Is it particularly crass to write a joint review of two
quite different novels, merely because their protagonists fall into the same
sociocultural dynamic? Possibly, but I shall do so anyway.
Jochen Schmidt’s
Schneckenmühle (emphasis on the third syllable) is narrated by
fourteen-year-old Jens and set at a summer camp in the dying days of the GDR.
The narrator of Torsten Schulz’s
Nilowsky is another fourteen-year-old boy (to begin with) in
East Berlin in 1976 ff. The characters themselves have little in common, as do
the respective plots; and yet both novels slyly dose us with information on
life in East Germany.
In Schneckenmühle, that underhand drip-feed is part of the
novel’s concept, it seemed to me. Up until about halfway through, I’d been
wondering when the plot was going to kick in before I noticed what Schmidt was
up to. Off Jens goes to his last ever summer camp, his naïve voice sharing the
joys and horrors of school holidays spent in a hut with his peers. Girls, bad
jokes, nudity, illicit alcohol, bullying, not washing for weeks on end. On the
surface, it’s all fairly standard stuff, even if you come from a country that
doesn’t do summer camps. And enjoyable, of course, because Schmidt knows how to
entertain his readers from his long experience as a Lesebühnen author (which I
usually describe as slam prose, for want of a better analogy).
But two other things are happening in parallel. Firstly,
Jens has a rather strange fixation with consumer goods. His mother writes him a
letter and the most thrilling news is that she’s bought a pedal-bin for the
kitchen. He can hardly wait to try it out. Or he buys a replacement glass liner
for a vacuum flask as an exciting gift for his father. In fact, the highlight
of every trip the kids go on is the shopping part. A jaunt across the border to
Czechoslovakia starts with the lines:
Unfortunately, the shops aren’t right by the station; you
have to walk a little way into the town and find them in the side streets. We
storm the very first food shop, full of greed for the unknown sweeties in
excitingly unfamiliar wrappers.
The main difference between the two countries in the kids’
eyes seems to be in their respective consumer goods: sherbet sweets, ketchup in
tubes, rubber snakes, bendy erasers and rulers, table football sets – all the
Czech excitement makes Jens ill.
And then there are the more subtle details: the people
disappearing, Jens’ discomfort about openly displaying his Christianity, the
kids singing Western songs at the disco, the Russian soldiers. And a rather
strange night-time adventure kicks in to provide surface plot action. I don’t
want to write a great deal about this aspect, because it’s one of the most
interesting things about reading the book. Perhaps it’s enough to warn you to
look a little deeper than Jens’s reading of events. In retrospect, I’m reminded
of Irmgard Keun’s
Child of All Nations, in which another young narrator
narrowly misses the historical point. Very clever indeed.
And so to Nilowsky. As I mentioned, the two books have
little in common in terms of structure. Schulz’s narrator Markus ages in the
course of the story, going from fourteen to about twenty, with a brief epilogue
some years later, and his voice is more mature than Jens’s. He’s a conscious
storyteller, perhaps, rather than an accidental one. His parents have moved
from Prenzlauer Berg to a dire corner of East Berlin for work. It could be the
area between Adlershof and Spindlersfeld, still not exactly Berlin’s sunny side
today, but in Nilowsky a reeking triangle between a chemical plant, a forest
and railway line.
And here Markus meets Reiner Nilowsky, an inveterate
trainspotter a couple of years older than him. Especially in contrast to
Markus’s dreary life, Nilowsky reminded me rather of Astrid Lindgren’s
Karlsson-on-the-roof – a mischief-maker extraordinaire with his own rules and
theories of how the world works. In this book, though, the oddball character
has a very dark side. We see him being beaten by his father very early on,
followed by his despised father’s and beloved grandmother’s deaths. And we meet
his love interest Carola, who has decided to remain thirteen even though she’s
seventeen: anorexia.
Markus falls under the older boy’s spell but is equally
drawn to Carola – again, nothing we haven’t read before. But Nilowsky is his
gateway to an otherworld, a GDR populated by drunks, old ladies and
guest workers from Mozambique. As in
Schneckenmühle, Schulz gives us a rare
insight into a particular aspect of life in East Germany, in this case racism.
Fawned over by the old ladies, the Mozambicans live in barracks in the forest
and are generally condemned by everyone else, including Markus’s father, who is
in charge of them at the chemical works. They are expected to work hard, learn
their trade and then return to the “brother country” to aid the revolution. As
far as I’m aware this was standard practice in the GDR. I’ve met people who
came over as students and were treated similarly, but managed to settle here
after the Wall fell. In fact the SPD is now
fielding its first black parliamentary candidate, Karamba Diaby, who originally came from Senegal to
study in Leipzig. For our adventurous Markus, the Mozambicans are enticing as
rebellious heroes, and one of the most bizarre things Nilowsky does involves
some kind of voodoo ritual. I wondered at times whether the author hadn’t
created rather two-dimensional stereotypes, but I decided the very fact that he
portrays Africans in the GDR is pretty groundbreaking, and what he shows us is
how people saw them. And that no doubt included a good pinch of racist clichés.
Torsten Schulz has a background in screenwriting, and as
such his plotting is more robust than Schmidt’s. After crises in the family and
his friendship, Markus moves away again and loses touch with Nilowsky for a
while, marking the apex of the novel. But the rest of the book deals with his
attempts to grow up and away from his strange friend. As he gets older, Carola
becomes a more realistic prospect – except of course that would mean betraying
Nilowsky. And Nilowsky’s life becomes darker and darker while Markus’s grows
more and more conventional. The ending is melancholy with a tinge of
iconoclasm. Throughout, Nilowsky's unconventional voice stands out, making for some excellent writing.
Two fascinating novels, both featuring stories well told. Go
ahead and read them both.
