It’s hard to shift preconceptions about the prefab housing estates in eastern Berlin. They say Marzahn is a concrete wasteland, but in reality it is exceptionally green. There are wide streets, ample parking spaces, good pavements and dropped kerbs at crossings. If you’ve got wheels, you can get around just fine.
Many people think Marzahn is teeming with former GDR bigwigs and SED party officials. It’s not true; I’d stake my life on it, especially as I work here. I look after the feet of former bricklayers, butchers and nurses. There’s also a woman who worked in electronics, one who bred cattle and another who was a petrol pump attendant.
Mark however quickly pointed out that the book is indeed political, in a way that is subtle and nuanced. While most of the narrator’s clients now live seemingly aspirationally Western-bourgeois lives, preoccupied with their feet, their holidays, hairdressers, and pampered dogs, the past keeps rising to the surface. Although the historical and political tensions potentially underlying the incident are not mentioned, a Russian woman throws herself from the tower block next to the salon. And ‘There is one dyed-in-the-wool party functionary who visits me regularly,’ ‘a walking cliché’ with an imperious manner, who expects subservience and gives her orders, though the narrative makes fun of his pretensions and sees his pathetic humanity:
The six-foot-three pensioner creeps off, checked flat cap on his bald head, back bent. Oh, Everard, you old child of the workers and peasants. All your life you’ve mistaken your position for your personality. Give my regards to the cardiac rehab group.
The narrator tells: ‘One preconception does hold true: the platenbau tower blocks aren’t soundproofed’. She goes on to recount the recent adventure of her ‘high-spirited’ client Frau Blumeier, a woman in her mid-sixties disabled by polio when she was a small child, who has rekindled a relationship with a boy from her youth:
While they were having sex, the bed collapsed… The next day, the man who lived in the apartment under hers got into the lift with a stupid grin on his face and said, ‘You have a blast at yours at night, don’t you?’
The narrator leaves hanging unsaid the fact that this amusing incident is the result of former SED measures to facilitate political spying on the part of the population (allowing people to hear each other through thin walls).
However the political message is not partisan. Perhaps more strongly, if mostly in passing, it is made clear that many of the characters have suffered from reunification and westernisation, having lost the benefits and even the lifestyle endowed on them by the former Socialist state. Frau Blumeier lost her job, as ‘the company she worked for went into liquidation. She was told she wouldn’t stand much of a chance in the West with her disability.’ Another also lost her job through liquidation of the handbag company she worked for, and her husband’s furniture-making business suffered and finally died: ‘The easterners paid. But the westerners didn’t… And then of course the easterners followed suit.’ Eighty-year-old Gerlinde Bonkat, who fled East Prussia as a seven-year-old refugee and worked hard in Germany all her life, found herself redeployed to west Berlin:
The bouquet of flowers that greeted every new colleague back in the old East seemed not to exist here… The ignorance and arrogance of her colleagues from the West made her hackles rise.
At which she gave up. ‘There was an exhaustion that went way beyond her feet.’
Yet what the chiropodist narrator sees as she tends the feet of these characters is their irrepressible spirit, and a picture emerges of the indomitable humanity of ordinary people in the face of any political regime. We all loved the book for this.
My only caveat was that I felt there was something missing. Although it is clear that the narrator’s change of career is prompted by a personal (mid-life) crisis, and that by the end of the book her personal circumstances have changed, we hear nothing in the meantime of her personal life and the ways in which those circumstances changed. I had however read something implying that when the book was originally published in German, it was published as a collection of short stories, and if I had read it as such I believe I would not have had this problem; it is only taking it as a novel that makes me want to know the narrator’s personal trajectory. John then said that he felt a lengthy section involving a works outing taken by the narrator and her two salon colleagues seemed a little out of place in the general schema of the book, and he wondered now if it had been added for the sake of length in order to publish the book as a novel. (It’s a publishing article of faith that novels sell better than books of short stories, and many a collection of linked stories has been dressed up in this way.) This however did not detract from our overall opinion of the book, which, as far as we could tell from a translation was beautifully written and brilliantly translated.
Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here
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