Janine Adomeit – the pressure milles consciousness

Parentification is called when parents transfer tasks and responsibilities that are not child -friendly. The term comes from psychotherapy and reflects the focus that this type of fault description stipulates: it is purely about the relationship between parents and children. Parentification identifies a disturbed family relationship.

But is that so easy? Anne would probably say: yes. Anne is one of the two main characters in “The first half hour in paradise” by Flensburg author Janine Adomeit. Anne makes a career in a pharmaceutical company and is otherwise away as far as possible: disturb feelings, annoy interpersonia – and if it is true that every person is an island, then it would like to be far out in the Pacific. But now she is at an internal conference and will give a presentation on the subject of opioid-based pain therapy, which it may allow her to switch from the outdoor service. That would also be a career jump, but above all: home office, even fewer people.

But then her brother Kai, whom she has not seen for years, calls her; The last time was a random encounter in a park. He was drunk, she ran away. She has nothing to tell him and he knows that too, but he has no choice. He has just had a withdrawal and needs a shelter for two days before he can get his new living space. And because otherwise he didn’t have many connections, he called his sister out of despair.

As children, they were close, very narrow. She always looked at Kai, who is seven years older, because he was everything for her: protection, consolation, hold, inspiration. He was largely responsible for the fact that her at home was Anne Happy Place, although she – from the outside – had a difficult childhood.

An estimated half a million minors currently maintains family members in Germany.

The mother is seriously ill, multiple sclerosis, and gradually loses her motor skills. She is a singer and stood on the big stages before the first serious damage. After the illness, she moved to Flensburg with her two children and stays afloat with singing lessons and smaller appearances. The disease is galloping with her. For fear that the youth welfare office will take away the children, she is not looking for help and tries to cover up the effects of the different paralysis if possible. So she depends on the help of the children, on her concealed accomplice, as well as that you pay attention to you – later: take care, take a shower, hold, keep worried.

This narrative level plays in 2000. It describes the reality of the life of many young people, even today. An estimated half a million underage currently maintains family members in Germany, and even if it has looked briefly in the meantime that politics takes more consideration for caring relatives, the pandemic has destroyed any illusion here: Without exception, all children were driven back to schools, regardless of the family environment in order to be through rudimentary protective measures as quickly as possible. With her caution and a clue, the mother has absolutely right about having no one: Disabled parents apply, at the latest the measures showed nothing.

The ongoing pressure is frosted by the awareness of the children: from the inside of that of the disease; From the outside, the lack of help and the fear of being taken out of the family to be separated from the beloved mother. Some of the attempts to keep the situation at least in the floating are desperate: When the paralysis affected the mother’s legs, Anne runs a few hundred steps more than necessary every day to pay them into the mother’s movement account; So that you can take a few more steps in life. Love on credit.

At the beginning of the summer vacation in 2000, the mother is to complete a rehab that will take a few weeks. Kai, she thinks it, can take care of his younger sister. But the otherwise reliable and self -sacrificing quay, just 18, has other plans: he hires on a ship, the adventure, but also for love. He supplies his younger sister with kilos of junk food and skin.

Anne, eleven years old, sits alone in the apartment and states through the day. Fortunately, the mother breaks off the rehab after two days; But when she learns that Kai just ran away, she throws him out. Soon after after, Anne comes to the biological father in Berlin, whom she has hardly seen before. With Kai she will hardly have any contact for years, the father (who is not Kai’s father) prevents every contact.

Run from life in this way, Anne pupates and becomes this all -controlling business woman, who looks at the world sharply and mercilessly, for which she does not feel responsible: she is responsible for herself alone. When calls, she does not want to go; When he asks her for help, she is only annoyed. In the end she will pick him up. In a summary like this one, Kai sounds like a cliché: too much responsibility in childhood, then drugs and the crash.

But Janine Adomeit did not write any cartoon here. Kai does not appear as failed in the novel; Compared to Anne, he has worked up the past emotionally much more comprehensively than his sister, which remains in her trauma. The drug addict has the clearer view than the career woman, but cannot move much with these findings: This is how the helplessness of childhood and adolescence in adulthood continues.

Janine Adomeit succeeds not to dramatize all these conflicts and faults, she does not tell any misery. Until these unfortunate summer holidays, Anne grows, despite the sometimes overwhelming responsibility. The mother would have needed a little more help; The kind of help that the welfare state still denies regularly disabled parents today.

One of the strengths of the book is that, contrary to the current trend towards autofiction, Janine Adomeit did not write this highly political history as a keyhole report, but actually as a novel. This succeeds in drawing figures that are slightly next to them and never have a bleak.

Anne, for example, copes; Her tragedy is that she could also be happy if it had been allowed. The fact that she later does not want to have a responsibility for others, but rather to work on something dangerous as the spread of a fentanyl pavement for completely selfish reasons, illustrate the blank spiral that arises when entire groups of people are excluded from the help systems.

Janine Adomeit: The first half hour in paradise. Arche-Verlag, 272 pages, born, € 23.