2024-09-01 08:42:26
Some books are so captivating that the reader is tempted to stop reading. He wants to stay in the defined world as long as possible. Others develop a pull from the front page that you can’t escape. Elsa Koester’s novel “Land of Wolves” clearly falls into the second category. It doesn’t fill you up, it just makes you hungry for more. Why is that? The program could not be more contemporary. The plot takes us to the east of Saxony, to the historic town of Grenzlitz near the Polish border. A new mayor has to be elected.
In the Middle Ages, the city, which had dwindled to 50,000 inhabitants as a result of the exodus of boys, especially young women, became rich through the cloth trade. But that is long in the past. The sorrows of the post-unification period are still deep in the bones of the elderly when Nana, almost 40-years-old first-person, traveled from Berlin to support the candidate “Green front” Katja Stötzel, who has roots. in the area, as a coach in his election campaign. The clear favorite is Paul Witte, the “Blue” candidate. On one occasion he meets Falk Schlosser, one of his supporters, also a rightist – but something draws him to him.
That sounds like the starting point of a kitsch novel. Far from it. Stories always take new, unexpected turns without losing the thread. We follow Nana to the political meetings of “Future Green”, to the police festival, to the conference of the “1 percent movement” and to the rest of the wooden house we built, Little Red Riding Hood’s base outside the city. . The conflicts that shake our republic appear as if in a large glass: the fight for a fair climate and refugee policy, for gender identity and the neglect of rural residents.
The novel does not try to be a natural manifestation of reality; But Elsa Koester draws her stories with incredible character from a world that looks very, very similar to the one we know. On the one hand, the separation goes directly through families. We know each other – some since school days. People stay out of each other’s way, but there are still areas of contact. People meet at the market, children go to the same daycare center and the owner of a vegan cafe has no problem with visitors from the other side of politics. “You don’t have to earn the cake,” he told Nana. If you need a cake, you’ll get it, that’s how I see it.”
In order to keep his candidate fit for what the polls say is a close race, the coach is trying to find out what makes local people tick. In doing so, he gradually overcame the contradictions of the advancing armies. For example, when it comes out in the conversation of Katja Stötzel, who can still score points with fellow citizens who have a conservative opinion because of her handshake, she doesn’t want to send her little girl to a regular school, but to the private rainbow school. There are few foreigners there.
Nana met with Falk Schlosser. You want to understand how you think, what ideas and language your top candidate can use to score points with people like you in the election campaign. But that is not the only reason. She has a certain intelligence in her that relates to their shared experiences of loss and violence.
Violence on all sides
“In the evenings in the bars,” he recalls his time in Berlin Antifa, “people talk about curb kicks, that’s the last level of violence. “To catch a Nazi the way you can put him on the street, put his upper cheek on the ground and then kick him.” It’s a fascinating reading experience to follow Nana as she begins to understand what her political opponents have done to her and why she just can’t accept that her brother doesn’t want to be a man anymore.
When Nana really needed help urgently in a situation that escalated to violence and she couldn’t reach her friends, it was Falk of the public who helped her without asking. What politics has to do with feelings, with hurts and trying to protect yourself from them. Is it a completely rational decision whether to turn left or right? As the novel progresses, the conflicts become more and more intense. The window panes were broken, a bicycle was broken. Conflict broke out at the multi-cultural sugar festival.
“In the Land of Wolves” provides a description of contemporary politics that hardly any non-fiction book can match. His honesty not only shows what it is, but also repeatedly suggests that there may be ways out of growing cruelty. When you reach the end, breathing and with your heart beating, you want to immediately start reading again.
Elsa Koester: In the home of wolves.
Thomas Wagner
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