Juli Zeh

Wenn in Unterleuten, einem kleinen Dorf in Brandenburg, überwiegend Kopien der eigenen Person leben würden, dann, ja dann wäre das Leben dort vermutlich sehr idyllisch und harmonisch. So aber treffen Menschen aufeinander, von denen sich jede/r im Besitz der alleinglückseligmachenden Wahrheit meint, während der Rest nur Stuß verzapft. Darüberhinaus pflegen praktisch Alle ihre Vermutungen und Erwartungen über die Anderen, die im seltensten Fall positiv sind. Jede/r traut jeder/m das show more Schlechteste zu und fast wie eine Art selbsterfüllender Prophezeiung geschehen Dinge, die die eigene Meinung noch bestätigen. Statt miteinander wird mehr übereinander geredet und so verbreiten sich Mutmaßungen und Argwohn in Windesweile im Dorf. Stadtbewohner (junge Frau, alter Mann) gegen grobschlächtigen Einheimischen - die Frau nennt diesen nur 'das Tier'. Naturschützer gegen Unternehmen - man schreibt Briefe. Kommunist gegen Kapitalist - eine Feindschaft, die keinerlei sachliche Grundlage hat. Ehemann gegen Ehefrau in unterschiedlichen Konstellationen - Erwartungen und Vermutungen werden nicht ausgesprochen, stattdessen schweigt man bis zum bitteren Ende. Als dann im Dorf ein Streit über die Errichtung eines Windparks beginnt, werden diese Beziehungsgeflechte auf's Äußerste strapaziert, wobei die alten Konflikte mit einer ungeheuren Heftigkeit wieder aufbrechen und die NeubürgerInnen direkt miteinbeziehen.
Obwohl das Buch mehr als 600 Seiten hat, lässt es sich weglesen wie ein Unterhaltungsroman. Die Figuren, die erst recht klischeehaft daherkommen, entwickeln sich ziemlich schnell zu eigenständigen Persönlichkeiten, sodass von der ursprünglichen Schablonenhaftigkeit nicht mehr viel bleibt. Gombrowski beispielsweise, der massige, ungeschlachte und auch brutale Wendegewinner hat eine überaus sensible Seite, von der aber nur die Wenigsten wissen - was ihn dennoch nicht von seinem Verhalten Anderen gegenüber freispricht. Schaller, sein ehemaliger Angestellter und Handlanger ist ähnlich ungeschlacht, wenn auch nicht so schlau wie dieser. Sein Schicksal ist derart unvorstellbar, dass ich mehr Mitgefühl als alles andere für ihn empfand. Und so ist es bei fast allen Figuren in diesem Roman, so eindimensional zu Beginn sie auch daherkommen mögen: Jeder/r von ihnen hat eine Geschichte, die sich zu erzählen lohnt. Von Juli Zeh habe ich kürzlich in einem Interview gelesen, dass Jonathan Franzen einer ihrer Lieblingsschriftsteller ist. "Mit seinem Roman 'Freiheit' kam ich mir wieder vor wie als Kind, als ich mit der Taschenlampe unter der Decke Seite um Seite verschlungen und alles andere vergessen habe. Es gibt nicht viele, die es beherrschen, so realistisch zu erzählen, ohne dass es dröge wird. Franzen schafft es, die Welt in der wir leben, anschaulich zu machen." Liebe Juli Zeh, Sie schaffen das auch! Danke dafür! show less

We're somewhere in the late 2020s, and Germany is being governed by the BBB (Concerned Citizens' Alliance), who have closed the borders, cleaned up the graffiti, and are steadily dismantling the outdated restrictions of the constitution in a series of "efficiency packages". Not everyone is happy about what the politicians are doing, but no-one seems to be upset enough to do anything to change things ("what good is voting anyway?").

Britta seems at first sight the absolute model of a show more middle-class working mum. She is a partner in a therapy practice, her husband is setting up an e-commerce startup, and they live with their eight-year-old daughter Vera in a modernist concrete cube on the fringes of Braunschweig, possibly the least memorable town in Germany. In their spare time they socialise with the parents of Vera's best friend. But we soon realise that there must be more to what Britta and her colleague Babak do in their work with suicide-risk clients than meets the eye, although it takes a while until we work out exactly what that involves. In any case, there seems to be someone a lot less scrupulous trying to move into the same field, and Britta is forced to reexamine her priorities in life...

