The tricky question about the children
Verena Kessler was born in 1988
What: Paula Winkler
Offspring – or rather not? Verena Kessler has turned this fundamental question into a clever, because not tendentious, novel. In the life planning scenarios, one position is particularly surprising.
Un many problems one can quite successfully wriggle around in the course of one’s life. But very few people are spared from racking their brains about reproduction at any point. While for some it’s about when and with whom you have children, others wonder if it’s such a good idea at all. Isn’t life complicated enough as it is? Doesn’t the future look too bleak?
Or do you only ask yourself these questions because you don’t actually have a real desire to have children, but don’t want to express it quite so bluntly? Because the unwillingness to have children is still considered “unfeminine”, “unnatural” or otherwise deficient? The four female characters, whose lives overlap in Verena Kessler’s novel “Eva” with more or less clear interactions, each have their own way of dealing with this topic. The teacher and heroine Eva Lohaus has no children and wants to encourage others to follow this model of life. Birth strike for the climate, so her steep plea.
Children – or no children?
The young journalist Sina, on the other hand, who conducted a scandalous interview with Lohaus, does everything to get pregnant. Because she wants a family at all costs or maybe because her boyfriend wants it? Things remain complicated. This also applies to Sina’s sister – Mona, who is married, at least for the time being, and has three children, although she only wanted two at most. At some point one sister says to the other: “You either have children or you don’t have any. Nobody has both experiences.” For a few pages, this sentence stands as if carved in stone, but at the latest when the fourth protagonist speaks up, it loses its inviolable evidence. So the final chapter is told from the perspective of an unnamed department store worker who, after a tragedy, has both experiences: the child she once had is no longer there.
Kessler, who three years ago received unanimous praise for her debut “The Ghosts of Demmin” – a story about the historical mass suicide in a small town in (now) Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in 1945 – does not disappoint in her second novel either. At first glance, “Eva” may seem a little too demonstratively connected to the issues and problems that have been discussed in the bestsellers and debate books of the late feminist mainstream for years.
Just think of Orna Donath’s sociological research on the remorse with which women look at their existence as mothers (“Regretting Motherhood”) or Sheila Heiti’s essayistic soul-searching about not wanting children (“Mutterschaft”, 2019). Last but not least, Kessler serves as a source of inspiration for Verena Brunschweiger’s effect-heavy, climate-moving antinatalism manifesto. In the pamphlet published under the title “Child-free instead of childless” (2019), the ultimately very personal decision for or against having one’s own offspring was exaggerated to the highly political crucial question of the intersectional apocalypse: Do you seriously care about the continued existence of the planet, world peace and feminism? Then don’t bring children into the world, was the message.
As obviously as the fictitious Eva Lohaus is based on the real teacher and activist Brunschweiger, there is little in the novel that aims to improve the world or morally optimize life. Instead, Kessler celebrates the contradictory and incorrigible in people with empathetic distance, literary and psychologically sophisticated. None of the four women is completely at peace with themselves, none of them are good as a source of orientation, each comes to terms with their misfortune in their own way and remains interesting for that very reason.
Verena Kessler: Eva. Hanser Berlin, 208 pages, 24 euros