Katharina Döbler’s novel “Your is the realm”. Review. – Culture

There is a young woman who laughs and struggles down a mountain stream in an advertisement for Klepper folding boats. There are oppressive coffee rounds in the mission from Neuendettelsau – you can hear the forks banging on the plates while reading. There is a man in a white suit who has stood in front of a palm tree in Singapore.

Katharina Döbler’s novel “Dein ist das Reich” begins with pictures and scenes that seem to have fallen out of an old shoebox. How do they belong together? This is what the reader asks himself, and that is what Döbler, born in 1957, asked himself, who until recently only knew schematics and fragments of the history of her family – all parts of a great riddle. In her almost 500-page impressive novel, she tries to solve it.

What made both of their grandparent pairs, that is the one question of the riddle, shortly before the First World War to emigrate as missionaries to Papua New Guinea, in order to keep the people who have lived there more or less peacefully, more or less happily, from the alleged wrong track of their previous ones To convince the existence and advantages of the Christian faith (and to educate them to be “useful” plantation workers on the side)? Why did it not dawn on them until the end that besides God’s Word they had also left behind destruction, alienation and exploitation on the South Sea islands?

“My grandparents’ real sins were godly kind”

And what made the grandparents, that is the second question, leave some of their dearly beloved children behind in Germany, where they were tortured and humiliated in a home (their parents did not see them again until ten years later) for their obsession? Their livelihoods were also destroyed by the hubris and madness of colonialism. “The true sins of my grandparents were godly kind,” said Döbler, who entered herself as “I” in the family tree that precedes the book. The children’s “abandonment” was “the reason I researched and wrote down all of this,” she explains.

While writing this down, Döbler must have struggled for balance in every sentence. How do you tell the life of four people who have fallen into a misconception that they never found out? How do you let them live in the novel without constantly distancing yourself from them? The fact that her novel is now being read as a contribution to the colonial debate does not make things any easier.

Döbler follows her protagonists discreetly and understandingly over long stretches, only occasionally allowing her own perspective and the 21st century to shine through. When, for example, she calls the Franconian mission officials the “horde”, as if they were the real savages. But even then it is not always clear who is speaking, today’s narrator or one of the characters. Sometimes, however, she steps into the narrative herself to take the sometimes stunned reader by the hand for a moment – and explain to them why, despite everything, she feels affection for the unfamiliar grandparents. The fact that these moments of mediation are so rare creates a tension that persists in the book until the end.

A form of strangeness that is almost beyond our imagination today

What must have also made the story more difficult are the four protagonists themselves, inexperienced and poor peasant children, perplexed, obdurate, who stumble into the world and into a crazy project as if by mistake from the deepest Franconian province. There is Heiner, who looks like a starved horse. When an advertiser comes from Neuendettelsau, he signs, just like the hungry children hired out as mercenaries in the Middle Ages. And because the “savages” are supposed to see that a woman always belongs to a man, they quickly lead him to Marie, who is also a leftover.

Only Nette, the Klepper poster girl and an important figure in the narrator’s life, has a mind of her own. An unexpected prelude, which could have turned into a completely different life and a completely different, equally great novel, takes her from her village to New York, where she lives as if she were decades ahead of her time. She works as a seamstress and saves on her own shop. At weekends she goes swimming or walks, when the weather is bad, through temples and churches to try out religions. Until the freedom and the cheek suddenly evaporate as if they had never existed. On a home leave she meets the missionary Johann who, like her, threatened to run wild. He fathered a child with a Papua, now he’s caught like a spy who has switched sides. Nett and Johann marry immediately, work determinedly on the common discipline and become picture-book missionaries.

The mutual strangeness between these two couples, who set up their mission stations in neighboring places in Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land, and the locals, can only be conveyed with difficulty by the novel. It’s almost beyond our imagination. Millennia, they separate, worlds. And the Europeans are, with the exception of Nice, completely inexperienced in dealing with people who do not look and live like them. They don’t completely disrespect black people, but it’s the kind of respect a craftsman has for his material.

Open detailed view

Döbler doesn’t condemn it, she hardly says it, otherwise her book would collapse. She only portrays calmly and patiently. Then also describe how closeness gradually comes about. Heiner and Marie, Nette and Johann assimilate much more strongly than today’s visitors ever would. The family speaks Papuan at home, the children do not know what shoes are. And yet the defense must never let up. You don’t want what today’s would want: get out, grow, become different. It is God’s commission! They must remain exactly who they are, despite the heat and the fever, despite the yellow quinine eyes and despite the forbidden lust that overwhelms them every few years. The locals have to change! The longer the four of them celebrate their coffee rounds in the jungle and sing their hymns, the more exotic they appear.

Open detailed view

This dialectic of foreignness is a secret leitmotif of the book. A fine example are the swastikas that the “natives” paint on their upper arms after the missionaries, who all join the NSDAP, begin to wear them as armbands. Do they emulate the Germans like naive children – or are they so happy to adopt the new white symbol because they see it as a kind of tribal jewelry based on their own model?

One week after “Dein ist das Reich”, “Das Prachtboot” was published, the new book by the historian Götz Aly. In it he describes the cruelty and destructiveness of the German colonial rulers in the same area. The two books deal with different forms of colonialism, but they are two sides of the same coin. Here the Christian mission, financed by the plantations on which the locals toil for play money. There exploitation and enslavement, mercilessly enforced by the German gunboats, whose crews burned entire islands and spread the syphilis over large areas. If the focus for Aly is the wedding of the German colonial project, for Döbler it is its end and its dissolution. Döbler has written a novel about her ancestors, Aly a non-fiction book about the German Pacific colony.

And yet “yours is the kingdom” is not only fiction. It is about real people with dates of birth and death in a specific historical time. So one is tempted to understand the novel, despite its own claims, as a portrayal of colonial reality – and in Döbler that seems more harmless and good-natured than it really was. One would wish Döbler her book had appeared a few years earlier. Then it would have been read for what it is above all: the moving and fearlessly told story of a German family and how they turned a collective delusional idea into perpetrators and victims.