Neukölln literature-“born in long summer”: scene broken

“I sit in Laidak and drink an espresso. The sky is gray. I have a black polo, as always, and my hair styled properly with a side parting. I am agitated. When I ran along the Sonnenallee earlier, I was insulted by a group of boys. They said I look like a fagot. I pressed my fabric bag firmly on myself and quickly ran to Laidak. “

This is how Jens Winter’s debut novel “Born in Long Summer”, which was published in Berlin’s XS-Verlag in early June. The parallels to Christian Krachten »Faserland« (1995) are pushy. Barbour jacket, S-Class and P1, that was the code of the German upper class at the time. In contrast, winter sends us to the Berlin clichés of medium -sized companies. This includes who can use the new Marx reading and buy their notebooks from Modulor. As in the literary template, the narrator Simplicissimus does not stumble through half the FRG, but through a hip Berlin. From situation to situation, he meets old acquaintances, but who quickly disappear from the field of vision.

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So it goes from the trendy pub via the afternoon WG party for a lecture to the Brecht-Haus, in the end by train to Freiburg. No stereotype is left out on the escape from the milieu. You drink vodka mate, never aperol spray. Islamist beards arrange for long brooding. Background noise for permanent lifestyle attitudes, “brand fetishism” was called at the time. Relevant staff occurs: At Kracht it is the trend researcher Matthias Horx in the ICE, at Winter Ines Schwedtner can agitate the conductor for the next strike.

Above all, winter steals the typical “fiber land” sound: short clear self-headings, almost primitive description prose. In the tone there is an incredible mix of naivety, irony and cynicism, which reveals on the outside and inside of ridiculousness. Kracht was celebrated and scolded for this. In 1995 it was exciting and radical because at least in this country. Three decades later, Jens Winter now writes the anti -German “fiber country” – is that possible? “Faserland” was already the anti -German “fiber land”. In the corresponding circles, the book has cult status, saturated trade unionists were satired as well as left-green taxi drivers. This culminated in the rumor that Kracht was a subscriber of the magazine “Bahamas”.

The antidetish battle sheet does not matter in “born in long summer”, this milieu is less dogged, you give yourself poppy and open to culture. Diedrich Diederichsen instead of Justus Wertmüller. Finn Job (“after”) had already written the paradigmatic novel for its sect in 2022. In it, excessive drug use is exhibited as if it has not been salon -capable keyhole views. In addition, the not so niche lawsuit about bad conditions in North-Neukölln. Winter is right to mock this in the first sentences. Job operates identity care and therefore writes tendency literature. Some can horny, the others foam with anger. The so -called Israelsolidarity has now also become chic in the German bourgeoisie, but it is not somehow brighter afterwards.

Let us add another post-noiskeeper reference work. In “Allegro Pastell” by Leif Randt there is also a passage that plays in “Laidak”. The completely outsidtered border is written down some lines about the “splitting of the anti -Germans” from the Wikipedia. His method consists of a telling -free story. Everything is shown, nothing may have consequences. With the absurd follow that some in “Allegro Pastell” wanted to read the sharpest criticism of the current incapacity to conflict, whose polluters were confirmed and celebrated in their Larifari posture. Eat bifi and say “I love you”. Hyperironia is said to be, as border it calls it – beyond any political dip wisdom; At the price of complete arbitrariness.

Winter’s text is now setting up in the middle of this Kracht-Randt poles. The style copy leads out of the dilemma, it neither doubles political judgments nor does the subtext fall into an anyding goes. Everything depends on the sound: If you just want to recognize arrogance here, overlooks the protagonist himself is a poor sausage. This ego is helplessly trapped in the nonsensical logic of a movement to the “scene”. Where it is no longer about real politics, only stubborn opinion and expected bite reflexes remain. You can only empathize with it. Basically, every sentence says without being able to say it: everything wrong! And I’m still durable in the middle of it. Ideology criticism, exceptionally applied to your own ticket thinking.

The caricature of one’s own milieus is broken throughout and actually withdrawal. But not quite. The former best buddy Michel, who has just returned from the United States, also brings with his new, annoying friend Attention a Schwall postmodern theory. Excessive Woke satire, which remains despite meta-end-endization. So it tilts back and forth. Are “Woke” and “anti -German” just two different masks of the same misery? In principle, it remains unclear, “whether he is serious or plays” how Winter himself braided a little too immersed as a poetological point of view. Potentially, adepts could read the book for self-adherence, as could see an approach to developing.

So the novel works; With restrictions. There is the author’s self -understanding, which is contemporary literature. The political shocks of the Corona years together with the subsequent wars have finally swept away the remains of the left anti-Germans as a phenomenon of late-west German decadence. It’s about the past, as the title suggests. He refers to Phillip Felsch’s “The Long Summer of Theory”, but above all to a Catchphrase from the “Game of Thrones” series: Winter is not coming but already there. Realism is not winter, but it would have contributed to greater inner consistency to do without all references post-2020. It remains in need of explanation, for example, why the “Bajszel” was not chosen as a cozy trendy pub, which has been replaced by the “Laidak” for a long time.

Otherwise the blows are placed as well placed, the winter, which is distributed, only initiated you can really hit. The symbolic game with the surface will rightly cause high blood pressure for outsiders. The narrative indecision is also the greatest weakness of the novel. Because what leads out of the scene swamp? That must remain open. The suspicion will rain that the ambivalence is only the desperate extension of pseudopolitics into literature. The last sentence could be interpreted in such a way that this self -reference is exceeded: “His torso was still glowing,” he quoted Rilke and spent the large slogan of art over gang: you have to change your life. Experience teaches how deaf many anti -Germans are. Christian Kracht never wrote pop literature again after »Faserland«.

Jens Winter: Born in a long summer. XS-Verlag, 140 pages, born, € 22.