Ralf Rothmann: Im Frühling sterben

A caveat to begin with: it has been a while since I finished reading Ralf Rothmann's latest novel, Im Frühling sterben. I wasn't sure what to write about it and so I didn't write anything. Now, though, I've noticed the book has stayed in my mind and I want to get it off my chest (where is it, then, mind or chest? Certainly somewhere I'd rather it wasn't).

The novel is possibly the story of Rothmann's own father; certainly, some critics seem to think so. Teenagers in 1944 but nominally protected from conscription by their apprenticeships as milkers – essential to the war effort – Walter Urban and his friend Fiete Caroli are pressed into signing up "voluntarily" to the Waffen-SS. They leave bucolic northern Germany and are sent first on a truncated training programme and then to the eastern front, which by then is in Hungary. While Walter is put into the supplies service as a driver, rebellious Fiete has to fight. His attempt at desertion falls flat and the two boys find themselves at opposite ends of a firing squad.

After the war dissolves into chaos, Walter makes his way back to the farm but there is no job waiting for him there. He tracks down his old romance, now a cynical waitress, to start a new life. The action is bookended by a description of the narrator's taciturn miner father before his death and a scene in which the narrator, a writer, fails to find his parents' grave site in a snow-covered cemetery.

Walter, too, had made an abortive attempt to locate the place where his father was buried. This unknown grandfather figure is portrayed as utterly despicable; he was a violent husband and a sexually abusive father who joined the SS and became a concentration camp guard. We learn through a letter Walter receives on the front that he was dismissed, apparently for passing on cigarettes to prisoners, and put into a penal division as canon fodder. Duly killed, he was presumably buried close to where Walter is stationed. Having rescued a commander's son, Walter is granted leave to seek out his father's burial site, but instead of finding it he witnesses the horrors of the end of the war, the brutish SS dancing on the volcano. Our naive protagonist refuses to participate – but is he guilty by association?

I have two problems with the novel. The first is its aesthetic. Rothmann is a great favourite among translators; he writes with precision and beauty about working people and their lives, and Im Frühling sterben is no exception. His language is no doubt a joy to translate, and here too we are treated to some gorgeous passages. They describe, as ever in Rothmann's work, darkness and light; the delights of a cowshed with its smells, sounds and muted colours or a seething mass of inebriated, copulating SS men. But at some point that aesthetic tipped over, for me, and became reminiscent of an instagrammed photo with its sharp focus on one detail to the detriment of its surroundings, with all the triviality that look has now assumed. I think that moment was the book's description of an American POW camp, where soldiers have cast off their dog-tags by hanging them on the fence and the metal tags jingle in the wind like an aeolian harp. It's a very pretty image but it reminded me of the cliché of children's hands clutching at mesh used to illustrate refugee camps, where everything but the emotive – i.e. the political, the causes of the situation – fades into soft-focus.

My second issue is the "good German" trope. Walter Urban is a character so virtuous that he borders on the ridiculous. He fires only one shot during the war, and maybe not even that one. He refuses to kill innocent locals, although they die anyway. He gives food to a dying concentration camp inmate on a forced march westwards. His war crime, if you like, is not deserting, not rebelling, fighting only for his own survival and no one else's, aware of the concentration camps' existence but naive about their reality. Yes, Rothmann does raise this issue by comparing Walter and Fiete. He does gently accuse his father figure of complicity through lack of resistance, as his generation famously did. And yet by creating a character with hands so clean it's almost outlandish, he perpetuates what I see as his generation's inability to go that step further and recognize their fathers as war criminals.

