2023-09-11 17:27:58
A summer Monday in Düsseldorf, we are standing in the kitchen of a shady ground floor apartment in an old building in the Oberbilk district. The writer Mithu Sanyal has opened the door of her refrigerator and is packing provisions for our lunch. It even comes with a cooling pad. “I don’t have a fridge over there,” she explains. Over there, that’s her writing retreat, a work apartment, two streets away.
In the Wikipedia list of well-known people associated with Düsseldorf-Oberbilk, Mithu Sanyal is between Heino (born here) and Sahra Wagenknecht (had her constituency here). Sanyal initially became known as a journalist and cultural scientist, whose statements on the heated debate topics of our time (e.g. cancel culture, feminism, postcolonialism) always read pleasantly three levels more differentiated than is usual in discourse.
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Sanyal has written a few clever non-fiction books, but her bravura piece was “Identities”. The debut novel that didn’t seem like a German novel at all, but rather like a cross between Zadie Smith and Salman Rushdie in the guise of a campus novel. With a speaking Indian goddess. A charismatic professor. Enthusiastic students. And a scandal about skin color and origin.
We step outside the door and walk through Oberbilk. The former workers’ quarter is located in the large railway triangle behind the main train station and has an urban, multicultural flair; it could also be a district in Brussels or London. Some residential streets are very quiet and secluded, with lots of trees.
Migration as normality
Sanyal, born in 1971, grew up here as the daughter of an Indian engineer and a Polish-born secretary whose parents had once come to Duisburg as miners – like so many Poles and Italians since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Labor migration has been a normality for centuries in the Ruhr area and Rhineland. Today names like Hüttenstrasse, Eisenstrasse and Stahlstrasse are reminiscent of the former heavy industry in Oberbilk. The proportion of people with a global migration background is higher here than in the rest of the city, which Mithu Sanyal likes; she doesn’t stand out and is greeted by all the neighbors, which was not the case in other parts of Düsseldorf where she once lived .
After a short distance we arrived at Sanyal’s office apartment. It is located on the top floor of an unadorned post-war building: the showpiece area of the light-flooded one-room apartment is the south-facing roof terrace, with a hammock, densely packed potted plants, tall flowering plants, tomatoes here and grapes there. Almost a small allotment garden oasis on the roof, with a wide view.
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Before my trip to Düsseldorf, I asked Sanyal whether there was a real model for Saraswati’s attic apartment in “Identitti”. Saraswati is the fictional star professor in the novel, who – as it turns out – has only faked her Indian heritage. She has the aura of a kind of Susan Sontag for postcolonial theory, sits down on talk shows with the real-life conservative Jordan Peterson – and lives in Oberbilk: “A world-renowned intellectual at this address. That was part of their myth that they down in the hood lived”.
Sanyal, from Oberbilk, is now also a sought-after figure and sits on several important juries in the German-speaking literary world. At the end of June she had her premiere as a juror at the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in Klagenfurt. The three-day live format is not only a reading competition, but also an interpretation competition by the seven-person jury – about readings, interpretive sovereignty, text aesthetics.
How does Sanyal sum up her new job there? A dynamic developed, she says, giving the false impression that she was only talking about feelings. “It was important to me to say: We act here as if we were talking about literature completely objectively. But texts also do something affectively to us, and it’s important to reflect on that too, which is why I want to talk about that too – but of course not only.” She sees her role on the jury as a writer: Since she was a literary author herself, I know she explains how much criticism can hurt and offend.
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Now let’s have a snack in the small kitchen. Sanyal puts tea on, a tasty bag brand from Wales, and cuts off the sunflower loaf, the slices go into the toaster so that the deliciously salted Shirgar butter melts in our mouths later. The guest gratefully foregoes Marmite, the bouillon cube-brown brewer’s yeast spread from Great Britain.
But it has long been clear: Sanyal’s life turns out to be on various levels very british embossed. Not only that she is married to an Englishman, the musician Matti Rouse. It’s not just that BBC audio books stock their shelves. The office apartment, which is furnished with a lot of retro design in Swinging Sixties orange, is also full of Penguin and Pelican Books with their wonderfully distinctive covers.
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We drink the tea from an orange “Wuthering Heights” merchandising cup. The classic by Emily Brontë, which she just wrote about in German for the KiWi series “Books of My Life”, was actually her first, formative adult book. “That set the bar high.” Other role models? She feels connected to the magical realism of Salman Rushdie, as well as the abundance of his novels, especially “Midnight Children”.
Husband as a test reader
Sanyal also talks about Agatha Christie, who stocks her shelf: “A teacher of plotting”. And about Enid Blyton, who was “so incredibly close to oral.” Not least thanks to Blyton, Sanyal’s dream of becoming a writer was already instilled in her as a child. “I always wanted to write novels.” What’s important to her when writing today is that the dialogue is right. You can generally learn better from English literature than from German. “It is important to me that my texts flow, that one sentence inevitably draws you into the next. That’s why I always read them out loud.” Sanyal’s husband is her first test subject.
She is currently working on her new novel (working title: “Anti-Christi”). It will be set in London and will deal with the Indian independence movement. She set herself three pages of writing every day. Incidentally, it was Florian Kessler, her editor at Hanser-Verlag, who wrote his “Let me through, I’m a doctor’s son.”-Text almost ten years ago, which triggered the so-called Kessler or doctor’s son debate. A feuilleton dispute about more diversity in the literary world, especially at writing schools, where Kessler only saw fellow students from middle-class, bio-German parents.
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Sanyal, ten years older than Kessler, would have wished that there had been something like a writing course in Germany in her time. That’s why she studied her way through various universities until she finally got into the “Literature Education and Media Practice” course taught by Jürgen Manthey, who was a literature professor in Essen at the time: “Without him as a mentor, I would never have gotten into radio. And never became a journalist. There was no access for people like me.”
People like her, by which she means people who are marked in Germany by their skin color, name and gender, but also because she came from a working-class family on her mother’s side. In the advanced math course, for example, she had a teacher who was of the opinion that “girls had no place there and actively bullied us. In the 1980s, racism and sexism were still practiced unabashedly.”
Would math have been for you? Oh yes, solving math problems is physically satisfying. “The world of mathematics is so harmonious, everything is related to each other and in the end something always comes out. Completely different than in literature,” says Sanyal – now as a proud mother who has successfully maneuvered both her daughter and her son through their math school exams.
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The sun over the roof oasis has long since reached mid-afternoon when Mithu Sanyal is still talking about Günter Grass. His “tin drum” plays not only in Gdansk, but also in Düsseldorf. Oskar Matzerath – like the real Günter Grass, who wanted to become a sculptor – did an apprenticeship as a stonemason there. And he frequents the International English Library of the “Die Brücke” educational center, which was set up by the Allies as part of the post-war re-education. Sanyal says her parents met in this library in the early 1960s. “When the last ‘bridge’ in Düsseldorf was supposed to close in the 1990s, I wrote Günter Grass a letter. That was pretty naive because he probably got 100 letters a day.”
But he actually reacted and campaigned for the “bridge” with the city administration. “Later he invited me to Behlendorf. Then we discussed the goddess Kali, about whom he wrote in ‘Show Tongue’ and who I simply understand completely differently than he does.” But he was very open to her statements. And the “bridge” was saved. “Many of my generation like to turn up their noses at Günter Grass, but he was a really honest and credible person.”
She will now water the flowers, says Mithu Sanyal, as the reporter leaves the attic apartment and sets off for the train station – with the deep desire, by the way, to read everything about Düsseldorf in the “Tin Drum”. And right away in “Identitti”.
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