Martin Kordić’s novel Years with Martha – Culture

Anger is a powerful impulse, it is the weapon of the excluded and of those who think they are. Not infrequently, anger is also an impetus for change when conditions have become untenable and people defend themselves, be it against discrimination, private insults or the feeling of being neglected. Anger can unleash tremendous power, but unfortunately it has the potential for self-destruction and delusion – those who rage unconsciously run the risk of losing control of their lives.

Anger is also a dominant motif in the recently published novel “Days with Martha” by Martin Kordić, it is the drive to escape from one’s own circumstances. Željko is the name of the narrator, who everyone just calls Jimmy, he takes us on a journey through his youth as a child of a Croatian immigrant family from Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The spitefulness of German class society is brilliantly portrayed

The father earns his money as a caretaker and construction worker on large German construction sites, the mother hires herself out as a cleaning lady in Ludwigshafen; her two sons and daughter should have it better one day. You adapt and get by, after all you want to be one of the “good foreigners”, which is why on special occasions the mother prefers to serve a Black Forest cake from the supermarket instead of the homemade biscuits.

The pressure to adapt is strongest in 15-year-old Jimmy, who devours every book and newspaper article, memorizes lists of unfamiliar words every day and wants to surpass himself: “I wanted to be someone you couldn’t push around. I wanted to be someone with brains . I was willing to do anything for it.”

Martin Kordić brilliantly describes the maliciousness of German class society, in which the children of immigrants are deliberately made small and sorted into the appropriate box. Jimmy is only allowed to move up to high school when a junior high school teacher complains that this ambitious know-it-all is far too good for her class. During careers advice in the tenth grade, the employee at the employment office recommends that he drop out of high school and do an apprenticeship as a gardener – he reads from the documents that he is interested in flowers and trees because the boy is so good at mathematics and biology. This is more than ignorance, it is sheer, racist mockery.

“I’m not a gardener,” replies the boy defiantly, who is reporting here for the first time about his bottomless rage, about this “terrible feeling” that rises in him. In this moment of humiliation, he surrenders to the impulse to make a sign, he kicks the computer monitor with a mighty force that shatters with a big bang. And is expelled from school for two weeks: “I did exactly what was expected of Željko Draženko Kovačević.”

Isn’t a boy whose parents escaped the war particularly vulnerable?

It is not without a certain irony that the cleaning lady’s son falls in love with the actually unattainable professor from the best of circumstances, for whom his mother cleans the toilets. Jimmy takes a holiday job with Mrs. Gruber, and in the garden of a Heidelberg villa, a cautious appraisal and mutual flirtation soon begins. Jimmy observes Martha Gruber “when she thinks, writes, and is clever”, but above all during her daily swim in the pool and her very offensive type of gymnastics, and the much older woman also feels attracted to the 15-year-old.

The exaggerated empathy for people who you like to take by the hand to lead them to the right place is often a compensation; it is intended to calm the guilty conscience of the privileged. The professor tries to understand her young friend from the bottom up, she drags him to the opera and checks him for possible trauma. The book “War and Peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina” will soon be on her desk. Isn’t a boy whose parents escaped the battlefield particularly vulnerable? On the other hand, he also has sex appeal, in contrast to the well-fed bourgeois sons and boring husbands.

“Years with Martha” is only almost a love story. What develops between these two people, who are different in every respect and with many interruptions, also has the character of a romantic power game, a showdown. Ultimately, everyone stays to themselves, trapped in their shift; This story of longing is lived through postcard messages and a stay in a luxury hotel on Juist, where the two of them, heavily stoned, only ever almost reach their climax.

In order to succeed, Željko is willing to sacrifice everything, including his identity

Even after this rapprochement, the social imbalance remains. The mysterious Martha, who doesn’t reveal anything about herself, wants to know everything about her young lover, who studies literature in Munich and tirelessly plunges into new affairs. If necessary, he uses the credit card Martha sent him to pay the bills in this expensive and unwelcoming city, a particularly subtle form of control.

In 2014, author Martin Kordić had an acclaimed debut with his novel How I Imagine Happiness, the story of a family’s displacement during the Yugoslav civil war. In his second book, the son of Bosnian-Croatian immigrants, who now works as a lecturer in Munich, talks about the danger of losing his identity and his pride in a stylistically confident and forceful manner – that’s exactly what happens to the young man. He is willing to sacrifice anything to achieve success.

Don’t underestimate this light-footed book: it’s a brutal reckoning. A reckoning with a society in which people from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds often only make it to the top if they either work until they drop or are willing to make a pact with the devil. And a reckoning with the beneficiaries of the system, who can afford to be tolerant because they’ve always had everything.

The protagonist in this novel knows exactly how it feels when you always have to be better than the children of the German middle class, also more disciplined, tougher on yourself, without self-pity, which you can’t afford. Jimmy is constantly on the run, he knows what it’s like when you have to celebrate a child’s birthday party at McDonald’s because the apartment is way too small, there’s only the alternative fast food quarters, even if you get pitying looks there.

Kordić sends his education-hungry protagonist to integration hell and back

In many places one has to think of Saša Stanišić’s autobiographical masterpiece “Origin”, which tells of the drama of his family’s escape from Bosnia-Herzegovina and his Yugoslav grandmother. In comparison to the novel “Years with Martha”, “Origin” is a cheerful and forgiving book, because Saša Stanišić, who comes from Višegrad on the Drina and grew up in Heidelberg, can assert himself under adverse circumstances, his remedy for great sadness, against the loss of home is his unbeatable sense of humour.

Martin Kordić, born in Celle in 1983, also sends his education-hungry protagonist to integration hell and back. Ultimately, the no longer quite so young man manages to tame his anger. By turning Jimmy back into Željko, a German Croat who stands by his past. Only in the arms of his family is there comfort and a halfway meaningful life, which he could not find as a well-paid but severely under-challenged employee of a communications company specializing in bullshit PR. And so the proud university graduate actually becomes a gardener after all, he is literally going back to his roots. That doesn’t just sound like a bad joke. It is also a salvation for him.