Hendrik Bolz and Daniel Schulz: Two books about the youth in the east – culture

We’re not in the German Abitur here, but it still doesn’t hurt to slowly feel your way around these two books. There is a small comparison: “We were like brothers” by Daniel Schulz, born in 1979, grew up in Brandenburg, today a journalist with the taz. And “Zero Years” by Hendrik Bolz, born in 1988, grew up in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, today a rapper (see interview).

Both authors are male, both come from the provincial East, both also write about the experiences they and those around them have had with violence and drugs. On the other hand, the authors are almost ten years apart. How does all of this show up in your books, in similarities and differences?

“Miami Vice” is still running in Schulz’s book, and “CSI:Miami” in Bolz’s. Schulz refers to the hunger strike of the potash miners in Bischofferode (1993), Bolz goes into Schröder and the Hartz laws. Schulz asks the group, “does one of you have a cell phone?”. With Bolz, the narrator writes a lot of SMS and not even those in which space would have to be wasted with “4u” or “gn8” due to high network charges.

So much for the playfulness of the contemporary details. You only get queasy when you see the things you have in common, especially when you’ve somehow brought a youth in East Germany over the stage of life. A youth with blunt vandalism, blunt racist jokes, also with blunt adults who stand on the sidelines like neglected help on two legs even when the young people of the country divide each other’s heads before their eyes.

At Schulz’s, the new bus shelter soon smells of piss, Bolz notes for a whole page how young people “consistently and awkwardly” immediately smear, blast, burn down every completed soccer field or playground – because: “There shouldn’t be anything nice here.” With Schulz: racist school toilet humor. At Bolz: racist Turkish sayings. Both: Jewish jokes. With Schulz: Parents who still normally don’t notice anything. With Bolz: Parents, some of whom rush down at top speed, and who are stolen, for example, by their children, who are not coincidentally traveling in the same direction.

Now, after many years of speechlessness, there has long been a whole series of books that tell about the post-reunification East and the violence that has continued there in many places to this day. In circles that are interested because they are affected, a certain degree of fatigue can even be heard, and the suspicion of free riders can first be dispelled when further titles such as the books by Daniel Schulz and Hendrik Bolz come onto the market. And yet both are a win, in very different ways.

Reading the book by Daniel Schulz is, at first, inevitably exhausting. The sparse language fits the initial banality of the plot in the barren landscape of Brandenburg. You can still find it boring. But even more strenuous are the many strange language images that the author literally forces on his readers. A trainee teacher is said to have “shiny black hair like a full moon night, …. and skin as white as a liter of UHT milk.” One guy with his messy hair reportedly looks “like a rabid yellow squirrel has gotten its teeth on his head.”

Unfortunately you have to go through that. But at some point it works better because Schulz makes an important decision correctly. His protagonist is an eccentric who has been nostalgic since he was a child and who smells a bit badly of Christian teachings. He wears difficult clothing over a difficult physique that earns its owner the nickname “Duck’s Ass”. The hero is weak and sometimes disoriented, he is insecure and angry and he is not only ashamed, but especially when dealing with the Mariam he desires. In short: He is everything that most adolescent boys are.

Schulz speaks honestly and openly about this protagonist. As a reader, you are there when the folder is properly written for the first time, but you are also there when – finally! – the first awkward kiss with Mariam falls. Last but not least, this kiss shows the power of the ordinary, which has something saving in the unusual environment of the narrator. Some of his friends may slide away to the far right. But there is never any doubt that the narrator’s inner compass would be functional and would give him a decent route suggestion.

Bolz’ text is precisely set down to the last syllable, it has a very unique rhythm

“Roman” is written on the dust jacket of Schulz’s memoir, but this word is not found on Bolz’s. Whether this follows a connectable logic is debatable. Because in comparison, Bolz’s autofiction is at least as much a “novel” as Schulz’s.

At Schulz almost all time is tough. With Hendrik Bolz, you take a seat on the back seat in a getaway car heading towards the past from the first row. As I said, Bolz is also about drugs, violence, about parents who can’t give their children orientation because they don’t know what to do themselves. Only the beat of this book is completely different, and in this constant acceleration, this unsuspecting haste it is a small sensation. This text is precisely set down to the last syllable, it has a very own rhythm and a precise punch over the full distance of more than 300 pages. Formally: so and so good, long time no read.

Open detailed view

Here, too, the form is sufficient for the content, but this content develops an even greater impact through its sheer presence. The book by Daniel Schulz can be read from a seemingly safe distance and as a history. It’s deceptive, but at least it doesn’t take your breath away. The 32-year-old musician Felix Kummer from Chemnitz, on the other hand, says in the accompanying text about Bolz’s book: “For the first time I’m reading a book about a past that was also my past. A bit sad and beautiful, and also scary.”

In the collective media abuse, the East German narrator “suddenly felt that he was meant to be involved”

A lot of the creepy things that were in the East are still there – that’s the real uppercut of Hendrik Bolz’ “Zero Years”. Unlike Schulz’s book, Bolz’s is in a very explicit way ruthless and purged of false hopes. There is something liberating about reading about it so clearly, even if it sounds paradoxical. Like the author himself, many young East Germans who were supposedly long since assimilated in Germany as a whole have noticed in the years from 2015 on that there is actually still a lot to work on. In the at least medial collective abuse of the East at this time in the larger context of Pegida et al. Bolz/the narrator felt “suddenly meant to be involved”, “offended and at the same time ashamed”.

That’s how Bolz describes it in an untamed torrent right at the beginning, you can tell: Everything has to be out first before it can really start all over again. And when it starts, a home video of the youth runs at three times the speed with occasional counter cuts of the realpolitik push circle in which the East soon found itself – ABM, Hartz IV, brain drainand so on and on.

Hendrik Bolz’s hero is more broken, but also cooler and smarter than Schulz’s. With him, everything is a bit more violent, a bit hotter, a bit more definitive. It’s no longer about shocking, only and again and again about understanding, coping, finally about negotiating a kind of truce with one’s own biography – and then, when the strength is enough, to cancel it again. This is how it will continue. Somewhere out there the next Hendrik or even a Henrike has grown up, whose equally shocking debut can be expected in about ten years.