Workers’ literature: Berlin Blues: The struggles on shift

A quick clarification in advance: Literature is not when someone writes what he or she feels and thinks or what is remembered. What is written only becomes literature as soon as it is Others remember when a world is awakened in the reader, even if this memory is sometimes just a fantasy. In this sense, “Berlin Nordost Blues”, the new novel by Andreas Brille, is the highest level of literature.

Adventures in the low-wage sector: Schulle, the narrator and hero of the story, whose day job is sometimes a doorman, then also a carer for the elderly and a postman, eventually works in the mailroom of a newspaper on Franz-Mehring-Platz in East Berlin. Glasses, born in 1965, who made his debut in 2002 with the book “The BFC is to blame for the building of the wall” in Aufbau-Verlag and, as a trained civil engineer, is perhaps the last working-class writer still alive, doesn’t even bother to write about his experiences in the former central organ cipher. While the paper itself almost exclusively uses the abbreviation “nd” today, Brille aka Schulle calls it by its full name: “New Germany.”

And Schulle feels comfortable in his job: “Most of the time I quickly ran around the seven-story new building in my two rooms on the ground floor, received requests for registered mail, franked the packages, processed the incoming and outgoing mail and moved quickly at the franking station. and inserting machine. Once a month I sent several hundred letters, large and small, to former employees of the Ministry of State Security, the armed forces and the customs administration. Hota! Decades ago, this workplace would have been just my battlefield for peace, but now I could have created a fantastic part-time job for the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.”

But Schulle doesn’t. “Berlin Nordost Blues” is not a roman à clef, not a reckoning. All Schulle knows about the nd editors is that several have been there since the last days of the GDR, if not for 40 years or more. Even before the fall of communism, they had had their discussions with the apparatchiks and were now considered the newspaper’s noble feathers. “Once they were pretty much in line out of necessity, but after the fall of the Berlin Wall they quickly learned not to ignore the realities.”

The “New Germany” was better than its reputation. Unfortunately, it seemed impossible to place the newspaper, as Schulle says, “stable” in the media landscape. »Good left, bad left. Many youth-liberal radio stations took the money to broadcast an advertising jingle, but neglected to mention the ND in the press reviews. Many publishers took the opportunity to have their books reviewed, but they didn’t quote the newspaper on the back pages of their works.” For Schulle, in any case, gender is worse than the “SED German of the old bigwigs.” It didn’t help circulation much: “14,000 subscribers, very good – for a punk rock fanzine.”

The fact that his employer is threatening to collapse and that he would witness the misery is a new experience for Schulle. He feels comfortable on this “red island” as a remnant of the GDR. The sentences in which Glasses repeatedly talks about that country in passing are among the best parts of Schulle’s sometimes very poetic work biography, in which the “nd” only represents one station. What some historians need hundreds of pages or minutes of broadcasting on television for, Andreas Brille’s just one sentence is enough: “The GDR was a good state for wheel of fortune watchers, but not quite as good for wheel of fortune spinners.”

But Schulle is a Sunday child, unfortunately born in winter, in East Berlin, or as he says, “on the side of the sunrise.” During his childhood in the working-class district of Prenzlauer Berg, many things still reminded him of the war, including some people. Then another hammer sentence: “The cripples in the three-wheeled wheelchairs soon disappeared from the cityscape, the GDR did not produce any new war invalids.” The construction of the wall was certainly not just a whim of Walter and Erich, but a consequence of history. “It’s just really bad luck that the most radical upheaval of power relations to date resulted in a Stalinist state.”

But all of this has already been told a thousand times. What is new, however, are Brille’s reports from the life of a minimum wage slave, as “Berlin Nordost Blues” tells of the downward class struggle.

When Schulle was still working as a mail carrier, he hated it when these “weekend paper types” clogged his mailbox with advertising, so that he and his colleagues had to spend twice as much time in each doorway. »These people, in turn, did not understand our insults because they were either foreign speakers or hard of hearing; Definitely about humble guys who knew their difficult lot and pulled their tails back.”

Schulle, the premium proletarian. As a letter deliverer you were out of the league, you were a “shit shipper with a diploma” and earned a grand and a half on your hand. “But when the rent was deducted, the balance was only a three-digit amount, of which there would still be a double-digit amount left at the end of the month.”

Andreas Glasses has gained experiences in his life that other writers only know from hearsay. He knows what it does to people when they have no money, no confidence, no future. This knowledge shapes the “Berlin Nordost Blues”. A novel that helps you see the world through different eyes, or at least the security guard at the university, the DHL parcel delivery person and the scrounger in front of the department store. As an MAE worker in the old people’s home (who is compensated by the job center with an “expense allowance” of 1.50 euros, in addition to support), Schulle himself ultimately becomes the object of contempt: “The trained nursing proles didn’t like untrained life artists…”

According to the publisher, this is a novel “full of cheerful classicism about everyday heroes who fight their battles on shift.” The plot has many gags, but little solidarity. A sad book that always makes you laugh. But a laugh that fades away towards the end. Beware, spoilers!

With the last chapter, Andreas Brille would have had to compete in the Klagenfurt Bachmann competition. The subject is definitely worthy of an award. Question: What comes after death? Answer: Schulle. He got a job in patient services. Schulle likes dealing with people. And he and his colleagues actually play a calm ball when they push patients from one ward to another in the hospital and to X-rays or physiotherapy. Actually. If it weren’t for the orders with the “Silver Arrow”, that transport trolley with a trough that always has to be taken out of a huge cupboard in the basement.

Every time he opens the door, Schulle gets a glimpse of half a dozen deceased people who have been laid out there, more or less wrapped in sheets, for a few days. Just don’t be alarmed when a dead person like that constantly sticks his head up! This person died in a hospital bed with the headboard raised. Rigor mortis is now in the body. »It’s nice when the window is already open and your soul is out.«

Andreas Glasses: Berlin Northeast Blues. Edition Periplaneta, 214 pages, br., 16 €.