Silent like a sneaker: the old and the new Nazis
Her novel “Under Grund” is about silence: Beate Zschäpe, the accused André Eminger, who was wearing a T-shirt in the NSU process with a quote from the “loyalty song” of the SS – “Brothers are silent” –, And about other silent old and neo-Nazis. How do you find the right words for this?
As a motif, the silence continued to eat in the text. One of the first scenes of the novel was that between the protagonist Franka and her mother at lunch-where what is not said booming becomes booming between all the minor matters that they exchange over a plate of spaghetti. However, the silence does not begin with the two, but span generations and spin away. Franka has not learned to speak in her family, so she later does not find any words to tell her best friend that she was part of a right clique as a youthful.
In order to break such a decades of silence, of course the right or sincere words are also needed. I found that reflected in the NSU process in a depressing way. For years, the relatives of the victims and the public had waited for the main accused speak. But then Zschäpe’s statement was the low point of the negotiation because it became clear that it will not educate anything and not provide any findings, it is only about her personal vanity. Due to their swollen silence, the right blow and make themselves important, even though they have nothing to say. In terms of our society, it annoys me that we give the right to reinterpret the past in its favor through our own silence- for example in terms of the role of our major and great-grandparents in World War II.
The novel begins with the NSU process from which the protagonist Franka escapes. How did the idea for this scene come about?
When writing, dealing with the NSU process was very important for me. On the one hand because I realized when I visited the process that the Nazis, which were active in Middle Franconia in my youth, belonged to the closer circle around the NSU trio. So that what was sold to us as “village nazis” was actually extremely radicalized and well -networked neo -Nazis in Germany. On the other hand, I came back to the NSU protocol again and again during the writing. Because such a legal process reveals a lot about society in general to clarify its willingness – Or in this case the other way around: the effort she operates so as not to do that.
From this point of view, I knew relatively early that the NSU process that my protagonist visits as an adult is the trigger that brings her back to the circumstances of her own youth process. The process may be a hinge between the novel and reality.
Interview
Random House/Daniela Pfeil
Annegret Liepold was born in Nuremberg in 1990 and studied comparative and political science in Munich as well as in Paris. Her literary work was given numerous awards and promoted with scholarships. The recently published work »Under Grund« is your debut novel.
The majority of the novel plays near Nuremberg, where they were born and grew up. How much personal story has been incorporated?
The question of how a family deals with grief, for example. And my brother, who has already made a fishing license as a child, gave me a lot of knowledge about the landscape. He is the one who stayed there while I only wanted to go away. The topic “stay in the province or move away” is also negotiated in the novel. But I also employed the NPD meetings and right-wing rock concerts that took place in my home village in my youth. And that I never was in the Jewish cemetery in the neighboring town in front of my twenties. For me, the Shoah was something abstract for a long time and not something that has to do with my origin.
A finger is also placed in the wound of Adidas, which is based in Franconia and forced laborers in the Second World War a tank weapon, the so -called armored fright, for which war had produced. And about dealing with the property of Jewish people. Do you count on critical feedback on site?
I don’t think there will be a reaction. The role of Dassler brothers in World War II is generally known-after all, they have disputed that one brother suspected the other of denunciation before the chambers of saying. This is the cradle of the two companies Puma and Adidas. And the companies themselves also know about their past, it only annoys me that they do not openly confess and thus get through. The Adidas Outlet in Herzogenaurach has pushed itself out all the more as a setting for the novel. The architects already write programmatically about the building design that the “landscape and movement were the catalysts” for this, the building is referred to as “bulbous earth layer”. The outlet is therefore deliberately part of the landscape and symbolizes its culture of displacement. At least the “canvas with projection surface” invites you to interpretations on the roof of the building.
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Would you describe “under” as committed literature for which readers take responsibility in the freedom of reception after Sartre? And if so: what could this responsibility look like?
It is very important to me that the text gives gaps and does not give the reader every interpretation. I did not want the reasons why Franka get into the right scene, list to the fingers or reduce the cause to a factor, such as: the entangling of the grandmother, the death of the father, the connection to nature, etc. It is none of that. Franka could say no at any time, and not go on the path she has taken. The text does not say that because Franka is not aware of this. But I would find it quite appropriate if readers are annoyed about it and accuse her of it. However, my ideal case of responsibility would be: that you start to question your own role and past sincerely and to understand history as something incomplete.
And what function do the successful nature descriptions in your novel take?
For me, the landscape is the actual protagonist. Often your own text is smarter than yourself. When Franka got her name, it was not yet clear to me that the text would really play in Franconia. But of course the place was long ago. We are not only shaped by the people with whom we grow up, but also by our immediate surroundings. I think at Oskar Pastior I read that that someone who grew up in the mountains also describes the non -mountainous landscape with the embossing of the mountain view. Perhaps that was precisely looking and describing nature for me a kind of location: where do I come from, what is my language shaped – what is there, even if it is not visible?
Annegret Liepold: Underground. Penguin, 256 pages, born, 24 €.