This isn't a simple dystopia-novel, the mood has more to do with a satire of the kind of disenchanted liberal detachment that got the country into this mess in the first place, exemplified by the way Britta and her friend Janina play the "dilemma game", speculating about how they would deal with hypothetical moral choices, whilst all the time Britta is moving towards a real-world dilemma she seems to be refusing to confront. Zeh keeps the tension up and doesn't let us get away from from Britta's sometimes rather restricted viewpoint: the book is written like a thriller, but doesn't fall into the obvious plot-traps we might be expecting. And we get some nice jokes about the brave new Germany, and some lively minor characters, in particular Babak and the young woman Julietta. show less

As the punning title already hints, this is another look at the rural Brandenburg setting of Zeh's previous novel Unter Leuten. But in the far from normal lockdown-spring of 2020, this time.

Thirtysomething copywriter Dora has fled Berlin after the stresses caused by two people working-from-home in the same small apartment opened up the existing cracks in her relationship with journalist and Greta-groupie Robert, and she and her dog are now camping out in the country house she bought a show more little while ago with a vague idea of doing it up. Fortunately, the village turns out to have good broadband, but it doesn't have much else apart from a volunteer fire brigade. She's fully expecting to get no welcome from the locals, who are obviously all going to be hardcore AfD voters conditioned to dislike everyone and everything that comes from Berlin...

And of course it turns out to be a little bit more complicated than that. In a village neighbours are neighbours, even if they have nothing else in common with you, and you can't simply ignore them as you might in a city. And in Dora's case the man next-door turns out to be an appalling neo-Nazi with a criminal record for violence, who also happens to be a good neighbour keen to help Dora get her place fixed up and habitable. And a skilled craftsman. Which doesn't in any way cancel out his repulsive views and harmful acts, but does force Dora to see him as a complex human being rather than as a sociopolitical type to be slotted into the "bad" category.

Dora folgt einer Unterhaltung über die Qualität der neuesten Mähroboter und denkt, wie wenig Polarisierung es in Wahrheit gibt. Kein Ost und West, unten und oben, links oder rechts. Weder Paradies noch Apokalypse, wie es Medien und Politik häufig schildern. Stattdessen Menschen, die beieinanderstehen. Die sich mehr oder weniger mögen. Die aufeinandertreffen und sich wieder trennen.

The moral seems to be that we lose out on the complexity of human characters as city-dwellers in our self-selected safe-spaces. Which is fair enough, and Zeh handles it elegantly and wittily, without ever falling into the trap of creating a "good Nazi". Along the way, she also has a lot of other clever and amusing observations of the strange ways German life has reacted to the Covid-19 crisis. Not as complex and comprehensive a novel as Unter Leuten, but still very rewarding. show less

A small community in Brandenburg is thrown into turmoil by a proposal to build wind turbines, and the unhealed wounds of old conflicts get mixed up with new tensions between the different priorities of old residents and incomers. Sounds like every novel about a fictional small community you've ever read. That this doesn't turn into an East German version of Midsomer Murders or The Archers is mainly due to the very unusual, but effective, way Zeh structures the book: the 61 chapters (plus an show more epilogue) rotate between eleven main viewpoint characters, so that the idiot/bigot/evil manipulator of the previous chapter becomes the sympathetic centre-point of this one, and a background irrelevance in the next one. It sounds disorientating, and it is rather: this is a rural tragedy with eleven different people competing to fail most spectacularly, and most of them end up with more soap than opera. It seems to be making the point that tragedy is a form that only exists on the stage, not in real life.

But of course there is also a lot of clever observation of how small communities work, of the problems specific to rural East Germany after the fall of the DDR, and of the classic dilemma of how to manage the countryside against the conflicting claims for it to be a food- and energy-factory, a museum, an unspoilt nature-reserve, and a recreation-ground for city-dwellers. Zeh has fun showing us how confusing it is for outsiders that the villagers of Unterleuten(*) insist that business should be done face-to-face, that deals should be arranged with the minimum possible involvement of lawyers and officials, and that barter or (social) credit are better than cash. The person in the strongest position in the village is the one who is owed most favours. Incomers like the bird-warden (and downscaled academic) Gerhard completely fail to see this, and put themselves in the wrong by bombarding their neighbours with official letters.

Very enjoyable, in a dark sort of way: the 600+ pages flew past.

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(*) There's a running joke that, as in Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire, many of the place-names in this part of Brandenburg, although made up of conventional German place name elements, turn out to have double meanings: Unterleuten, if read as "unter Leuten", means "among people". show less