“Another epoch”, the title of Ulf Erdmann Ziegler’s novel, can make you wonder about questions of political periodization. What is meant are the near yet distant years between 2011 and 2013. Is that still our extended present, even if the topics and excitements of those years have faded a bit? Or is that actually another age in which the worries of our day were not yet awakened or at least we imagined so?
Ziegler’s novel leaves the political chronicle of those years open again, and of course we remember: In Eisenach, two men are discovered dead in a burned-out mobile home. In the NSU investigative committee, an SPD member made a name for himself who was soon suspected of having acquired child pornographic material. Another SPD colleague hit the headlines for possessing crystal meth. The Federal President comes under pressure on suspicion of taking advantage and resigns. A black-yellow coalition rules in Berlin. What is the SPD doing? This is what this novel tells about. “All candidates before and after Schröder were burned,” once stated a party-affiliated political advisor. The fact that the SPD is even running a candidate for chancellor testifies to belief in miracles. But in 2013 everything should get better.
Ziegler’s novel is about a handful of people in the Berlin business of those years. Their names are as striking as their biographies. Andreas “Andi” Nair, aspiring SPD member of the Bundestag with a safe constituency near Hanover, has roots in South Asia. Florian “Flo” Kessler, the liberal vice chancellor, was saved from Saigon as a child. And Wegman Frost, the central figure, Nair’s research assistant, owes its name to a “native American” from a reservation in the northwest of the USA. The three met at home in Schaumburg-Lippe, not far from Gerhard Schröder’s birthplace.
Ulf Erdmann Ziegler: Another era. Novel. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2021. 254 pages, 24 euros.
Of the political careers told here, Ziegler is most interested in the most unspectacular – that of a research assistant. One reason may be that one can observe things better without a mandate and without a public. The novel thrives on these observations by Wegman Frost of himself and his environment. Those who do not rule have more time to reflect. In Wegman Frost, Ziegler’s reflexive, essayistic narration creates a character who sees a lot without being seen. Unlike the active politicians, this figure even has a private life, indeed a distinct life of its own, which in turn is given a lot of space in the novel.
So what is it: an SPD, even an SPD key novel, with many clever insights into the company, ideally suited as a handout for the Federal Agency for Political Education? Perhaps that too, but at the same time and even more it is about the complex inner and family life of a forty-year-old working man of “vague origins”, as he calls it. How Ziegler keeps these two spheres permeable to one another is his secret.
Ziegler’s figures are exceptional. Unfortunately, her talent trickles into politics.
On this side or on the other side of the historically verifiable facts, the novel is dedicated to the “inner workings” of its characters. Ziegler leaves room for productive dreams and absences again. It is true that these business people have been washed with all political, rhetorical and intellectual waters, but then an acute inner state of mind puts them in a stimulating twilight state. The only thing that Ziegler’s characters, starting with Wegman’s precocious foster daughter Ellie, definitely can’t, is: not being smart.
Occasionally this leads to exaggerations, for example when Wegman’s girlfriend and partner (to be) Marion, who is also a super clever real estate agent, answers the admittedly somewhat columnist question of what time you are currently living in, a quiet or a loud one, as follows: “We live in a time of finance, but not of money; one of communication, but not of knowledge.” Ziegler’s figures are capable of such insights into Luhmann’s dimensions around the clock.
Such instant concentrations of intelligence and eloquence may have been rather unlikely in Berlin in the years after 2011, but Ziegler is pulling the Berlin political bubble up to another, to his level. He is neither dull moralizing nor satirically looking down on the company. On the contrary, the novel demonstrates how much intelligence, sometimes in vain, is invested in governing and even in the hope of governing.
The other era, if you want to call it that, has no end, unless the federal elections in 2013, in which the SPD and Peer Steinbrück unsuccessfully send the next candidate to the election. For the well-known reasons, MP Nair is also over, and Frost, the research assistant, would have to fear for his continued employment if he did not already have completely different plans. What do plans mean? Events are precipitous, in politics and in family life, but it almost looks as if Ziegler’s protagonist could still fulfill his dream (which he himself did not fully understand) and henceforth lead an “easy life”.