Michael Wildenhain’s Berlin novel “The End of the Song” | EUROtoday

West Berlin, 1969: There are cowsheds in Schöneberg. Some escalators are nonetheless manufactured from wooden. Children are despatched to the bar across the nook to get a number of bottles of beer for his or her father. The pediatrician is chain smoking, in all probability HB or Roth Händle.

The “FRG” may be very distant from the town that Michael Wildenhain describes in his new novel. The Wall and East Berlin play virtually no function in on a regular basis life. Just like “the 68s”. They scurry across the scene, agitating with restricted success, organizing themselves poorly and infrequently demonstrating. Some change into radicalized, amateurishly tinker with bombs and are infiltrated by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Wildenhain’s protagonists are left slightly chilly by this materials for the nice historic narratives. They actually combat their means via life. Who kisses whom, touches who’s pants or below their shirt is way more essential to them than assassinations, the Cold War or world revolution.

“The End of the Song” collages the treasure trove of motifs from Wildhain’s earlier novels. The dissimilar blood brothers are again, the unsure household relationships and unresolved household secrets and techniques, the lengthy post-war interval, the keyhole views, all the up to date and linguistic coloring. Just because the first-person narrator stands at a biographical threshold round his thirteenth birthday and rearranges his life, so too do the circumstances as a complete, simply in an unheroic means within the personal battle for relationships, friendships, recognition, profession and revenue.

The narrator’s household has simply moved from Charlottenburg to Schöneberg into a bigger condo that the mother and father can barely afford. The home, which continues to be partially bombed, is as fragile as the encompassing ruins, which initially provide the youngsters a playground earlier than they’re correctly closed. But the household now has more room. She can take somewhat breath. The mom is anticipating the delivery of little Rosa. The father hobbles on a wood leg to his office within the tram depot straight reverse – the prosthesis is a memento of his Russian captivity.

In the novel, the tram nonetheless runs (in actual fact, operations in West Berlin stopped in 1967). The narrator’s brother, who’s a number of years youthful than him, doesn’t cope effectively along with his environment and is pleased when he’s allowed to go to boarding faculty. The narrator solely hints at the truth that a instructor comes nearer to him than is permitted.

At the start of the novel, a narrative of development emerges. The transfer ought to have been a recent begin, however pressure between the mother and father continues to develop. Alcohol performs a task, as does the daddy’s skilled scenario. At first it was simply rumors, then it grew to become clear that the tram had no future in West Berlin and the works had been closing. The father finds a job as an evening watchman – even quickly. The mom works as a cleansing girl to make ends meet. Her son sees her on her knees scrubbing the ground and doing the soiled work in a villa.

Ultimately, the truth that the household’s life simply would not go easily is due neither to the financial upheavals nor to social inequality. Rather, the historic legacy extends into the current: traumatic experiences that the mom had throughout the invasion of the Red Army and whereas fleeing. Here she was supported by a person who now forces his means into the lifetime of the first-person narrator, a small-time criminal who is meant to infiltrate the left-wing scene as an spy for the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and who hopes for a rosy monetary future. How he matches into the household image is the nice thriller of the novel.

Running parallel to that is the coming-of-age story of the narrator, who’s preventing for his old flame and a spot within the youth avenue gangs. The creaking of the prosthesis within the father’s “special shoe” varieties the historic accompaniment to the broken life; one other primary motif is the life and loss of life of dragonflies. Right in the beginning, the narrator observes the final twitches of an insect that flew into the Schöneberg sports activities corridor at an inopportune time in February. From then on, the animals seem time and again as a logo of a life that, when it actually issues, is aware of no solidarity – in occasions of best want, dragonflies change into cannibals.

“You have to defend yourself. Always,” is among the first items of recommendation within the novel. At the top, the daddy explains to the narrator, “Sometimes… you have the strength to fight. Sometimes you don’t.” At first it appears somewhat too exaggerated when Wildenhain invokes the Nibelungen delusion as one of many many key literary references. However, the entire story constantly results in loss of life and a number of betrayals.

Wildenhain devoted his novel to “the grandchildren”. They will definitely get to know a Berlin that after regarded, tasted, sounded and smelled totally different than the one they’re now experiencing on considered one of their faculty journeys. For her, nevertheless, what must be way more revealing than the novel’s content material is its peculiarly tough kind: typically Wildenhain makes it straightforward for his readers to observe the plot, typically he will get misplaced in hints.

Some are utilized very thickly, others are delicately dabbed on. The guiding perspective is supplied by the first-person narrator, who observes from the second but additionally feedback retrospectively from a distance of a few years. And time and again different voices out of the blue seem. The narrative spectrum is as broad because the readings of the narrator, who incorporates the whole lot from “Perry Rhodan” to Karl May, Jack London and Mark Twain to Franz Kafka and the nice Western sagas.

So what can the “grandchildren” take away from this? Maybe this: that there’s a historical past that you do not be taught something about in historical past books, however solely because of the creativeness of novels like “The End of the Song”, which do not make remembering too straightforward for themselves and us and that inform of the previous as an uncanny net.

Michael Wildenhain: “The end of the song”. Novel. Verlag Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2026. 416 pages, hardcover, €26.