Christian Baron – “Three Sisters”: Out of the Malocherhölle

Reading you can see a film in front of you and wish you could become one from the novel. The scene goes under your skin right from the start when the 15-year-old Mira has to say goodbye to her stillborn child in the hospital. And then a guy with a red great and black leather jacket kicks through the door. He gently caresses her over her head and “smiles mild out of his sea blue eyes”, although he is not the father of the little nunzia.

Mira and Ottes before Christian Baron was born: In his autobiographical novel “A man in his class” I got to know her very differently. »Our parents slept right next to our room. That’s why it came to us when mom thundered against the wall. We never lost a word about it. We felt the pain, we looked at our trembling hands, we looked at each other. Teiling and floating became normal for us over time. “

And now I try to bring these pictures together: Mira, who goes to the Kaiserslautern Maikirmes full of undertaking in the red evening dress and red pumps and almost falls in love with another, with the miles who finally dies of cancer. And above all: how could this Ottes become such a racket?

Already in “Schön is the night”, the second part of his “Kaiserslautern trilogy”, Baron went back to the time before he was born in 1985 by following his grandfathers’ life. This novel lived from the effort to understand what shaped his father, to which he could not forgive in front of which he closed. But now he lets him in his heart.

“Because my most important impulse for writing is something that unfortunately comes out of fashion in the present: I want to understand.” He says that in the band “Writing his life – texts on origin and future” (2023). But the new book does not live from the essayist that the author brilliantly dominates, but of a sensual impression. From one, as I said, the atmosphere painted with a film, always underlaid with the pop music of the 80s. How does he know the atmosphere at the time? He researched, experienced a lot of his aunts in July and Ella, from acquaintances of the mother, who would only be in her early 60. And he felt that he said goodbye to too simple evaluations. July and Ella are now much more differentiated, including the conflicts between them. The hidden envy because Mira is so beautiful and Ella was able to escape the poor conditions.

“Aisocial Gör … do you know what the rabble is?” The teacher said to Mira. This woman Lohmark was “fled the GDR eight years ago” and now liked himself in a class of civil registry, to which you could only react with anger and pride if you didn’t want to sink into pubic. With Carson McCuller’s novel “The Heart is a lonely hunter”, Mira left to West Berlin in the pocket, found shelter in a Kreuzberg background before Ottes took her back. Baron also shows you the “uniform mass of counterculture”, the beginning of the Greens with Petra Kelly, who reacted to the demand “We have to become warming” as one should.

Here the feat of bringing subliminally to bring subliminally into the book and at the same time remaining in the reality of the 1980s. Dramatic scenes, strong characters, including the communist grandmother Hulda, embedded in spiritual swinging that is transmitted when reading. “Three sisters”, the title lets Anton Czechow’s drama think. Three General Stöchters who dream of a departure in the province and ask about the meaning of their life: Ella, Mira and July, who see the play in the Palatinate Theater, are faced with much harder circumstances. Liberation from “Der Malocherhölle”: by marriage as with Ella, through risk to risks as with July, who opened a video store called “Film Höhle” with her husband, or through hard work like Christian Baron’s parents.

“I’m more of a miserable way than just living from support once,” says Ottes. At first he looks like a film hero, later he will freak out again and again in the suffering because he does not bring it to any green branch despite the tap. Violence lived in the personal. How different her way would have been in the GDR, I thought about reading. The reading put me in another country.

And in the final chapter a jump back when July is three years old and Mira Six. A woman is expected who “unfortunately abandoned the family, many years ago”: Ella. “Hello you two. Nice to get to know you, ”she welcomes the children. The mother stank of schnapps. The fish stew did not taste, the “cheese cake” was burned and it looked “as with Manson’s under the sofa”.

Shame and anxiety: What is not good is already a child. “Man was born freely,” says Mira when Grandma Hulda and the father want to talk her Ottes. Again and again try to be herself, it can, but not the “circumstances, in which people are a humiliated, an abandoned, an abandoned, a contemptuous being”.

Christian Baron: Three sisters. Novel. Claassen. 350 pages, born, 24 €.
Literature salon with Christian Baron on October 22, 6 p.m., in the house at Berliner Franz-Mehring-Platz 1.