Novel “In man everything must be wonderful” – culture

There is no explanation in this book, but a sharp dream image. A line of people of the most varied shapes. “I understand that they are mothers and daughters,” says the narrator, “from the way they look past each other.” Each of these women pats the person standing in front of her on the shoulder: “Toktoktok – and another long finger, bent several times, taps this woman between her spine and shoulder – toktoktok, toktoktok – and the nail of the person standing behind her scratches the fuzz inside Neck, brrbrrrbrrr, the skin is already red there. ” The moment a woman turns around, the one behind her turns to the woman behind her, and so on.

A surrealistic image for the basic structure of Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s novel “Everything must be glorious in people”, which was on the longlist for the German Book Prize, but which is incomprehensibly missing on the shortlist. It is about two daughter-mother-grandmother lines that meet at a point outside the narrative. Salzmann spends everything she can as a gifted narrator to recreate something that you can’t really talk about: how little mothers and daughters know about each other. Almost nothing, says the novel, even though they are so inextricably linked. Sitting on your neck forever, a constantly noticeable scratching on the skin of the other, brrbrrrbrrr.

In addition, the life stories of these women largely take place in an empire that no longer exists. What the Soviet Union was all about and what the “Soviet eyes” of the mothers see in Germany today, in which they have now been living for a long time, is incomprehensible to the daughters. And then Salzmann, who was born in Volgograd in 1985 and belongs to the daughter generation, takes her decisive narrative step. She did research, interviewed contemporary witnesses, heard life stories. With what she knows, she approaches the lost world so closely that one can hardly make out its outlines, familiar from the history books, but its wallpaper patterns, their smells, their anxiety, their feeling on the skin.

Sasha Marianna Salzmann has become known as a playwright. Together with other authors at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse in Berlin, she shaped what later got the label “post-migrant theater”. Her most successful piece is also about disastrous mother-daughter relationships, it is called “Mamloschn mother tongue”. She was the in-house author of the Gorki Theater, directed a side stage there and curated a “Disintegration Congress” with Max Czollek, at which the role expectations of the German majority of Jewish Germans and their self-awareness were discussed. She patiently explains to interviewers what it means that she sees herself as non-binary.

There is a calm sovereignty that makes it difficult to hope to read one of the coming great German storytellers here

In 2017 her debut novel “Besides yourself” was published. There was a desire to combine current motifs in one narrative: shifting identities in a politically insecure world, the transition between the sexes in Istanbul during the attempted coup in 2016, against the background of a centuries-old Russian-Jewish family history. The tone of the book turned occasionally into something hectic and fashionable.

That has completely disappeared in this second novel. Rather, the impression arises that Salzmann has long since gone through the identity-logical argument that some opinion circles are only now really excited about. She tells in a broad, timelessly epic style. There is a calm sovereignty that makes it difficult to hope to read one of the great German storytellers to come. With the title of her novel, Salzmann refers ambivalently to the Russian literary tradition: “Everything must be wonderful in people” is a quote from Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya”, with which a system-loyal chief doctor admonished his students: “Your appearance is a mirror of your thoughts ! “

The most detailed story in the novel is about Lena, who grew up in Gorlowka in the 1970s, in today’s Ukraine. In the summer, she spends the summer with her grandmother in Sochi and marveled at the glamorous people in the cafés under brightly colored parasols, after helping her grandmother to sell the few hazelnuts in her own garden at the market. There are the strange social differences that are supposedly not supposed to exist under socialism. Lena will find herself on their unpleasant side. But Salzmann does not comment or explain anything.

Your text is too intensely preoccupied with perception: with the tingling sensation in your fingers when you peel off the “jagged leaves”, “which closed like funnels around the nutshells”, the “smell of sweat and fresh meat” in the queue in front of the Grocery store, the crumbling paint on the barracks of a holiday camp.

When Lena’s mother becomes seriously ill, no one can help her. Medicines cost a fortune in bribes for a doctor who does not give the ailment a name. Shortly after Lena gets a place to study medicine against the resistance of the system, her mother dies. Lena’s neurology professor advises her to change her subject: “You will see your mother’s face in every patient who from now on rolls her eyes in pain.” Somewhere in the background glasnost and perestroika are looming, Lena becomes a dermatologist, and the following system change means for her that all of a sudden rich men in furs come to her who want their sexually transmitted diseases discreetly removed, while under the bridges of the city cardboard settlements develop.

Open detailed view

The gap between the rich and the poor becomes glaring, the cities in which Lena lives are suddenly in the Ukraine, no longer in the Soviet Union, and resentment is blossoming in society. For example against Jewish friends who are considering going to Germany as contingent refugees. Lena falls in love with a Chechen man who keeps reproaching her with prejudices that she doesn’t even have. When she is expecting a child, he disappears and a Jewish man who keeps telling jokes takes his place. She emigrates to Germany with him and her daughter Edi.

You get to feel a lot through this novel, but if you want to have it explained, you have to google it

This Edi is one of the main characters in the other three storylines of the novel. She loves women, works as an intern for a newspaper and always seems to come after the end of something: after the end of the Soviet Union, in which her parents still live in spirit, and after the end of her medium, the newspaper, only those around her is still used to wrap waste. With a friend, Tatjana, who emigrated shortly after Lena, and her daughter Nina, who is floating in the Asperger spectrum, Lena and Edi form a square of strange mothers and daughters. The novel begins with a scene in which these four meet again after a long time in a backyard in Jena, roaring, howling, thrashing, disheveled and at a loss.

Sasha Marianna Salzmann then puts together the history of the alienation. Without filling in the gaps artificially and decidedly without didactics. How the Soviet Union collapsed and what came after that, what kind of place in the world the city of Dnepropetrovsk was in the eighties, what migration does with families, you get to feel all that through this novel, but if you want to have it explained, you have to google it .

Possibly these are the aesthetic consequences of the idea of ​​disintegration: That the lives of migrants are not retold in order to make the “background” of the newer Germans understandable to the Germans. But because feelings and stories emerge that have not existed or have rarely existed in German-language literature.

And then something dialectical seems to be going on, because at the same time there is an integration. The one in a, in this case female, genealogy. In a family context that would not exist without this story. For example, Salzmann tells two love scenes, decades apart: two women each, stinging nettle fields, more or less lived danger. Mother and daughter would not talk to each other about these experiences, but the novel creates an underground connection between their lives. And if it only consists in the memory, of a burning sensation on the skin.