Christian Baron | "Three Sisters": Out of the Hell of Hard Work

Reading, you see a film in front of you and wish the novel could become one. Right from the beginning, the scene where 15-year-old Mira has to say goodbye to her stillborn child in the hospital gets under your skin. And then a guy with a red quiff and a black leather jacket walks through the door. He gently strokes her head and "smiles gently from his sea-blue eyes," even though he is not the father of little Nunzia.

Mira and Ottes, before Christian Baron was born: I got to know them quite differently in his autobiographical novel "A Man of His Class." "Our parents slept right next to our room. That's why the muffled sound of Mom's head banging against the wall reached us. We never said a word about it. We felt the pain, we looked at our trembling hands, we glanced at each other. The pleading and crying became normal for us over time."

And now I'm trying to piece together these images: Mira, full of adventurous spirit, going to the Kaiserslautern May Fair in a red evening dress and red pumps, almost falling in love with someone else, with her haggard mother, who eventually dies of cancer. And above all: How did this Ottes become such a thug?

In "Beautiful is the Night," the second part of his "Kaiserslautern Trilogy," Baron has already gone back to the time before his birth in 1985, following the lives of his grandfathers. This novel thrives on the effort to understand what shaped his father, whom he initially couldn't forgive and from whom he closed himself off. But now he lets him into his heart.

"Because my most important impulse for writing is something that is unfortunately going out of fashion these days: I want to understand." He says this in the volume "Writing for His Life – Texts on Origin and Future" (2023). But the new book thrives not on essayistic writing, which the author masters brilliantly, but on sensual impressions. It's an ambience, as I said, envisioned as cinematically perfect, repeatedly accompanied by the pop music of the 80s. How does he know the atmosphere of that time so well? He researched, learned a great deal from his aunts Juli and Ella, from acquaintances of his mother, who would now only be in her early 60s. And he empathized, abandoning all too simplistic judgments. Juli and Ella are now portrayed with much more nuance, including the conflicts between them. The hidden envy because Mira is so beautiful and Ella was able to escape her poverty.

"Antisocial brat... Do you know what the rabble is?" the teacher had said to Mira. This Frau Lohmark had "fled the GDR eight years ago" and now reveled in a class snobbery to which one could only react with anger and pride, if one didn't want to sink into shame. With Carson McCullers' novel "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" in her pocket, Mira escaped to West Berlin and found shelter in a Kreuzberg backyard commune before Ottes brought her back. Baron also brings to mind the "uniform mass of the counterculture," the beginning of the Green Party with Petra Kelly, who responded to the demand "We must become fit for war" in the same way we should today.

Here, the feat of subtly incorporating contemporary elements into the book while remaining firmly grounded in the reality of the 1980s has been achieved. Dramatic scenes, strong characters, including the communist grandmother Hulda, are embedded in a spiritual resonance that is transmitted through reading. "Three Sisters," the title of which evokes Anton Chekhov's drama. Three general's daughters, who dream of a new beginning in the provinces and question the meaning of their lives, are confronted with much harsher circumstances: Ella, Mira, and Juli, who see the play at the Pfalztheater, are confronted with much harsher circumstances. Liberation from "hard worker's hell": through marriage, as in Ella's case; through risk-taking, as in Juli's case, who opens a video store called "Filmhöhle" with her husband; or through hard work, as in Christian Baron's parents' case.

"I'd rather die a miserable death than live on welfare even once," says Ottes. At first, he seems like a movie hero, but later, he repeatedly loses his temper with drunkenness because, despite his hard work, he can't seem to make ends meet. His parents acted out violence in their personal lives. How different their path would have been in the GDR, I reflected as I read. Reading it transported me to another country.

And in the final chapter, a jump back to when Juli is three years old and Mira is six. A woman is expected who "unfortunately abandoned the family many years ago": Ella. "Hello, you two. Nice to meet you," she greets the children. The mother stank of liquor. The fish stew was tasteless, the "cheesecake" was burnt, and it looked "like something under the Mansons' sofa."

Shame and anxiety: Even a child senses everything that's wrong. "Humans are born free," says Mira, when Grandma Hulda and her father try to talk her out of it. She can keep trying to be herself, but she can't overturn the "conditions in which man is a degraded, enslaved, abandoned, and despicable being."

Christian Baron: Three Sisters. Novel. Claassen. 350 pp., hardcover, €24. Literary salon with Christian Baron on October 22nd, 6 p.m., at the house at Franz-Mehring-Platz 1 in Berlin.