Horst Wessel and Hydrangeas
Not your thing? Here’s a list of other suggestions for Germany!
There’s a very long long list of heavy must-read German classics, which I have never read, and I skipped right over them. I also ignored all of the must-read books on WW2 and Cold War history.
Instead I went for some of the most recent I could find: A book by a best-selling German author set under the Covid pandemic. The original German edition was in fact published in March 2021, when lockdown restrictions had yet to be lifted.
I really liked it this book, and the way it challenged my worldview in ways I did not expect.
In the original German, the title “Über Menschen” has a clever wordplay that is lost in translation. It translates directly to “About People”, but it also evokes the “Übermensch” – the Nazi ideal of a superior Aryan race.
And on one hand, the book is very much about ordinary people — their relationships, flaws, and struggles. On the other hand, it pokes at the idea of ideological superiority, the tendency to see oneself as morally or intellectually “above” others. And on top of that it is just a truly engaging and very moving story.
That sense of superiority is a long-acting poison
that devours all humanity from the inside.
About people follows Dora, a 30-something advertising professional from Berlin, who decides to escape the lockdowns and more importantly her keyboard-warring. climate-obsessed, and ridiculously rigid Covid19-rule-following boyfriend. She moves herself and her dog, Jay, to a dilapidated house with an overgrown garden in a small rural Brandenburg village called Bracken. This is in AfD voting territory, people warn her sternly.
Dora is expecting to find some peace and quiet, but instead she quickly finds herself facing all the difficulties of living in a place where the bus only runs twice a day. And before long she also comes face-to-face with people who challenge everything she believes. Especially her next door neighbour, Gote, who bluntly introduces himself as “the village Nazi”, embodies all of her prejudices and every ideology that she finds abhorrent.
But she also encounters a small and close-knit community where social distancing is a thing for the city-folks, and helping each other out is just something that you do without asking. And she meets Gote’s daughter, whom he clearly adores despite her obvious air of neglect.
As their friendship develops, Dora begins to question whether Gote could really be all that bad. Yes, he was once imprisoned for politically aggravated assault, and he sings the banned Horst Wessel song with his neo-Nazi friends in the garden during the Covid stay-at-home order. But he’s also a talented wood-carver, he brings her Hydrangea plants for the front porch out of nowhere, and maybe you can be friends with someone who holds a world view so completely different from your own?
Things are very much not black and white in this book. It tackles some big moral themes and the complexities of human nature without being preachy. There really are no easy answers here, and you are forced to ponder your own worldview and the divides we like to create between “us” and “them”.
Of course there’s no law stating that neo-Nazis can’t appreciate hydrangeas. But it’s a jarring notion nevertheless. It poses a threat to the life-affirming yet mistaken idea that good and evil can easily be distinguished from one another.
About people is sharp and relevant, and deeply human. It has a wonderfully colourful cast of characters, including but not limited to the gay couple who grow flowers for a living, the “serial griller” across the road, and Dora’s succesful doctor dad.
This author is completely unafraid to poke at the bubble of the so-called “politically correct,” showing that sometimes it is the very people who see themselves as tolerant and open-minded who have the hardest time really listening.
And then, just when you begin to genuinely care for Gote, the author mercilessly slaps you in the face to remind you that you do in fact still think his worldview is abhorrent.
This is a novel that slowly gets under your skin. It is genuinely hilarious in places and brought real tears to my eyes in others. It made me uncomfortable in all the best ways and left me thinking about it long after I turned the last page. If you’re ready for a story that challenges your perspectives, About People is absolutely worth a read.
I have a feeling this is not the only Juli Zeh book that will make it into my bookshelf.