Let's think a little about the German family myth. The anecdotes vary between East and West. In West German family narratives, people's parents and grandparents simply didn't know the extent of the Nazis' crimes; they were allegedly unaware of the camps and kept ignorant of the atrocities on the front. In East Germany, so the narrative goes, fathers and grandfathers were in some way active in the resistance. It takes a brave person, and a brave writer, to imagine their father or grandfather as a swine or a convinced fascist, and I've been told countless stories that people – understandably – use to deal with the burden of possible familial guilt: a grandmother may have been raped, meaning they aren't the biological descendants of their SS grandfathers; their fathers were called up late in the war and were practically children at the time (see Günter Grass); their grandfathers were conscripted but had previously been socialists or even put into concentration camps at the beginning of the Nazi regime (this did happen but it doesn't mean those soldiers were necessarily paragons of virtue once they got to the front). Opa war kein Nazi. No one wants to be descended from a war criminal, and perhaps that's what makes the "good German" such an enduringly popular trope in fiction and film.

Rothmann appears to be no exception. I'm not sure how far he reflects on this himself. It might be that Walter's sudden sympathy for his dead bastard of a father is a nod to the writer's own desire to paint his protagonist in such glowing colours, comparatively speaking; as a coward but a virtuous one. The narrator's stumbling around the snowy graveyard might be pointing us in that very direction. And yet, and yet. If a father refuses to talk about his war experiences, as was common and is the case within the narrative, a child can choose what to imagine. I would say Inka Parei's What Darkness Was is a braver confrontation of possible parental guilt, although less obvious about doing so. But I would say that because I translated it.

English-language rights have sold to Picador in the UK and FSG in the US/Canada, so you'll have a chance to make your own mind up even if you don't speak German. The book is doing very well in Germany, so much so that there were howls of frustration when it emerged that Rothmann asked for it not to be submitted for the German Book Prize. I'm sure Anglophone readers will go for it too; perhaps this will be the book that makes a name for Rothmann in English. If you'd like to read his beautiful writing without the sour aftertaste, I recommend seeking out Young Light (tr. Wieland Hoban) or Fire Doesn't Burn (tr. Mike Mitchell).

Books and Things I'm Looking Forward To

I'm back! And thinking about what excitement 2012 has to offer for German book lovers. Here are a few books and things I'm looking forward to in the coming months.

Benjamin Stein follows up The Canvas (coming out in English in September, trans. Brian Zumhagen) with Replay in January. Very different, very exciting, very well written. You may be surprised. That may be part of the point.

Then in February we get to read Olga Grjasnowa's debut novel Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt. Or rather, you do - I already have and was extremely impressed.

Next out is Franziska Gerstenberg's third book, Spiel mit ihr. I'm hoping to finally find a female literary fiction writer who dares to write about (good) sex. We shall see.

More in February, a rather busy month: my friend Oliver Bottini has a new crime novel out, Der kalte Traum, which he researched in Croatia.

Another friend shares that release date (perhaps some horoscope thing?): Tamara Bach's fan-blooming-tastic YA novel Was vom Sommer übrig ist. You will weep. I did. I believe there will also be a launch party, at which I will get drunk in public and stroke people's faces but hopefully not weep.

Followed the next day by Thomas von Steinaecker's new novel Das Jahr, in dem ich aufhörte mir Sorgen zu machen und anfing zu träumen. It sounds intriguing, playing with the present and the future and using more than the written word.

Along similar lines, perhaps, is Matthias Senkel's Frühe Vögel, dealing with aviation and storytelling and again using unusual media, funnily enough recommended by Thomas von Steinaecker. Out in March.

And then a wee birthday gift in April from Suhrkamp (you shouldn't have!): a new collection of short stories by Ralf Rothmann - Shakespeares Hühner.

I'm also looking forward to the Leipzig Book Fair and attendant prizes in March and the London Book Fair in April (another birthday gift - really you are spoiling me...) but sadly and contrary to stubborn rumours, I won't be going to the no doubt excellent Festival Neue Literatur in New York in February. I will have at least two translations of my own out at some point in the year though: Helene Hegemann's Axolotl Roadkill (fingers crossed for June...) and Sibylle Lewitscharoff's Apostoloff. Plus possibly the book I'm working on now, Inka Parei's precise, intelligent and haunting novel Was Dunkelheit war. "My" authors Inka Parei and Clemens Meyer will be out and about in the English-speaking world, in the USA, the UK and New Zealand, and if all goes well Helene Hegemann should be in the UK to launch our book too. Oh, and New Zealanders can look forward to all sorts of amazing German-lit related delights as quid pro quo for being the guest of honour at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair.

