Workers’ children’s literature: Against Eribon | nd-aktuell.de

Workers’ literature has always had a difficult time in Germany, but it is now almost non-existent. At least since Didier Eribon’s “Return to Reims” it has been replaced by a genre that could be called workers’ children’s literature. The preferred medium of this genre is the autobiography, which is designed like a 19th century artist’s novel: telling the protagonists’ careers and all the small and large insults and insecurities, missteps and awakenings, like those of Frédéric Moreau in Flaubert’s » Education sentimentale« goes through. Following the example of Eribon, the narrative flow is interrupted by sociological sprinkles and psychological considerations.

These stories of the emancipation of one’s own past, of emancipation from one’s parents, are liberal stories of individualization. Or as Iuditha Balint, director of the Fritz Hüser Institute, puts it: The protagonists of workers’ literature stand for a “we,” for their class. In workers’ children’s literature, however, the “I” emerges much more strongly.

A feature of this type of literature is the betrayal of one’s own parents. They become simple representatives of a class that cost their children so much to escape. They carry more stigmas than characteristics: they are generally deprived of their voice. They can rarely hope for understanding; their role is that of a fairytale stepmother: bitter, stubborn, haggard.

They almost always stand as examples of left-wing workers. This falls back on the political left. In “Return to Reims,” which was published in France in 2009 and in a German translation in 2016, Eribon blatantly blames the communist party’s dirigisme for his parents’ turn to the National Front – this is a new, perfidious kind of horseshoe theory that is, of course, currently in vogue Germany falls on fertile ground. The rise of the right is blamed on repressed conflicts within the left, because they are extremisms; With this volte, the middle class is set as the ideal. In summary, this should not only explain the rise of the AfD in East Germany, but also the rise of the right across Europe. What Eribon wants to offer here as a sociologically grounded analysis is his psychological protection against any criticism. He secures his middle-class self, which he has gained through social advancement.

Eribon’s works themselves are of course more fragmented than a classic development novel, but follow the same principle: the narrative of the parents as representatives of an entire class becomes background noise for their own self-reflection. In his new book, which is about his mother and is called “A Worker,” Eribon makes this theme particularly strong in the opening chapter. His mother should (according to Eribon: must) go to the home because she can no longer look after herself and there are no alternatives. But she refuses, which is why her sons – who have scattered to the four winds – try to talk sense into her. In Eribon’s case, it turns out that he uses a Descartian fatalism against his own earlier Marxist dreams in order to prove an inexplicability that does not exist. Of course there would be the option of caring for the mother at home: it would just be contrary to the life plans of her children.

It doesn’t even occur to him to say this because part of his life plan is to travel to Italy for several weeks shortly after his mother moves into the home. And although he plans to visit the village where his mother has parked often, in the end he only manages to do so twice because of his vacation: that’s how the book begins. It’s more of an apology letter than a study and perhaps that explains its success. However, the fact that Eribon asks himself in the last paragraph of the book whether one no longer needs to listen to “the old people” or even give them a voice – but he himself ignores his mother’s wishes with the literacy and intellectual authority available to him – raises the question what his study would have been like if he had stayed there. And whether his method of equidistancing would still work.

The betrayal of one’s parents is also a betrayal of one’s own class and a betrayal of oneself. This betrayal is repaid with attention and praise and prizes and positions. This is not a reproach to the authors who fought their way up from the working class environment into the precariat. They depend on the company to show them this kind of attention.

Of course, there are authors who refuse this logic. In Germany, one example among some of an honest self-questioning is Ulrike Draesner, in France an example would be Annie Ernaux. That Annie Ernaux, who, before she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, was more dutifully received in Germany than her writing and self-questioning were made fruitful. Instead, the next betrayal and bourgeois narcissism is celebrated with Édouard Louis, who advances his idolization of the self more skillfully but no less intrusively than Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre. The Nobel Prize Committee was smarter than the German feature section because the latter does not want to see more than a series of medically relevant diagnoses (alcoholism, psychoses, etc.) when considering the working class. It is not surprising that under such conditions the wrong people are always celebrated; It’s a shame nonetheless.

It’s a shame especially for those who see culture in this country as more than a narrowly defined privilege. The fact that the literary world laments its constant loss of meaning without being able to remedy it is also due to a vulnerability to Eribon’s method. He doesn’t talk about real things – what it’s like to look after your mother, what it’s like to be poor – but imagines them because that’s how his parents thought it or were like that. Above all, this helps himself and that is the whole moral of it.