Novel: Toxic Love: His Hands Around My Neck

Jella had imagined it all differently. She and Yannik could have been true love. An idyllic relationship in a large old apartment, with mint on the window sill and friendly couples coming to dinner. Instead, Jella sits in her old childhood room and feels her stomach and throat where Yannik punched and choked her. Yannik Brenner is now the one whose name she reported to the police for domestic violence.

Ruth-Maria Thomas, born in Cottbus in 1993, worked as a social worker in youth welfare. She then studied at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig and landed on the longlist for the German Book Prize with her debut novel: “The Most Beautiful Version” is about a violent relationship and the question of how one could have gotten into it in the first place.

East Germany in the 1990s. Jella and Yannik’s relationship has long since tipped over into a spiral of provocations and incitements. They only find the deep connection from the beginning in an argument, when he cuts off her breath and then they lie in each other’s arms, panting. But then an argument escalates in particular, he chokes her and threatens to kill her, she hits him on the head with a pepper mill and flees. First to the police, where she files a report, then to her parents, where she wants to calmly think about what to do next.

This is where the novel begins and the narrative strands divide. On the one hand, Jella, who tells her father what happened, who tries to sort out her life with the help of to-do lists. On the other hand, Jella, who recites her youth in the former East, her first relationships, and her socialization as a woman.

There is her parents’ destructive marriage, which is falling apart due to the lack of prospects in the East and the challenges after 1989. Her friendship with Michelle, with whom she shaves each other’s private parts before they meet boys. There is the first oral sex in the cinema. The guy, older than her, pushes her head down to his seat without a word, then they part in silence, Jella is proud that she hasn’t done anything wrong. She derives her self-worth from the appreciation of boys, nothing else. Jella is raped while studying. “You’re not causing any drama now, are you?” the guy asks. She doesn’t do it.

When she meets Yannik, she wants to please him. He is an artist, Jella becomes his muse and gives everything to fulfill the role – even if she has to bend herself for it. This is becoming increasingly tiring. Shelly, her best friend, one of the few characters in the book with integrity, is ignored from then on because Yannik doesn’t like her.

Adapting to a man, wanting to please him, aligning yourself with him, then at some point waking up in an unhappy, destructive relationship – the story of course hurts. Maybe because you’ve seen them so often. By the time Jella and Yannik move in together, she has long since become annoyed and angry. But of course only subliminally. Nothing in the apartment is hers, she isn’t even allowed to keep her beloved mirror. She initially takes revenge with small everyday gestures, for example when she secretly stirs meat into the vegan mince for the vegetarian Yannik. Later she shouts at him that he is not an artist and that she is cheating on him to hurt him. Ruth-Maria Thomas also shows Jella’s destructive behavior and her provocations.

In doing so, Thomas uses a “trauma plot” that has become a popular device in literature in recent years. Something bad happens to a protagonist, like rape, and readers then watch her try to discover and combat her trauma. This search movement also exists at Jella. One is accompanied by the question of whether she will withdraw the ad. Thomas has meticulously and ruthlessly examined what it means to be made into a woman. In doing so, she has written one of those books that you want to give to your partner, father, or friends so that they understand you a little better, not just nod in understanding. A depressing and touching debut that ends as succinctly as skillfully with a to-do list.

Ruth-Maria Thomas: The most beautiful version, Rowohlt, 272 pages, hardcover, €24.