Literature: Maxim Biller: Go where it hurts

I don’t want to live in a world where there is no place for Jews. This thought comes to mind every now and then when I see a film by Billy Wilder, listen to songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David or read a novel by Maxim Biller. It is unbelievable that an ethno-religious group that has fewer people than North Rhine-Westphalia has such an impact on intellectual and cultural life. And then again, it’s not surprising when you consider what Jews have been experiencing for 2,500 years. A people that has been expelled, persecuted, burned, gassed and slaughtered throughout its history (as a reminder: the last time was on October 7, 2023) has no choice but to develop imagination and brains. The mind must work faster and sharper than that of its hunters and murderers.

This even applies to the place where the attacks are only rhetorical in nature: in the features section. When Maxim Biller was attacked there in the past, one always had the feeling that intellectual low-loaders were attacking an intellectual 28-ton truck. Above all, the attempt to attack his column “Hundred Lines of Hate” (in the zeitgeist magazine “Tempo”) failed because the angry snorting people lacked the means that characterized the “hate biller”: inner freedom, pleasure in the Provocation, courage to escalate and a precision that only those who are skilled at using language as a weapon possess.

But at some point word got around that “an arrogant, cheeky, well-read Jew” (Maxim Biller’s self-description) was probably a bit too big for the intellectual cretins. People were forced to accept that he was one of the country’s literary greats, without really understanding why. So people dutifully acknowledged that his novels and collections of short stories are about the lives of Jewish people. And since, for well-known reasons, there are not that many Jews left in Germany, Biller was assigned the role of an ethnologist for exotic peoples.

His “style” was also praised. Which was especially wrong. Because style is an external characteristic. Comparable to a manual skill that one masters over time through intensive observation and diligent practice. You appropriate what you like about others, mix it together, refine and perfect it. And at some point you sound like Günter Grass, whose books became unreadable in the 1970s because the so-called “style” was just a series of mannerisms. Behind the familiar, flawless shell, the great nothingness opened up.

No, Maxim Biller is not about style. In any case, one should assume that a writer has mastered his craft – even if this is not a given for many German writers. Beautiful formulations are just a byproduct. What is crucial is that it clicks and kicks while reading. That after reading it you see the world (and sometimes your own life) with different eyes.

Biller’s current work “Mama Odessa” does a great job in this regard. At first you don’t understand what makes this novel so special. The story is told quickly: A Jewish family from Odessa emigrates to Hamburg. The mother would have preferred to emigrate to Israel. The father cheats and ultimately leaves his wife for a German non-Jew (whom mother and son henceforth call a “Nazi whore”). The mother later dies of cancer, presumably the long-term consequence of a KGB poison attack that was actually aimed at her husband.

From many individual episodes and the mother’s interspersed short stories, the picture emerges of a family that is no happier or unhappier than its non-Jewish German counterparts. Nor can one claim that Biller portrays his Jewish protagonists as overly sympathetic. The penchant of some German authors for ethnokitsch – the transfiguration of peoples who have supposedly preserved their “originality” and “naturalness” – is alien to him. For him, Jews are just people.

That sounds like a platitude, but it actually opens up access to his work. Reading is not about deciphering a cryptic text like a seminar (“What does the author want to tell us?”). The opposite is true: literature makes humanity visible and tangible in all its forms. This can be painful – especially for the author.

In his early years as a columnist, Biller was often accused of being “cold” and “arrogant.” Which missed the mark because a judgment was made about the person that said nothing about the quality of the texts. For some of his critics, it was a surprise that Biller presented himself supposedly differently in his autobiographically colored short stories and novels: “warm-hearted” and “approachable.” He only consistently applied the principle of his columns to his stories.

He also applies the directness and honesty that he showed towards his “Hundred Lines of Hate” characters to himself. In football you would say: Biller goes where it hurts. This is where the fascination of his texts comes from. It’s not a new finding that families are messed up, it’s just that it’s rarely presented in such an unfiltered way. At the latest when your father admits: “Everything wasn’t the way I wanted it,” you understand the fundamental difference between Maxim Biller’s books and the rest of German literature.

Anyone who is an underdog on the day of birth, i.e. has a competitive disadvantage, cannot afford to lie to themselves. He has to take a closer look, research deeper and try to understand why the family biography – and therefore his own – is such a mess.

Maxim Biller follows in the tradition of Jewish authors such as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth, who dealt with their roots in a similarly rigorous manner. The fact that this touches you, even shakes you as a non-Jew, is due to the courage and honesty behind this type of writing. You recognize your own in the Jewish neuroses, fears and doubts. His new novel is also a reminder of what is missing in German literature. Even their flagships (like Daniel Kehlmann’s “Measuring the World”) are, compared to “Mama Odessa”, just a work of art – well written, nice to read, quickly forgotten.

So we need more Biller books. There is hope. In any case, he did not keep his announcement after Russia’s attack on Ukraine – “I no longer want to be a writer, I never want to publish a novel or a book of stories again” -. Otherwise we would never have known about that mother, who comes from the Ukrainian port city of Odessa.

Maxim Biller: Mom Odessa. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 240 p., hardcover, €24.