Birgit Birnbacher’s novel “What we live on”: Sense and senselessness – culture

There is a scene in Birgit Birnbacher’s novel “What We Live From” in which the first-person narrator washes her brother who is in need of care: she prepares a lye solution with her father’s hand soap, gently runs a washcloth over her brother’s face, then continues to cleanse him whole body, each spot is named as in a meditative body scan, hands, fingers and nail beds. The intimacy of this scene arises from the fact that Birnbacher documents, in a reserved and almost protocol-like manner, how a care situation can succeed: by touching another body respectfully, by taking every nail bed into account.

What is shown in this scene of caring is what is lacking everywhere else, especially in the alienated work environment, which is also the subject of the book. The narrator works as a nurse, but in the present novel she suffers from shortness of breath due to exhaustion and moves back to her parents in the village.

We thrive on women running care systems and families

Birnbacher accompanies her narrator Julia for a summer as she tries to recover from being grounded in a world that has long stopped calling for this kind of serious dedication and treats people as mere holders of labour. Under “Notes” at the end of the book, Birnbacher indicates the tradition in which she places herself. With the study “The Unemployed of Marienthal” by Marie Jahoda and Paul Lazarsfeld from 1933, she names one of the pioneering works of empirical social research, which is dedicated to the misery of Austrian industrial workers.

The fundamental changes in industry and work through global integration, digitization, weakening of union organizations or changed living and living situations in the workforce have since played no role for Birnbacher, their concern is that of the exemplary biography. In the village, Julia gets to know “the townsman”. After a mild heart attack, he is also unable to work, but he is not willing to let it spoil his mood.

He won an unconditional basic income for a year, which inspired him to formulate sentences about work that must have a provocative effect on Julia: “He said that work had to ‘speak to people as a whole’, ‘make it sound’, and I kept silent, not to abstain, but because it was quiet inside me. I was always a nurse as a whole. I’m only unemployed on paper.”

In her novel, Birnbacher walks through a whole range of forms and areas of work that have been under discussion, especially since the beginning of the corona pandemic, under keywords such as care work, relationship work, the low-wage sector and care. Above all, the proportion that women have in maintaining families and care systems while constantly exceeding the limits of their strength is modeled. That’s what we live on, postulates Birnbacher’s novel. At the end of Julia’s mother’s short striving for freedom comes to an end when her father is in need of care and accepts no other than his own wife as a caregiver.

Birnbacher attributes the misery of care that is not “people-oriented” to too much paperwork. The huge area of ​​office work, from which so many make a living, plays no role in the novel, perhaps because it is not so well suited to the problematization of work that is at stake here. The alienation in the world of work and social relationships, as well as the narrow-mindedness of the village that Birnbacher shows, can be found in the present as well as in 1933.

The figures may not be more than representatives of their class

But the real issue that Birnbacher deals with is the loss of meaning, which is only manifested through the loss of work. The fact that Birnbacher is aiming for this dimension can be seen in the formulations that stand out from the ascetic style of the text, such as the narrator’s desire to “turn towards creatures”, but also in the animal symbolism that is not exactly used sparingly. Her stay at her parents’ house is accompanied by worries about a goat kept by the neighbors, whose seemingly unfounded screaming comes to an end when Julia turns to her. Furthermore, the desolate place is permeated by a stench, which after a while can be traced back to the decomposing carcass of a cow: This is packed in plastic bags and picked up by the carcass processing. Also a job that someone has to do.

Think about it! the novel seems to exhort its audience at these points, to ensure they don’t miss the decoding of a third animal symbol: the South African masked weaver, a bird whose persistent and mostly functionless nest-building cannot be fully explained, makes an appearance the first few pages of the novel, “as a symbol for the work of animals without context”, as the hints at the end clarify.

Just as these animals are tightly bound in their function as symbols for certain aspects of the novel’s theme and for its significance, so too all the characters have their roles to play first. They can become little other than prototypical representatives of their class and the appropriate professions: landlord, architect or graphic designer. Birnbacher’s brief sketches border on caricature, from which she always knows how to keep a safe distance. She stands by each and every one of her characters and never denounces even the most unpleasant ones. It would just be so nice to see how they would behave if they didn’t have to act out the findings of older empirical social research, prepared for social studies lessons.