A Klagenfurt juror judged Heike Geißler’s reading at the Bachmann competition last summer that he could write a text like this during the lunch break. Now this text turns out to be the opening chapter of her novel The week, which has been nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. This juror often delights in his provocations. The sentence may have hurt the author at the time. She has protested the jury treatment in subsequent interviews. With the nomination in Leipzig, the pain should be forgotten.
Heike Geißler was born in 1977 in Riesa, Saxony. The week is her third novel. The first was called Rosa and told of a young woman fleeing from her just born baby, the second, Nothing tragic, read as a literature-literature novel in which an author has to experience that the novel character protests against its inventor. The readers got to know her from a completely different perspective when she met her in 2014 seasonal work published a field report over three months in the Leipzig parcel hall at Amazon.
The experiences made at Amazon obviously had consequences for her writing. What the 300 pages of the new novel The week holding together is the spirit of rebellion. Because the first-person narrator and her companion Constanze have just been rented out by the investor and can only look through the window into their old apartment, contradiction and rebellion are not slogans, but personal because they are existential. In Geißler’s case, a Monday always slips between the days of the week that structure her novel. Mondays are days for demonstrations in the East of the Peaceful Revolution, especially in Leipzig, where the novel is set. The spirit of protest drives the narrative through the everyday lives of the two protagonists. The view is critical, the tone in many places more of a manifesto. The language is similar to a rap in terms of urgency and rhythm. The perspective is the we, which is reminiscent of citizens’ choirs that articulate anger and fury at the circumstances on East German theater stages. Heike Geißler’s novel also has another side, a romantic one, one of weakness. The economic orientation of capitalism develops in its shadow an intense emotional culture.
Proletarian Princesses
The French-Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz, quoted in the novel, calls this orientation “emotional capitalism”. Heike Geißler always has him in mind, which is what makes a novel out of her anti-capitalism furor. The reader experiences two forty-year-old women who don’t want to fit into the order, but realize that they lack the strength to always be against. Breaking out of order is exhausting. Especially since the main voice, who has two school-age children and is now around forty, doesn’t let her husband – whom she obviously has – into the text. She has her whole life on her own, day after day. That’s why it doesn’t make her and her companion self-pitying and squeamish. As the children of working-class parents, they call themselves proletarian princesses. In what the name means, there are disadvantages and distinctions at the same time. That’s how they both feel, honored and precarious.
Heike Geißler does not make herself the sole spokeswoman for the “sorted out” in precarious circumstances. With the mixture of social location and insight into “emotional capitalism” the author tries something new. That’s good, because literature that doesn’t take any risks won’t really get to the bottom of our living conditions. Well, sometimes the text pendulum swings towards the manifest. There are beautiful passages in which the story is told, but the main part is speaking. Sometimes the high, enlightening tone sounds like it’s coming from imaginary megaphones. A high-pitched tone, carried over many of the 300 pages of the book, confirms the urgency of dealing with the subject, but it is also tiring. This objection cannot fail. It does not negate the quality of Heike Geißler’s novel. You can experience it when the tone changes and becomes funny and mischievous. The change is particularly successful when he counters one thing with its opposite. For example, when it says: “Every birth means a strengthening of the structures (…) because you no longer have the time and strength to criticize them (…) or to destroy them.” The I-speaker on the side is there an imaginary interlocutor: the “invisible child”. For reasons of this economy, the mother of two refuses to give birth to the invisible child. The argument between the two about birthright leads to a lot of funny dialogue.
With inventions like these, Heike Geißler revives the form of the novel and frees himself from political claims. Unfortunately, it was not discovered at the Bachmann Prize in Klagenfurt that he had dared to do so in a way that was new and formally new in contemporary German-language literature. For Leipzig’s Book Fair Prize, there is a legitimate new opportunity for the author. It extends the perspective of Anke Stelling’s award-winning novel Sheep in the dry from 2019, but tightened many times over. For awarding the prize The week there would be a Leipzig tradition.
The week Heike Geissler Suhrkamp 2022, 325 S., € 24