People would love to be stable: In Bochum, people hope to be “irrelegable” and not just in football.
Photo: dpa
The SPD is already very old, but its ideas do not last long. An example is the high-rise housing estate in Bochum, where Reza moves from Iran with his parents when he was ten, in the new novel by Behzad Karim Khani. It is a “70s SPD fantasy” that people from the “lower lower class to middle middle class” would form a “we” here. But it doesn’t work properly, in the medium term only the unemployed and simple workers will stay there – in the “SPD utopia in which everything is temporary, except the ‘defective’ signs on the elevators.”
The entire Ruhr area seems to be gone to Reza, the narrator: “The workers have first lost their work and then their meaning.” And the Bundesliga soccer team VfL Bochum claims to be “irrelegable,” but they are not. And the city is not a “flower in the area,” as Herbert Grönemeyer sang about it. In the settlement, everyone actually wants “one thing to be valid, to last, to be stable and resilient,” but that never happens, and “then there is always violence.” The young people are “restless like insects. Ready to accept any annoyance, but not boredom.” Most of their parents didn’t grow up in Germany.
When Roma arrive in the neighborhood, the Germans begin to greet the Iranian family because they consider them “the lesser evil,” as Reza’s father believes. He cannot take anything that does not serve the world revolution seriously. Least of all the German bread, which for him is simply a brick. His wife doesn’t understand what “sculpted” means when she sees a fat man wearing a T-shirt that says, “Beer shaped this beautiful body.” Her son says: “Nothing. The man is stupid.”
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The parents’ Iranian university degrees are not recognized. You have to study again. But that’s too expensive for both of them. That’s why the father drives a taxi and works in a kiosk and the mother studies. The father is a poet, makes calligraphy and publishes books. He is becoming more and more withdrawn. He is particularly interested in one thing about the Germans: What made them march all the way to Stalingrad?
The son describes his parents with two pop songs: His father with “Losing my religion” by REM: He has lost his faith. And his mother with “Unfinished Sympathy” by Massive Attack – her sympathy for the Germans is unfinished. When the adult Reza is finally arrested by the police while smuggling drugs, he hears “I got next” by KRS-One in the car; it is the first time that he feels understood by a rapper.
The neighborhood seems like an aquarium, except that its residents don’t understand the windows. Later he will develop the ambition to eat his way through the glass like a worm in order to live between the worlds; and anyone who saw him from outside or inside would think he was on the right side. Poor people in Iran get cholera, in Germany they get social assistance.
When they were kids, they played being ninjas. They dreamed of being able to walk on air. Then “stand” becomes an important adjective: not falling on the skateboard – or anything else. Reza develops his own superpower: the ability to make feelings last. Once, on impulse, he was the only one to stop an admired bully when he wanted to push the eyes into his much weaker opponent’s skull in front of an audience.
Some of his friends later go to prison, are shot or die from drugs. And the others just act as if they know how things will continue or improve. The title of the book is a parable: Swans are beautiful birds, but they don’t fly where there is noise, Reza learned that in Iran.
“When We Were Swans” is the second novel by Behzad Karim Khani, who was born in Tehran in 1977. After the success of his debut “Hund Wolf Schakal,” which is about two Iranian brothers in Berlin-Neukölln, the new book is closer to his life, he says. It is 100 pages thinner and excellently written. With laconic poetic equanimity it is about recognition and fear. But also about love, friendship and the effort to understand your own parents. Wanting to defend yourself in the prefabricated building land of the West, where you have to say B when you have said A, and where nothing comes from anything.
Depression and aggression are not just at home in East Germany, even if it may seem that way in recent autofictional literature. And not just in gangsta rap either: When the guys come who have something to prove, who only see themselves in winning stories, then Reza runs away – too dangerous. He learned that when he was like that himself, back in Bochum.
Behzad Karim Khani: When we were swans. Hanser Berlin, 190 p., hardcover, €22.
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