“Buckle up, here we go”: This place should become more beautiful

Imagine there is no longer a train station in your town. And also no flower shop, no butcher, no school, no bank branch and no doctor. Like in Ziegenrück in Vogtland, Thuringia, Germany’s fifth smallest city. 615 residents and half of them vote for AfD, as could be read in a report in “Zeit” before the state elections. Nothing changed there after the election: AfD at 51.2 percent and the SPD at 1.9 percent. The Left got 9.2 percent. By the way, Bodo Ramelow has his holiday home in this corner. Beautiful landscape, depressed mood.

“Pascal wanted a lot, he got a lot: a lot less,” says the first-person narrator Marcel about his best friend in Domenico Müllensiefen’s new novel “Fasten your seatbelt, it’s starting.” Pascal drinks a lot of alcohol and doesn’t exercise much; “the office paid for an apartment and beer” in an area that had “lost all steam and juice.” Marcel is approaching 40 and works in a kebab shop in Jeetzenbeck, a fictional town in the Altmark where people say “rotisserie” to the kebab. There seems to be even less going on there than in the real Ziegenrück.

Absurdly, there is a stone in the village pond that is called the “center of the world” because, according to legend, the world was once measured from here. But one could actually use Müllensiefen’s novel to think through the feeling of being disconnected, frustrated and fascised that prevails in many East German areas. “Fasten your seatbelts, here we go” is very current contemporary literature.

Marcel is caught in a time loop. 20 years ago, Steffi, his first and only great love, left him and the place. 20 years ago, his younger sister intentionally drove herself to death. The last time he saw his father before he went to prison was 20 years ago. Marcel reports on them in flashbacks, stories like something out of a post-GDR youth book. “Our professions were: cook, bricklayer, electrician, mechanic and unemployed,” says Marcel, summarizing the careers of his former classmates. “But somehow our world became smaller and smaller, and what was sold to us as an upswing was no longer a standstill, it was more of a dismantling, dismantling of the East.”

The symbol of being logged out is the end of the “America Line.” In the past you could take the train from Jeetzenbeck to the next small town and from there to the North Sea ports towards Übersee. But Deutsche Bahn gradually shut it down. This is not made up, the “America line” comes from the Empire. There are still remnants of this route; according to the railway, they will be overhauled at some point, no one knows when.

That’s why the core question of the novel is: “What actually happens to places that are abandoned by society and the state?” says Domenico Müllensiefen in an interview. “What happens if the state withdraws from the town with the last authority it still has, and that is the railway?”

Müllensiefen was born in Magdeburg in 1987 and moved to a village in the Altmark that is similar to Jeetzenbeck when he was nine. However, when he was 16 he moved back to Magdeburg. His grandfather lived in the Altmark. There was field around their house and he had a field of vision of two or three kilometers to the forest. The eternal expanses of the provinces – that’s how he grew up, but he was also happy “when I came back to Magdeburg, where the social cards were reshuffled again.”

In “From Our Fires,” his debut novel from 2022, he told how they were mixed in Leipzig after 1989. This is about three secondary school students who pass their time with homemade bombs while their parents’ houses are falling apart (short version). One becomes a blaster and goes to the USA, the other a butcher and then a Reich citizen and the narrator first an electrician and then – very symbolically – an undertaker.

In “Buckle up, here we go” most of the people in Jeetzenbeck work as farmers. But they know that their village is slowly but surely dying out. There are constantly fewer children and more old people. And there is Dirk, Pascal’s father. He would like to call himself “Historian-Schulz,” but in the village he is only known as “Nazi-Schulz,” because he deals in the “import business” with illegal Nazi memorabilia and weapons and sees himself as “a corrective against the ideological nonsense that we “I’ve been experiencing it here for years,” he says. Dirk tends to lecture and has always been a Nazi, and he became one in the GDR because he hated that state. Just like the West now. But he doesn’t seem unfriendly, he seems like a kind of caring Nazi who helps Marcel a little. Likewise his mother, who often sits in front of the television, turned away from the world, and watches “Columbo” episodes on video. And he also helps Steffi when she reappears after 20 years. Her father is Cuban and runs the kebab shop where Marcel works, her mother is Marcel’s former teacher. As a teenager, Steffi once asked Dirk if he wanted to throw her out along with the “criminal foreigners.” No, he replied, why? She is “one of us”. Yes, yes, yes, nothing against foreigners or others, but, but, but – the classic answer from the realm of resentment and the right.

Müllensiefen tells how, as a teenager in the Altmark, which is traditionally considered a CDU country, he encountered Nazis “who could do their shit completely openly and without any contradiction.” They showed Nazi memorabilia out of the trunk and walked around at village festivals in Nazi clothing without bothering anyone. And when he was pogo dancing with a friend at a party like this, a skin would come up to him and just say, “Don’t do that!” And they’d go home frustrated.

In the novel, Marcel says: “Jeetzenbeck was calm and quiet, here you could only raise loud and restless people.” Dirk tells Marcel how he and his friends would have given the Hitler salute in the village disco in the early 80s when the western NDW hit ” I want fun” by Markus ran. Whenever he sings: “Germany, Germany, do you hear me?” Dirk actually asked himself at the time whether Germany heard him.

Only later does Marcel understand “that Dirk was never a friend of the family, but always just an asshole” and betrays him to the police. And that his father, who always did what Dirk wanted him to do, will not become a better person, “rather a worse one.” And even later, as a reader, you understand the title of the novel, which is meant positively.

When Steffi returned, she brought her son with her, who is even a professional soccer player at 1. FC Magdeburg. Is it Marcel’s son? Ultimately that’s not so important. What’s more important is that they stay there and don’t go crazy or depressed. That you don’t go along with the right-wing narrative reinforced by the media that everything is a catastrophe and start treating yourself and your surroundings better. In Jeetzenbeck they start small. They take care of the old, dilapidated cultural center. There’s something touching about that, but also constructive. Being constructive voluntarily, without orders or paternalism, is always good. Marcel had already remarked: “If my life here was really like what I always see on TV, I wouldn’t want to live here.”

As in his debut “From Our Fires,” Müllensiefen tells the story in “Buckle up, it’s starting” with laconic humor in a relaxed, pointed and entertaining way. He appears again in a ridiculous supporting role as “Garbage” and the emphatically pragmatic craftsman duo “Mike and Maik” cannot be missed. Behind the roughness of his characters lurks subtle irony and dramaturgical dynamism in the leaden calm. From the dreary, dull province, he develops a complex context, as we know it from the RBB series “Waiting for a Bus” or from the Netflix series “Dark”. In contrast to the contemporary Eastern novels by Anna Raabe (very thesis-heavy) or Lukas Rietzschel (atmospherically very oppressive), the heavy topics (crisis, violence, disappointment) are approached by Müllensiefen with a casual lightness, so that one can perhaps think and talk about them better.

In an interview, Müllensiefen attests to the North German friendliness of the area in the Altmark. People are a bit closed off, but still warm. He tells me that there is no tourist offer there, but: “If you are really looking for peace and quiet, if you want to see stars at night, if you also want to live in a dead zone, then the Altmark is exactly the right place.”

Domenico Müllensiefen: Fasten your seat belts, here we go. Kanon-Verlag, 352 pages, hardcover, €25.