Ah, who could fail to blush with anticipation in the face of all these treats?

A Cold Berlin Love Story - Hitze

Sometimes writers pass you by, and then it feels wonderful to find someone with a whole shelf full of books to their name, just waiting to be discovered. My informer gave me a book for his birthday – and I’ve no idea how I can live up to it on mine.

The book in question is Ralf Rothmann’s Hitze. I had asked what felt like five thousand people for suggestions of books set in Berlin, and this was my informer’s tip-off. Rothmann is a poet and novelist – you can read one of his poems in English at AGNI online (trans. Elizabeth Oehlkers-Wright), a sample from another novel, Junges Licht, on Litrix (trans. Susan Bernofsky) – and his debut novel was translated into English as Knife Edge by Breon Mitchell.

I gather Rothmann grew up in working-class Oberhausen, moving to Berlin in the 1970s. Although he was never affiliated with any of the West German working-class writers’ organisations, he does consciously write about working life and proletarian characters, with Hitze being no exception. It’s rare to read a book where so much hard graft goes on – unless it’s a detective novel. But it’s not in the slightest bit didactic; there doesn’t seem to be any major political agenda behind the novel.

In fact it’s a love story. The enigmatic protagonist Simon DeLoo, tired of observing life as a cameraman, gets a job as a driver for a canteen that delivers meals all around Berlin. We see the cooks at work in the kitchen and at play in the pub, and all the people he delivers to on their lunch breaks – prostitutes, office workers, junkyard men and down-and-outs. He comes across a young woman who reminds him of whoever it is whose flat he still pays the rent for, now turned to dust. Lucilla is a Polish woman living on the streets, her only company and protection a dog.

In her hour of need, Lucilla turns to DeLoo for help and we next find them in an idyllic Polish summer by a lake, clearly in the throes of a passionate affair – the “heat” of the title, perhaps. But the veneer wears thin there too, with drugs, alcohol, property speculation and other complications rearing their heads and making the Polish countryside seem almost as grimy as Rothmann’s Berlin. Not before a breathtakingly erotic and very Catholic sex scene though.

The end of the novel, which has moved from winter to spring to summer and now to early winter again, sees DeLoo’s degeneration and death. Neatly biting its own tail, the book closes with the protagonist dying on the street opposite his former home, where he set out to get a new job early one morning on the first page. A woman leaning out of the window coldly refuses to call an ambulance. No heart-warming Bildungsroman this – in fact the little information we glean from taciturn Simon DeLoo indicates that his development moved very much in the other direction.

As the hero develops, so does his city. The area of Kreuzberg where he lives and works is gradually gentrified, a posh restaurant opening up and the buildings being sanitised (I choose that word with care). The catering company switches from hearty stews to exquisite finger food, and we get a glimpse of how the other half live when DeLoo delivers a party buffet to a divorcee in Dahlem. Rothmann doesn’t rail against this way of things – but nor does he spare us the sight of those who lose out en route.

Hitze may sound a tad dark. It is, of course. But it is shot through with beautiful and – doh! – poetic descriptions of Berlin, contrasted with rural Poland. And it’s these that make it a joy to read, expressing a love for the city that doesn’t need glass facades and clean pavements to feel at home. There are birds – pigeons and a heron, a hawk and magpies – and dogs and a cat. And there is a great deal of down-to-earth Berlin wit, from the cook who complains that a dog ate his dice to an aging prostitute who offers to take her teeth out. All set in authentic places mainly around Kreuzberg, from a Mehringdamm café to the Blaue Affe pub at Hermannplatz.

Read it! You know you want to.