A few times in Lena Schättes short novel, the time lasts. And somehow the text. Then there is a sentence on paper and flashes like a blue light. “I fall in love with a drinking man because it is at home.” “Shortly before I go out, when my brother is already gone, my father and I only understand each other when we both drank.” “After he died, I am ashamed when I think badly. If I wanted here instead of I would have been others. “” My brother tips the schnapps into the grave. “” I say yes, but shake my head. “Lena Schättes” The Black on the hands of my father “is the village novel of a global, cross -generational and social stratification problem. Seeks. A father drinks, the mother holds the shop together, the three children, depending on their age, outgrow the situation (the oldest daughter) or her (the son) or overwhelmed (the youngest daughter who tells us the story). This text comes from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. The time is the nineties. The family lives in the Sauerland, which is the home of the author and the future Chancellor, who was drawn by the Federal Republic in the election campaign with a truck, on which “more Sauerland for Germany”. Everyone has to know how to say on Twitter in the past. In any case, it is a deep -catholic region in which women go to go to the order when they go jogging on Sunday morning. The people drink everywhere lives there to this day, during our conversation at lunchtime the church bells ring, and she says: “It was not even a second in my head to put this story somewhere else than in the Sauerland.” But she then explains immediately that her story could play anywhere. Because people drink everywhere. In the village. In the city. Whether you choose left or right or not at all, Catholic or nothing at all. Place, time and action of this story are globally transferable. In Lena Schättes Roman you all drink. Almost at least. The father. The first and second man of the grandmother. The pastor. The narrator even then at some point. She is called Motte, no: her father calls her moth – and this is the one recognizable metaphor in the unaffected prose of this book, because the daughter circles the father, who is life light and will at the same time cloud forever, but the expression in the eyes of the ancestors dies. Motte had stolen a photo album before the woman who had demented could throw it away. “My ancestors look emaciated, exhausted and drunk,” she says. “Especially my great -grandfather seems to have this expression in his eyes even on the photographs of the children’s festival in the wildlife park.” Mothe shows the pictures of her grandma’s sister, who lives in the nursing home. “It used to be quite normal, she says. I stood in front of the factory with the other women on Friday afternoon and we picked up our husbands and relieved them of the wage bags so that they did not bring them to the pub.. She laughs (..) I ask her whether she never drank. speaks a character. The author, which she has come up with and who has been working in the addiction aid system since her training, most recently in an integration aid for people with addiction diseases in Lüdenscheid, says: Women also drink. They may do it more functional, and they do not appear to the same extent in the addiction aid system like men, but they drink. Schnapps means an trouble motted mother, however, in this novel the circumstances stick together as best as possible. She doesn’t drink. But, says Motte, “My mother teaches us things. Other things than sitting at the dining table with a straight back than thanks and please say other things than her son. She teaches us that schnapps means trouble.” Then follows such a sentence with flashing lights: “And she teaches us that a woman always has to have escape money.” The author Lena Schätät has been working in addiction for years. Boris Breuerwenn is noticeable in this early book, then it is the large number of new literary publications of different formats that are dedicated to the family-apart from the father-mother-child, semi-detached half. These literary texts include Bettina Wilpert’s “A bearded woman” (criminal publisher) such as Katharina Bendixens “A contemporary form of love” (Edition Nautilus), Kristine Bilkaus “Highter Island” (Luchterhand, on the shortlist of the Leipzig Book Prize) or Sara Gmuer’s “Eighteen Stock” (Hanser Blau). All of the books about tinkered, damaged family constellations and the conditions under which something like happiness or breathing can still arise. Apparently the need for these stories has grown up. Also in the sense of how the family of this story still stops in breaking and only breaks more on it. As unaffected and clear is the author’s prose who received the WG Sebald literature award for an extract from this novel last year: the strength of her text is in ambivalence. That sounds like Plattitude, ambivalence should be the minimum claim to a literary text. Shaking laconia, terrible incidents, especially with a complex topic such as addiction, is not so easy to achieve this complexity. However, Lena Schätät succeeds, however, that this ambivalence is not only formal-in the shattering Lakonie, with which she describes the most terrible incidents-but also in the affects that she lets her characters live through. “I have read too many texts in which addiction or generally psychiatric diseases are told as a perpetrator-victim history,” she says. “This is unfair. Every day has 24 hours. You are not always drunk, you are not always just shit, everything is there at the same time, family life, love, trust, but also the break and the disappointment.” Moth loves her father, but she also lives in constant threats, what could do next to ruin the family without wanting to ruin it. Once he drives drunk in the snow by car on summer tires down the mountain directly into the village bakery, we are here in the steep slopes of the Sauerland. The bonnet is buried deep in the counter, the entrance door smashed on the car roof. The family has long since learned to live in such ruins. It is the secret that the women of such families pass on from one generation to the next: how to do it. Motte wishes you had been others. And she wishes that the father is still there when he is dead. Novel. Verlag S. Fischer, 192 pages, 24 euros. Fischer “I come from a working -class family from the Sauerland with a addiction topic,” says Lena Schätät. “And even if this is not my father and not my story, it always brings a measure of responsibility and sensitivity. Everyone around me has to support the story that I tell. And that is why it was clear that there were things that have to be left out.” What this novel also leaves, but still brings up, that this story can be read in the spring of 2025: these are the social conditions. In terms of village kitsch, like in July toe, “The Black on my hands on my father’s hands” is also the story of a worker and his children, the father is to work in metal processing, on Mondays his hands are gray, “over the week. On days off. Crawled, the brittle nail bed deep red. ” Showly does not psychologize, no connection between the factory and schnapps. It also does not operate village kitsch like July toe and puts the wisdom of the province against the arrogance of elitist city dwellers. She just directs the view (like Christian Baron in “A man in his class” years ago) into a milieu, which is usually only taken to take a closer look when it is strange on election evenings. And how much such stories are missing is then realized, when you count, how many of this kind of past time you can remember, so the father calls his daughter – as I said, that is a recognizable metaphor of this novel. The other is the rest area on the highway, the mottes family begins to run at some point. Everyone helps, the mother cooks, it also runs for a while, despite the father’s escapades, but then three trips continue to open a larger rest area that dries up to customers. But because the tenant does not know what else to do with the house, he leaves it to the family. The restlessness of the trauma “and so we stay there. We clear the heavy wooden tables from the dining room, push living room furniture, just a few corner benches. My mother buys green wrapping paper with red flowers and sticks a window down, through which strollers sometimes go inside. My father goes to the morning. Guest toilet and brushes his teeth there, distributed his magazines in the cabins. Rest sites, bridges, motorways, transitional cakes, provisionals: ciphers for the homelessness, which brings trauma, for the unrest, the restlessness. For time, the cars still hold, and the guests try to look through the glued windows into the dining room, where the family has distributed photos of France, where nobody remembers, where Christmas tree balls hang on the decommissioned. Climb up walls. “And at some point everyone understood that we no longer exist.” Another sentence with blue lights. Lena scalp, “the black on my father’s hands.” Novel. Verlag S. Fischer, 192 pages, 24 euros.
