Worker’s life: toil and silence and terraced house

»Working-class children recognize each other within seconds. It’s like street dogs,” says author Martin Becker, who lives in Halle, in a conversation with his publisher. Coming from a working-class family shapes people throughout their lives. Didier Eribon deals with this in his bestseller “Return to Reims”, as well as in his latest novel “A Worker”. Annie Ernaux has also written many insightful books on this subject, such as “The Shame”.

In his autobiographically inspired novel “The Workers,” Becker talks warmly but also unsparingly about his family of origin, which shaped him: “A laborer, a housewife, four children, one of them in a wheelchair.”

In the 80s, the father initially worked as a miner in the Ruhr area, then after an accident at work as a blacksmith in the Sauerland, and the mother earned extra money as a seamstress for a mail order company. Because the money is always not enough, the family is “always on the verge of a financial nervous breakdown.” Cigarettes, private television and schnapps at the end of the day are the only short-term relief.

The mother was only 15 when she met her future husband; she wanted to “get out of misery” as quickly as possible, away from her domineering mother, who on the one hand was happy to have “one less mouth to feed” but on the other hand was not happy about it is that her daughter can no longer contribute to the family income.

The couple dreams of a little happiness, of children, of a terraced house. When the mother fails to get pregnant, the couple decides to adopt a child. They are given an infant – Lisbeth – without informing them that their future daughter is severely disabled. When the extent of her disability becomes clear, they are given the freedom to return Lisbeth – as if she were a defective product. The parents reject this indignantly. It is also this deep humanity of the exploited workers that makes it hard to put the novel down. The father will later bring his demented wife home against the doctors’ advice and take such touching care of her until the end of his strength and days that she will blossom again.

The parents, overwhelmed by the everyday struggle for existence, have no time to think about their feelings or even talk about them, but they always do their best. Reason enough for Becker to create a touching, literary monument to them.

They then have three more children: first the delicate Kristof, who, like his father, develops into a secretive pragmatist and stays in his hometown. Then Ulla, who dies shortly after birth due to a doctor’s mistake. There is no room for the pain of the parents, who will never get over the loss, “not in their time, not in their world.” However, Becker lets Uta live for literary reasons – a benefit for the novel.

She will be the daughter who runs away early and has the courage right from the start to criticize the “dictatorial father” and the “blackmailing mother.” Becker’s fictional encounters with her in the Belgian seaside resort of Ostend help ensure that the novel never runs the risk of romanticizing the working-class family. The father’s racism is discussed, as is the mother’s addiction to control.

In the end they get “the short one”, the youngest child, which is the author himself. He develops his own methods of getting attention in the overburdened family.

The father manages to get hold of a small terraced house, with strangulation rates that lead the family to the brink of financial catastrophe month after month. Every now and then you treat yourself to a few days of vacation on the North Sea, of course in a cheap holiday accommodation that is further away from the sea.

The author himself makes his modest transition, studying at the Literature Institute in Leipzig, only realizing later that the academic children are passing him by and that he has actually always been left out.

Not only that and his constant longing for the sea connects him with his partner, also a working-class child, from the other side of the Iron Curtain. “That was us,” he writes elsewhere. »A family from the past. From the small town, from the terraced house. That was never entirely ours.”

But is this form of existence really a thing of the past? Sure, the number of “struggling wage earners” has fallen by 35 percent since 1970, as the author points out, but global capitalism and digitalization have created new exploited classes whose chances of escaping the precariat are extremely slim. According to the Federal Statistical Office, a good fifth of Germany’s population is at risk of exclusion or social poverty, seven percent of them despite wage work. It would be better to read about decisive measures against it rather than touching, critical novels about it.

Martin Becker: The workers. Luchterhand. 304 p., hardcover, €22.

There is always not enough money either way.

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