Literature and gentrification: Social critique as a surrogate for literature

And isn't this book also really a sort of introspective “navel-gazing” in view of the really pressing political problems of our times, an accusation levied at the author even before the prize was awarded?

Stelling has responded to this claim in an essay: “The navel-gazing accusation is a power tool designed to prevent subjectivity, suppress opinion and preserve hegemony”. She is serious about the “Willi” who has been cooped up for generations and, decades later, despite all the promises of social participation and inclusion through education, is still beating his head against a brick wall: “When I say ‘I’ and affirm something and assert myself on the basis of my example”,Stelling writes, “then I do so in the face of opposition. And that is why what I am saying is about those obstacles”.

The whole novel, this monologue of resistance, is directed at Bea, the teenage daughter of the narrator. Resi explains to her everything in terms of war and combat: she intends to “arm” her with knowledge and stories and the insight that “nothing is black and white”. Unlike her own parents, who raised her to believe that one can ascend if only one is industrious enough, Resi wants to “burden” her children with the truth, make things difficult for them. “After all, armour and weaponry are heavy”.

Ever more Stelling exposes the supposedly purely cultural core of group-related resentment as material in nature. And transforms it into a narrative technique that treats what others say like building material as well. She is constantly confronted with the pat phrases “it's your own fault” and “you should have known better”. She even uses these phrases herself. And just when you, the reader, are thinking: “Wow, this is all constructed very elegantly”, Resi is already mocking you: “righty right, literature and the worlds we live in, we want everything to be ‘properly built’, preferably in the dimensions 90-60-90”. Sitting in her pantry, which harks back to an age when people had personnel, she scribbles a note about one of her friends: He reads only “real literature”, that with “personnel”, people “who are dying to be part of a story”. Of course, this aims at a reception that is intent on action and figures and—just like in real life—is not really interested in knowing exactly how all these language constructs and vehicles are crafted, how manipulative they are, whom they benefit, whom they annoy or whose power they augment.

Stelling's novel engages in social criticism as literary criticism, which is why Radisch's invective against the author's alleged naïveté is puzzling. Because Stelling herself rolls up the heavy artillery more quickly than one can deploy the usual arsenal that readers have at their disposal when reading. She always manages to pull the parquet flooring of clear categories and opinions right out from under your feet. In this respect, her scenario of everything starting to get out of whack is an exercise in a form of pain that is most in tune with the times: “It's okay,” she writes laconically, adding: “Many will feel the same way over the course of the next few years.”

Already back in Stelling's novel Bodentiefe Fenster [Floor-to-Ceiling Window] the protagonist fancied herself as a sort of “Kassandra of Prenzlauer Berg”. Resi actually looks to the future: she sees herself winning a book prize quite similar to the one at the Leipzig Book Fair, endowed with 15,000 euros.

Stelling, who has meanwhile also been awarded the city of Bad Homburg's Friedrich Hölderlin Prize, remarked after the actual award ceremony that she was by no means reconciled, as “becoming marginalised and humiliated and capitalism, patriarchy, paternalism—that's all there is”.

And she is remaining in Prenzlauer Berg for the time being. As if she were planning something like Herbert Achternbusch once put it: “This place has ruined me, and I will stay until you notice it”.

Anke Stelling: Schäfchen im Trockenen. Verbrecher, Berlin 2018, 272 p., € 22.