well in translation. Combining moving historical fact, an affectionate family portrait and a secret curse, it has a great deal to offer readers – small wonder then that Günter Grass wishes it many of them in large letters on the cover.

Das Fremde und das Eigene

Berlin's Literaturwerkstatt has been running an interesting small series of events under the above title. The phrase is rather popular but difficult to translate. My trusty Muret-Sanders offers about six column inches of translations for "fremd": strange, foreign, exotic, other people's, extraneous, outside, other, alien... "Eigen" is fairly clear-cut, at least superficially, meaning "one's own". But what is foreign and domestic in literature? What is exotic and familiar? What is extrinsic and intrinsic?

The first event in the series was held at the Social Democratic research institute in Berlin and was a pretty heavyweight affair. It started with a panel discussion between politicians, researchers and "migrant authors" - Imre Török and Zafer Senocak, in this case. Although the discussion was fairly rambling, it soon emerged that nobody is happy with the labels applied to literature written in German by authors with other cultural backgrounds.

One of the key issues for the series is how mainstream literary culture reflects minorities, and indeed the last event will be about German-language literature's difficulties with homosexuality. The panel discussion touched rather briefly on this subject, with the researcher Meral Cerci explaining how other media have actually begun including ethnic and sexual minorities - the Turkish motorway cop, the gay neighbour, and so on. In literature, it seems, that's something reserved for the minorities themselves. Write what you know, they say, and it looks like many German authors don't know many people outside of their own demographic.

The discussion was followed by a reading by four top-notch authors, which I found more productive than the first half. Sherko Fatah, Terezia Mora and Zafer Senocak more than proved that their writing is of excellent quality, wherever they happen to come from, and Michael Wildenhain played the role of the token German, the exception that proves the rule. They were all agreed that they have definitively "arrived" slap-bang in the literary establishment, earning prizes and grants galore.

This week saw the second event, which focused on writing in German as a foreign language. The authors were not quite as established, with stronger accents and (for the most part) less experience. Maria Cecilia Barbetta, Abbas Khider, Orsolya Kalasz and Pedro Kadivar read from their prose and poetry and talked about the freedoms and confines of writing in German. Kadivar, who also writes in French, touched on the controversy over Francophone literature - an issue that has a different weighting in Germany, which never had colonies to speak of.

The presenter, Professor Doktor Norbert Dittmar, was better than I had expected from his slightly embarrassing performance at the first event. He's an expert on second-language acquisition and so comes at the issue from a certain direction - which was absolutely inappropriate on the initial panel but seemed more fitting here. Very affirmative and congratulatory in a way that bordered on the patronising - what a great achievement it is to write literature in German, how well the authors have done, etc. If you're familiar with Zafer Senocak, you can imagine how well that went down with him, but he grinned and bore it. What I did approve of was Dittmar's rejection of the standard labels and insistence on the fact that the authors write German-language literature, period.

It turned out to be a positive evening, if not all that insightful - but if I hear one more person comparing the German language to a lover in the near future I won't be able to account for my actions.

Stanisic* - Wise Beyond his Publications

This month's Words Without Borders features a magnificent piece from Sasa Stanisic on myths of immigrant writing. Not unlike myself in my less erudite rant on the Chamisso Prize recently (which Stanisic received last time around), he criticises the expectation that writers from elsewhere should enrich their adopted language, more so than native-language authors. He also rails against the myths that there is a category by the name of "immigrant writing" at all, and that immigrant literature deals (or should deal) solely with the migrant experience.

Great reading matter, nicely packaged, and - in an ironic twist - rather well translated from the German by the author himself. I do find it slightly amusing, though, that an author who has written one (excellent) book can be so worldly-wise. But I suppose I haven't written any books at all and I still spout my opinions here on a near-daily basis. Still, it's a great feeling when you realise you're not the only person to hold a certain view.

If we must have a word for one category of "immigrant writing" at least, why not post-migrant literature? I'm rather inspired by the upcoming Dogland festival at and around Berlin's Ballhaus Naunynstraße, which features post-migrant theatre and the latest developments in dance, film, music and literature - including a new play by the ubiquitous Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel on sans-papiers. I know, I was trying not to mention him, but it's hard sometimes. Or an "evening of scenic songs" directed by Neco Celik (the very interesting interview behind this link goes some way to explaining what post-migrant might be in the German context). I can't spot any actual literature in the strictest sense on the programme as yet, but I live in hope.

*I do apologise for the lack of accents, etc. throughout this piece. It's been a long day, so you'll have to imagine them all for yourselves.