Da someone wants to be a writer. Maybe because he’s bored in his German studies. Maybe because he’s seen too many Hollywood movies where the hopeful up-and-coming author not only gets the pretty girl, but also lands a bestseller. The German studies student wants that too. If it weren’t for this little problem: What should he write about? Unfortunately, he knows it: he lacks the imagination to create a Harry Potter world. So he decides to write about himself. About his terraced childhood in the provinces and how terribly boring and stuffy everything was there. This is how pop literature is made. Or what people in Germany think of as such. Hunter S. Thompson would have burst out laughing.
Christian Baron did not live in a terraced house. And after reading his debut novel A Man in His Class, it wasn’t pop feelings that overcame you, but the blues. It was a horror Time.news. The father was an unskilled mover who became a beast when drunk – and he was drunk often. And a family that experienced every day what it means to be at the bottom. It was hard to believe while reading that this life, which was cruel in every respect, was still possible in middle-class Germany spoiled by prosperity. In this way, “A Man in His Class” became an awakening experience in a literary world that had revolved around itself for far too long.
Christian Baron brought back a rawness and immediacy not seen since Jörg Fauser (“Raw Material”), who died much too young. Baron’s second novel, “Schön ist die Nacht” is now being published. And of course, as after every rocket launch debut, the question must be: will the VTOL maintain its level, or will the high-altitude flight be followed by a crash? Baron must have asked himself this question too. Because instead of continuing on the path he has taken and delivering more of the same thing as film sequels (more action, more violence, more shock effects), he goes back a generation and delivers the prequel to his underclass saga: from the parents to the grandparents.
Grandparents, that sounds like a safe or at least less “unsound” world. But there are no kind grandpas in “Schön ist die Nacht”. At the beginning of the novel, Baron’s grandfathers are in their early 40s. A treacherous age. It is that phase of life in which men in particular lose their inner compass. Marriage is run into the wall, and professionally, without really knowing why, you find yourself in a dead end. That’s bad enough when the townhouse is just paid off, and devastating when there’s no savings. No financial cushion on which to rest temporarily, to recharge your batteries and reorient yourself.
Baron remains class-struggle
Christians Baron’s second novel turns out to be a story of being overwhelmed right from the start. The supposedly “normal” working life, with its loops and pitfalls, pushes the players to their financial and mental limits – sometimes you drink a pint more. But while in “A Man in His Class” the subsequent excesses of domestic violence and the associated permanent fear superimposed on the story of poverty, in “Schön ist die Nacht” the daily struggle for existence is in the foreground.
The whole thing is reminiscent of “Herr Rossi sucht das Glück”, probably the most class-struggle and also most depressing animated series that has ever been shown in children’s programs. A lowly Italian clerk suffers from the whims and poor pay of his boss. “Others can have everything, can enjoy the finest, and Mr. Rossi would like to have some of these gifts, too,” says the title song. But his actually modest wish – “he just wants a piece of happiness” – is denied him episode after episode.
Baron’s grandfathers, who share a conflict-ridden friendship, feel the same way. There is always a boss standing in the way of happiness. The two grandfathers function as character opposites. One, Willy Wagner, is a dutiful, honest and hard-working carpenter, the other, Horst Baron, an aggressive, often lazy, petty criminal unskilled worker. Were this a moral tale, the latter would perish miserably and the former rise above his fate and triumph in the end. But we are in reality and it has no sense of justice. And no way out either.
Just as it was of little use to Mr. Rossi to travel to the Stone Age, the Middle Ages or the future – his boss always appeared to him in a different form, whether as a Roman emperor or a pirate captain – so little is it possible for the grandfathers in Baron’s second novel to leave your misery behind. Things keep going wrong, both main characters suffer personal and professional setbacks. The legendary saying of Bundesliga professional Jürgen “Kobra” Wegmann comes to mind: “First we weren’t lucky, and then we had bad luck.” And of course Murphy’s law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”
With so much mishap, the thought comes to mind: “Here, however, the imagination ran away with the narrator.” It also comes to mind that Christian Baron, before he became a novelist, was an editor at “Neues Deutschland” and “Freitag” and positioned himself as a class-conscious socialist with the non-fiction book “Proles, mobs, parasites – why the left despise the workers”. Is someone ideologically motivated to write here?
But then it occurs to you that “Schön ist die Nacht” essentially depicts reality. That these “bankruptcies, bad luck and mishaps” CVs are real, yes, must be real, because the subsequent family catastrophe that “A Man of His Class” describes is the only way to understand them at all. Such a ludicrously raw biography, which also touches on the Nazi era, even makes woodcut characters like great-grandmother Hulla – a tough model communist who lectures as if she had stepped out of a textbook on Marxism-Leninism – seem plausible. People probably become so rigid, so relentless when they are constantly being hit by life.
In addition, Christian Baron sets plenty of counterpoints. Grandfather Willy is apolitical, and what Grandfather Horst says about foreigners is likely to make the grandson hate the woken community. Christian Baron is simply a good chronicler. He writes down what people say when you let them talk.
All of this takes place in the 1970s, which today are often glorified as the decade of squeaky-colored April flowers, with super-casual velvet shirts, flared pants and platform soles and even more laid-back people. Unfortunately not true. One becomes painfully aware of this when reading “Schön ist die Nacht”. The 1970s were also the energy crises of 1973 and 1979 and everything that went with them: inflation, mass unemployment, social decline.
energy crises? Inflation? Doesn’t that sound all too familiar in 2022? And against this background, should one perhaps read Christian Baron’s earlier-everything-bad-novel in a completely different way? Not as a reminiscence of the bad old days, but as an outlook and reminder of what happens to people who are socially left behind. The night may be beautiful, but the horror begins in the morning.
Christian Baron: The night is beautiful. Claassen Verlag, 384 pages, 23 euros