Sausage is all: “Lenin auf Schalke”, Gregor Sander’s western novel. – Culture

For many biographies, the “Wende” years mark a brutal experience. The author Ines Geipel identified a whole “generation wall” in one of her books. In literary terms, however, these years are still often told by East German authors from the perspective of comically naïve characters. “Peter Holtz” by Ingo Schulze and Lutz Seiler’s novel “Stern 111” were recent examples of this. Of course: satire. But hasn’t the uncomfortable question been asked, at least since February 24, 2022 and the necessary reassessment of the 1990s at European level, whether the narrative style, which is easily digestible at least for West Germans, has been exhausted?

Gregor Sander was born in Schwerin in 1968, quotes the character of the dumb fool in his new book “Lenin auf Schalke”, but turns the tables. It is not the East German soul that is dissected, but the West German soul, which has been neglected in the thirty years since the “Wende”: “Sander, now no mercy! You have to get to it.” The one calling to action is Schlüppi, a magnificent specimen of the generation described by Ines Geipel, who, however, in Sander’s case “got stuck in the tween deck of the fall of the wall” quite casually and is doing his things ravishingly anarchically. If you want, you can read other dimensions of an existence marked by the historical break.

Author Gregor Sander has recently resisted the expectation of having to explain the East: “It’s annoying,” he said on Deutschlandradio in 2020. He has now made a virtue out of necessity: “Lenin auf Schalke” is a travelogue, a literary action, a sly joke with a subtle bite. Because Schlüppi sends his friend Sander on a humanitarian mission early one morning in Berlin, just as they are comfortably sinking between Späti and Konnopke over the last beer in the “Hackepeterrot” of crazy ideas. It’s about Gelsenkirchen, the sick woman on the Rhine-Herne Canal, the saddest place in an already dreary zone, for which the city’s head of marketing is fighting windmills.

Oh, the Ruhrpott! What was he glorified in his twilight. By authors like Feridun Zaimoglu, by filmmakers like Dominik Graf, who, using the example of the city of Marl and the Grimme Prize, not only tells German television history with his wonderfully melancholic film essay “Es wird Stadt”, but also testified to urban hubris. Gregor Sander, on the other hand, is pursuing a specific goal: to explain to the Wessis their West and what they have suppressed themselves.

With a project like this you can really go for a swim and step on the toes of the whole Ruhr area. But “Lenin auf Schalke” is an accomplice-like homage to a sense of home from the spirit of the now-more than ever. And the latter is needed: closed pubs everywhere you look, boarded-up shop windows, desolate posh new development areas and miserable wastelands with embarrassing high culture use. And right in the middle: nothing but honest people who have their hearts in the right place and at the same time on their tongues.

“Trust, trust, trust!” is the mantra that Schlüppi gave his friend to take with him when he tears up because of the life dreams that were prematurely canceled, for example manifested in a handwritten plaque that dangles sadly in the dusty window of a long-closed butcher’s shop: “The sausage is gone .”

Sander offers a lot of such funny moments that aren’t actually funny. Her humor arises from the contrast between description and evaluation, between misery and expertise, which surprisingly does not tip over into cynical: “On the other side of Bochumer Straße, which leads us to Ückendorf, there is a small house with an empty pharmacy on the ground floor. ‘ It was called Engel’, which of course sounds doubly poetic for an abandoned pharmacy. You have to do it first. Going broke with a pharmacy, I thought appreciatively.” Since someone knows, in the gradations of bankruptcy declarations.

Sander revives an amazing figure in German history: Zonen-Gaby

But all this is a backdrop, an entertaining accessory. As does the eponymous scene, which pokes fun at the celebration of the local communists on the occasion of the import of a discarded Czech statue of Lenin. gift. The actual central character and Sander’s opponent is called Ömer. Boy meets girl, West loves East, so Ömer die Gabi, aka Zonen-Gaby, the woman who made it onto the cover of Titanic and into the story with a cucumber in her hand. In the fictional real life that Sander attributes to the Titanic character Zonen-Gaby, her name is Gabriele Wolanski and she is Schlüppi’s cousin, living in Gelsenkirchen, where she first met Ömer and secondly made her living as a “history performer”.

Gabi impresses with disarming (actually classic Western) statements. For example, when Ömer describes how his Turkish father, recruited for underground hard coal mining in the early 1960s, had to endure the “health test”: “They bent their teeth apart, measured their muscles and felt their eggs.” Gabi pulls his shoulders up and says: “Of course that’s not so nice.” This mixture of helplessness, love and sincerity with blatant incomprehension at the same time – as a writer you have to manage that in a single sentence. Especially since the author doesn’t sabotage his character, but rather her readers, some of whom will presumably recognize themselves.

Incidentally, with stories like Ömer’s, Fatma Aydemir and Özkan Ezli have just set a new standard for collective memory in this country. Aydemir through her novel “Djinns”Ezli through his impressive analysis “Narratives of Migration. Another German Cultural History”. When Gregor Sander now stages his Ömer in a tragi-comic, that’s tricky.

For example, when the author Gabi and Ömer proudly present the view over the “sea of ​​tranquility from Moers to Hamm, from Marl to Hagen” – probably also a silent reference to Wolfgang Hilbig’s poem “The Sea in Saxony”. Or when Ömer invites Sander to the “Büdchen”, which he took over from his father. He had switched to drinking hall when he was “completely broken and fucked up by your shitty money,” as Ömer says. Gregor Sander succeed in balancing acts without kitsch and without devaluation: the Büdchen as a cross-milieu meeting place of West German society; a sense of home that is more of a Stockholm syndrome.

Open detailed view

Above all, however, he almost casually puts his finger in the wound of the West. A wound that is our story with and without migration in the foreground – not that of “the others”. What Gregor Sander does differently than Moritz von Uslar, for example, when he describes the East: He includes himself and reveals his own weakness as the breaking point of his book. This breaking point is the speechlessness between Ömer and Sander. Sander avoids staging a real conversation or even solidarity between them, as Naika Foroutan and Jana Hensel suggested in their book “Society of Others”. Ömer and Sander keep their distance and don’t seem to want to play this role in the big reunification drama.

Even more: Ömer remains an object, Sander a descriptive subject. This makes the author Gregor Sander vulnerable, because the younger generation of the literary world in particular has had a hard time understanding such speechlessness on just one page.

And what does Sander do? He gets one of them in his book. In the crucial chapter he quotes the Writer Enis Maci, coincidentally from Gelsenkirch. Maci was with that Essay volume “Eiscafé Europa” suddenly one of the most important voices when it comes to contemporary German cultural history, i.e. one that recognizes its migration history. Astonished, Gregor Sander quotes them from a distance, as if he knew that there is something to be learned from these younger people that the characters in his book are not yet aware of and that their author is not able to do as long as he is still grappling with his own attributions by others. It is precisely this undercurrent that makes “Lenin auf Schalke” much more than a funny crazy idea.