Her books have rhythm, elegance, style, and they appear one by one with an interval of one or two years. The length remained the same, 120 pages, and the slim size corresponded to the rhythm of their production. Birgit Vanderbeke, born on August 8, 1956 in Dahme in the Mark Brandenburg region, and who fled to the West with her family shortly before the Wall was built, didn’t just want to write. She also wanted to have time for everyday life. She was a life artist, happily situated in the “Franco-German balancing act”. Since 1993 she lived in a small town in Languedoc-Roussillon. She has published a wonderful “Instructions for Use for the South of France” at Piper Verlag. Her son Julian was eight when she moved there with him and her husband. So she was integrated into French society from the start, whose peculiarities she knew how to describe with laconic charm.
She became known with her story “Eating the mussels”. In 1990 she won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in Klagenfurt for an excerpt from it. A family waits for the father to arrive and makes assumptions. The abysmal normality of everyday life in the Federal Republic of Germany was her topic for a long time, or more precisely: the minimal deviation from the apparent normality. In this gap, she settled her stories. Whether it is the father, whose non-appearance for the banquet leads to a small rebellion in the family, or the mother, whose fears, control constraints and overprotection in “peaceful times” become the flywheel of the action: the desired normalcy is bought with effort, everywhere it creates collateral damage.
Trained with Thomas Bernhard, Max Frisch and the Nouveau Roman, Birgit Vanderbeke developed her own sound over the years. It is immediately recognizable: artistic in its loop-shaped repetition structure, it remains close to oral speech at the same time, it spirals up into intellectual heights, sails laconically through wisdom and commonplace and finally lands sure-footed on the ground of everyday life. Vanderbeke’s work is a “dictionary of platitudes” in the sense of Flaubert. The narrator, Bouvard and Pécuchet in one person, distilled the epoch signature from language.
First there was the post-war period, then came the external disasters
Your stories are deep holes in everyday life and have helped write contemporary history. “Alberta receives a lover” was a great success in 1997, not least because Marcel Reich-Ranicki attested to the story of the marriage crisis in the literary quartet that it was “superbly written and highly erotic”.
In 2001 she gave a story the title “hung up”. Twenty years ago that meant exactly what the books by Didier Eribon, Édouard Louis or Annie Ernaux stand for today when they tell of people who are unable to cope with the changing times and are outclassed. The gold rush mood in Berlin after the fall of the Wall, the stock market hype, the sushi bar demeanor and the New Economy nerdism looks like a document from a bygone era when viewed from today. The motto came from Gertrude Stein and could stand above all of Vanderbeke’s books: “She always says that she can’t stand the abnormal, it’s so transparent. The normal, she says, is complicated in a much simpler way and is therefore interesting.”
Over the years, the catastrophic undertone of the Vanderbeke Sound Manufactory no longer came from the family structures of the post-war period, which were shaped by National Socialism. The way their generation treats their own children is more partnership-based and offers less potential for conflict. The disasters now came from outside. In “Summer of the Wild Boars” she told of a stock market crash, fracking and the destruction of nature, but also of the cohesion of small communities that defend themselves against hostile takeovers with craftsmanship and ingenuity.
Later she seems to have succeeded in seeing herself as a link in a generation chain
Sometimes the writer, who grew up in Frankfurt am Main, was ahead of her time. With educational advice from Bruno Bettelheim in the title, “Gut Enough”, her 1993 book about having children, is a memoir avant la lettre. What has now almost become a genre to write critically and very personally about having children and motherhood – like Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti or Maggie Nelson – she did with laconism. “To be precise, when you’re halfway sensible you can’t think of a single reason for it. Don’t say anything about love. We’re not so suited to love.” In the ideological vacuum between the naturalness delusion of the 1970s and the lifestyle-dominated 1990s, she pretty much hit on why wanting children in an individualized society must appear absurd. The natural way in which the cohesion of the generations is cultivated in France despite individualism seems to have later helped her to see herself as a link in a generation chain. “Everyone who was there before us”, her last novel from 2020, tells of it.
Birgit Vanderbeke died unexpectedly on December 24th in the south of France. She was 65 years old.