One “moved to the distance – into paradise / and that is somewhere at Herne”, as Franz Josef Degenhardt had sung.
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Parents, it is already a matter of Aristotle, have absolute responsibility for the life of their children; After all, they gave them birth without their consent. This picture of parenting and motherhood, which has already been condensed into a bins, has contributed to an ideology of the family as a nucleus in society over the millennia, which already translated Leo Tolstoi literarily: »All lucky families are similar, every unhappy family is unhappy In their own way. ”In the meantime also a binary, but one that still has a literary effect not only literary, but also socially and politically.
This responsibility, which is attributed to the parents, is also justified in a liberal bourgeois concept of freedom, which is based on the assumption that there is a choice. But what if the parents – and especially the mother – had no choice at all?
Aynur is 19 when it is advertised. She is a dreamy, stubborn young woman, grew up in a liberal milieu in the world -faced corner of Istanbul. Her brother, who strives for a career in politics, chooses her: Alvin who emigrated to Germany. Alvin comes from the country, the family is strictly believing, he has fixed ideas about what a man is and what a woman and what they have for each other. He is a “medium -sized village destrot,” thinks Aynur’s mother when she sees him for the first time. His love for Aynur is as archaic as his dream of climbing is modern: this delicate, clever, stubborn being should belong to him, then he did it. “Like a hungry dog,” he looks when he looks at the shop windows of the big shops, but even if he sees in the blushing face of his fiancee. It is the same look: the look of a man who wants to become something.
For Alvin, the wedding night becomes a triumph, a torture for Aynur. After he’s finished, he sleeps so deeply, “he could have been dead, like a catcher that dies after sex”. It will be the highlight of his life.
He brings Aynur to Herne, where he works underground for the economic miracle. The money is not enough for your own apartment, so you live with your father and brother in a breaking booth; Outside the chimneys smoke, the men inside. Aynur becomes sad and pregnant, and then it happens for the first time: Alvin, dissatisfied with her dissatisfaction, strikes. It beats so much that she suffers a miscarriage. You will get children later, Ada and Meryem. He too will beat; After becoming unemployed and instead, he will also steal the money that they develop through newspaper.
Only one construct springs from his decline: the family, especially the mother. Aynur, who now works in a factory and sometimes also beats the children at home, does not interfere when the father becomes violent, does not leave him, not over the years – she will want to light him in between, but in the end becomes They say that he was not a bad person, just overwhelmed.
And certainly he was overwhelmed, but what? From his dreams, from his ideas? And she was certainly overwhelmed by her lack of options. When she writes home, it is a call for help from the start, but Aynur Grandparents don’t know how to help her; Instead, they die from Gram.
The children remain for Aynur. Certainly they were also overwhelmed, these children, who were hardly allowed to be children: the mother had to accompany the office to translate, put money into their hands, in between with racist teachers, and in the schoolyard anyway. Nevertheless, the loneliness of such a childhood not to understand as a fate, but still to make it credible that at least Meryem loves her parents is heart -open. This is not about analysis, but about understanding, and in the end both children are right: Ada, who never comes out, but his departure from everything that is family speaks for themselves, and Meryem, the two parents in their end the hand is able to rich.
Çiğdem Akyol has written an enormously dense novel that leaves the analyzes behind because a new imposition is hidden in every paragraph: Love that Meryem feels about her mother, which is as frequent and unexplainable, cannot be told, not analyzed . If the story was written from the perspective of her brother ADA, who loosened from the family in pain, we might have an Eribon successor book. But Çiğdem Akyol is not about a household access to any kind of balance. It is not a billing that she wrote, but a declaration of love: an explanation for why Meryem loves her mother (and finally forgives the father). Literature can tell circumstances that cannot be explained, and that makes them comforting, makes them capable of donating consolation.
This consolation is not arbitrary. It is based on a social analysis that, precisely because it was not spelled out, is highly political. Meryem’s grandfather Sabrî, when she wants to sneak home with a broken toe, starts her down and invites her to a cola. When she starts asking him questions, he says – more out of excessive demands than out of a look: »There are three categories of people: those who were born with the golden spoon in the mouth. Those who don’t get anything. And us: the ones who have to put up with everything they want to put up with the little for the little. We are only tolerated because they benefit from us. “
This novel is also relentless: Meryem, when she is grown up, cannot love until she gets to know a imprisoned sociology professor in a Turkish torture prison, which she also besides. Other novels would have ended with how it gives him: But Meryem simply leaves him behind when it gets tight. But her father shakes her hand when he dies, even though he was nothing but pain for her. Maybe it is the other way around: children have a lot more responsibility for their parents because they carry their memory around with them for so long. But even if so, then they don’t have to be bitter.
Çiğdem Akyol: Geliebte Mutter – Canin Mom. Steidl, 192 S., Geb., 24 €.