Mesut Bayraktar’s “The Situation”: “When I sigh, mountains break”

There is a scene in the italicized foreword or prologue of “The Situation” in which Mesut Bayraktar formulates a poetology of his 300-page volume of short stories. At the premiere of his play “Gastarbeiter Monologues” in the Hamburg Schauspielhaus, the theater is populated by proletarian bodies and Bayraktar remarks: “The astonished gestures in the foyer, the brisk movements in the ranks, the casual conversations in the hall – a theater has never felt like this before confided.”

Later that same evening, a man approaches him to tell him that he didn’t know that his life was so interesting “that you could make a story out of it.” Bayraktar makes a decision: From that moment “I decided to write this book. It’s about such people and their situation.” This sets the title for the 18-story collection “The Situation.” The similarity of the title to Friedrich Engel’s “The Situation of the Working Class in England” is probably not chosen by chance.

With a large dose of warmth, Bayraktar sends his characters through all the madness of everyday capitalist life, in which racist violence, a broken health system, the unleashed housing market and the exploitation of the workers stand in the way of the characters’ happiness.

“The situation” does not romanticize; it paints a picture of the struggles of various class factions for access to the good life. Sometimes, as in real life, people step down, for example when in the story of Kai and Axel – a dispute between brothers – the older one tells the younger: The workers, “they are to blame for the situation.”

The volume is divided into three parts: “Encounter,” “Dispute,” and “Desire.” The heading “Encounter” encompasses stories of a post-migration society in which the characters are forced into jobs and behaviors that harm themselves and others. For example, there is the unskilled worker Yürekli, whose name means “hard heart” in German, who is addressed by his clerk at the employment office “as one of the many voices through which the power pulls the trigger” and who does not dare to speak out to tell his family about his termination.

At the latest with the story “The Indomitables” in the second section, which is entitled “Dispute,” the pull of Bayraktar’s story unfolds. The story has no punctuation; the beginning of sentences is marked with a capital letter. The syntax and language are reminiscent of Nanni Balestrini’s novel “The Publisher” about the left-wing Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli.

In Bayraktar’s story, an unnamed narrator reports on a house squat that is violently broken up by the police. The person telling the story uses the court verdict against them as an opportunity to go into hiding. “There aren’t many of us but there are many of us. Someone always gives you a hand when you’re in trouble. That’s how I learned.”

With so many fates, it is precisely the moments of struggle in which the characters prove that things can be done differently that make you breathe a sigh of relief. On the one hand, it shows how people perish due to the violence of society. But Bayraktar also works into the small cracks in reality in which a space opens up for some people in which they can deal with their misery.

Every now and then, Bayraktar’s characters also enter into a dialogue with themselves. The author gives them time for precious moments in which their small existences fit into the bigger picture for a moment. These moments are accompanied by reflective subordinate and main clauses in which an omniscient narrator emerges.

The reflective passages in which the narrator classifies the situation of the protagonists are the great strength of the volume of stories. But sometimes this strength also turns into its opposite. Whenever too much world knowledge is spread and the distance to the protagonists becomes too great, for example in the story “The Midsummer Night’s Dreamer”, the narrator loses himself in the vastness of meaning.

Bayraktar always takes its characters seriously. Not just with who they are, but also with their dreams, hopes and desires. It turns out that the people in the stories are everything they are not, everything they would like to be if the oppression and exploitation of capitalism didn’t come between them and their dreams.

“The Situation” is a hidden object of disappointed hope, of the struggling oppressed, of those who love in vain, searching for self-determination in a world that is directed against them. And Mesut Bayraktar is a master at stripping social violence of its everyday costume. “If I sigh once, the mountains will collapse before me.”

Mesut Bayraktar: The situation. Autumnus-Verlag, 312 pages, hardcover, €19.95.

The people in the stories are also everything they are not, everything they would like to be.

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