Post fascism – half a devil guy

It was a huge shock for the western world when on October 4, 1957 by the system enemy Soviet Union, the first earth satellite “Sputnik” was successfully shot into space. It was a presumably at least so huge shock for a twelve -year -old Berlin girl named Ada when she got a little brother a few weeks later. As a result, she also called him “Sputnik” – no matter what the birth certificate said.

In any case, the actor Christian Berkel told it in 2020 in his novel “Ada”, in which he wrote down the story of his fictional sister (which of course shares numerous key data with his real brother Peter). Now he has also accepted this shock -born name “Sputnik” under which he now tells his own story – not fictional but fictionalized.

He had already started in his first novel “The Apple Tree” (2018), in which his parents were still in the center – especially the mother Sala, which he circled like a narrative sabant. “Sputnik” is now Berkel’s attempt to finally have this narrator described his own track. This begins and ends furiously with the description of his birth: first the physical from the womb, finally the (no less physical) birth as an actor – his calling.

In between, Sputnik struggles with his own identity for a lifetime. Half Jewish, half German – was he a whole person at all? In any case, he doesn’t feel that way in the leading post -war Germany. He only succeeds in France, where he lives with rich holiday friends as a teenager for two years and, so to speak, only learns life there-in the country in which his Jewish mother once fled from the Nazis and wants to escape the still suppressed Nazi afterlife of his country of birth in the Sputnik.

The other place where Sputnik feels healed his existential halving is the theater. Since he saw a staging of “Tom Sawyer” as a little boy in Berlin for the first time, he has wanted to be an actor. On the stage where you can be and becoming, if you want, you feel strangely canceled: “Behind the curtain there was a strange, familiar world.” In order to be able to become another on stage, he first has to get into the pure.

This journey of his alter ego Sputnik tells Berkel with the same stylish melange of melancholy and amusement, which already captivated in the previous novels. He succeeds particularly well for childhood, which he describes with poetic strength and tenderness, although – or because – they were anything but simple with the traumatized parents: “Child was one of my most uncomfortable experiences.”

With the progressive age of the hero it is sometimes more difficult to hide that his troubled sputnik should ultimately be a whole devil’s guy with all the half. In his first film role for Ingmar Bergman, he runs his head through armored glass, whereupon the director lets him chauffeur with Gustaf Gründgens’ Rolls-Royce and gave him a bottle of red wine with steak against his blood loss.

However, the fact that the permanent and permanent youngsters in particular and at the same time permanent romantic or hallucinogenic adventure knows how to briefly shortly with the appropriate reading experience, may be authentic, but in places inhibits the narrative flow. And yet there is a dense motif fabric that carries to the end. And the skin -like sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll are always illuminating insights and impressive descriptions, for example from the moving rehearsal work “at Uli” Heising, who in 1979 occupied both royal leads in Schiller’s “Maria Stuart” with his wife Christa Berndl.

However, what the intensive debates about Heising’s staging triggered before Elfriede Jelinek’s play “Ulrike Maria Stuart” (2006) is an examination of the Nazi past that was also consistently conveyed in Sputnik’s family. He describes brilliantly how the US series »Holocaust« was watched in 1979 in the parental circle of acquaintances-a literally fatal event. A few years later, it leads to Richard von Weizsäcker’s double -edged speech a few years later, when a Federal President speaks of the “liberation” and not of the “defeat” for the first time on the 40th anniversary of the end of the war. Last but not least, Berkel’s novel is a reminder of the increasingly precarious status of “German” memory.

When designing his own story, the author did not take the pitfalls of autofiction everywhere, but largely took the same sovereignty with which he previously embarked in the foreign stories of his next. Even if “Sputnik” in the end jumps directly from his career start to the present, since his mental satellite is now adequately centered on himself, one wishes that Berkel can always tell book for book.

Christian Berkel: Sputnik. Ullstein, 384 pages, born, 26 €; As an audio book, read by the author, at the Hamburg audiobook, 640 min., € 22.