Review – Take that, naive middle class friends! – culture

In a moment of insult, Reese remembers the decks. In the parents’ home in Stuttgart, there was a 1960s Western PVC, which was timely sprayed with polishing powder and then brushed until the gray striped pattern was dirt-free. Then, like almost all ambitious people, she went to Berlin, moved from one apartment to another and was once really lucky: “a wooden floor in the 30s, dark green and in very good condition.”

Its wood screed looks the most beautiful of all the floors, but it is very expensive. Usually people choose between wood planks and tiles if they do not choose state-supporting parquet. What is the most beautiful what is the best? She has four children, her husband is an artist, they don’t earn much, and she sees things more clearly. The floorboards in the kitchen look good, but the wood works, and the cracks get wider and wider and harbor dirt. The tiles are cold when there is no heating under them and are easy to care for, so they are so easy to care for that they need to be cleaned daily. When asked about the floor, Reese advised her daughter: “Monochrome terracotta tiles with good underfloor heating – if you have a cleaning lady taking care of them all the time.”

One would think that Reese had other concerns. Before she thinks about designing the apartment, she first has to find a new place to live for herself, Sven and their four children. In the apartment they used to live in, they are subletting from a good friend, who has now quit in order to punish them. Where are they supposed to go? Out of the inner city, far from the environment they belong to? Out to Marzan?

Reese does what she can, writing to herself and her daughter how things got this far, how she grew up in humble circumstances, and lived under the illusion that she could belong to an environment of high self-fulfillment like her friends, like her lost friend delusions, got out of the circle of friends and doomed to a fresh start. .

Suada’s novel The Social Climber has become a very rare novel in contemporary German literature: angry, fierce, punching in the stomachs of all naive middle-class friends, sinister, funny, borne by the will of social accuracy. In 2015, Anke Stelling reported in her novel “Bodentiefe Fenster” about a society of building groups in Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg, and was one of the first to describe the intertwining of subjective romanticism with the powerful bourgeoisie that was typical of the time. The creative romantics of cities today combine classical outward ideals with an unconditional desire for status, wealth, recognition, and the occupation of the middle. They are against commerce, conformity, and narrow-mindedness, and without giving up their moral self-image they become owners, chiefs, surrounded – well – by floor-to-ceiling windows.

That was an inside opinion at the time. The film “Sheep in the Dry” tells about the fall from this environment. Stelling combines this with an autobiographical assertiveness that is remotely reminiscent of Didier Eribon’s “Return to Reims”, but shows more understanding and sympathy for the world of origin. Violent criticism is directed at the target medium. Reese’s mother left a notebook containing only one sentence: “Again, I ate too much.” Reese had a happy childhood, the way that seemed normal, with no alternatives. At school – a long time ago, in the 1980s – she made friends with children with better incomes and took off with them to Berlin. She could belong, marry one of them, or accept the other’s generous offer to give her the fifty thousand euros that were needed to move into the group of friends. You don’t want it. So that she could stay close to her, her boyfriend allowed Frank to sublet his apartment. And perhaps everything would have gone on plausibly if you hadn’t written about the collecting project and the confidants who found themselves betrayed, exposed, seen through.

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In this novel, writing leads to the crisis and is the means to confront it, to conquer the subject matter, to oppose the stories that surround us, dreams and perceptions, to oppose others, us. So, this is on purpose “the opposite of a well-constructed and elegantly composed novel”. Anke Stellings Resi correctly parallels Feuilleton’s statements that disguise advertising in the form of judgments with “dream dimensions 90-60-90”. You can put family masterpieces next to it, which hide the stench, dirt, stress of daily interaction, and the work that four children bring with him. do it yourself It means something else to Reese, necessary to make ends meet, not self-enjoyment.

The novel shows the way in which the well-known subtle differences in lifestyles in major cities are based on rather massive economic differences, as well as the tactics of hiding, speaking away, and covering up. He would often say, “I don’t know how to run that,” which in Reese’s ears would sound like, “I certainly don’t want to trade places with you.” The most effective argument: she had her chance and she shouldn’t label herself a victim. On the other hand, one’s life story, the entire novel, is presented.

Open the detail view

Reese’s unease, and her spirit of resistance is also expressed in everyday baddies like eating cans, chain smoking, urinating outdoors or trying to conjure up a nice autumn vacation by doing nothing, while schoolmates have to travel to warm countries or in Valuable adventures.

Sheep in the Dry suggests that the question of housing could become for contemporary literature what adultery was for the nineteenth-century realist novel: an idea in which ready-made dreams, self-images, social and moral expectations, and hard truths such as contracts are the fortunes of a situation that threatens to coincide.

But Reese has a blind spot: it’s Marzan, the prefab neighborhood built under Honecker in the east. For a long time, Resi had no words for this world, only cliches are ready, as if the area, a maximum of thirty minutes’ drive from Mitte, is in the afterlife and inhabited by aliens. Because this is the case, their worldview has one thing in common with the neoliberal worldview that they routinely attack. There is no community there, just families and friends, don’t think of Marzan and downtown together.

That eventually changes, which is almost happy. “This step is like an experiment. Resi could write a book about it: How Life Is Out of the S-Bahn Loop. How the Neighbors Beat. The rough tones, the soft hearts; and the fact that Resi and Sven still smoke makes it easier for them to accept.” (.. .) It’s okay. Many will feel the same way over the next few years.” That is why you read this novel breathless, angry, possessed, without dream dimensions, not polished, but tainted with reality, with commitment.