Christian Kracht: "Eurotrash" - Mamaland in Nazi hands

Listening 19:48There it is again, the noisy "So": "So, I had to go to Zurich again for a few days. My mother wanted to speak to me urgently. She had called and said I should please hurry come, it had been quite scary on the phone. And being nervous about it had made me feel so unwell for the entire long weekend that I was severely constipated."

Jever aus der Flaschen

Clever to start the announced sequel with the same formula as the debut "Faserland" 25 years ago: "Well, it starts with Fisch-Gosch Sylt and drink a Jever from the bottle", so it was said at the time. The mother of the new novel lives where the first novel ended: in Zurich. With the journey there, the narrator picks up the thread of "Faserland" again. "I also have to say that a quarter of a century ago I wrote a story that, for some reason I can't remember now, I called Faserland. It ends in Zurich, in the middle of Lake Zurich, so to speak, relatively traumatically." You are immediately right in the middle of this Kracht world. As in that language that works precisely to create indefiniteness. Not "she", the story ends in Zurich. But "it ends", and "relatively traumatic". The narrating author casually claims to have forgotten the reason for the original choice of title.

To mom, to freedom?

That is the crucial contrast: On the one hand, the narrator can no longer think of something important. On the other hand, he remembers: "Faserland" was consistently written in the present tense, as if everything was happening "right now, just now," says "Eurotrash" in the past tense from the first sentence. The central questions of this novel are: What can be remembered? What should be remembered? What is forgotten and repressed? What remains blurred, what is contoured? The encounter with the mother and the motherland means facing the task of remembrance. What does the protagonist and narrator Christian Kracht still remember: How he traveled to Zurich after his mother called. That he spent a thoughtful night in a hotel there — a hotel that remains nameless in the midst of Kracht's thriving brand aesthetic, as the narrator describes "looking in the pockets outside the hotel door for the hotel key."

German weapon systems

The narrator remembers how the next day he drove his over eighty-year-old woman, who was addicted to alcohol and pills after a serious operation with a stoma and after several stays in the psychiatric clinic, tending towards madness mother visited. And how he spontaneously decided in the burgeoning argument to embark on a journey with her. She wants to go to Africa. He calls the taxi. A fruitful stopover at Mama's house bank remains in memory. Because how does she explain her son so succinctly: "During the last financial crisis, she invested counter-cyclically and very successfully in floor cleaning machines and now has perhaps thirteen or fourteen million francs, which were mainly invested in German weapon systems and Swiss dairies." Mother and son get back into the taxi with a plastic bag full of money. As always in Kracht's novels, all flows of money and information have a direct impact on the bodies and physical flows. The call from the mother right at the beginning, with which she takes matters into her own hands, makes the narrator nervous and constipated. The stoma, which requires the bags to be changed repeatedly to prevent them from overflowing.

We'll soon be in the middle

The plastic bag bulging with bills and the narrator's memory that he always kept his belongings in bags only makeshift, form the most striking constellation of the novel. After the novel narrows these circulations, mother and son ask the taxi driver to go to Saanen: towards Gstaad, to where Christian Kracht was born. A good three hours from Zurich. Mother and son spend the night there and take a trip up a glacier by cable car. Drive to Lake Geneva. Visited the deceased father's chalet and Borge's grave and returned a good 48 hours later. That's it. No other facts can be remembered. The reminiscence protocol comprises twelve chapters, almost 200 pages: slim, elegant, financially well padded, mamaesque. "Mom! When will we see each other again? Soon." This is how the novel ends. The dialogue is a gentle echo of faserland's "Soon we'll be in the middle of the lake. Soon.". Nevertheless, "Eurotrash" ends relatively non-traumatically.

Identity and authorship

Christian Kracht rejects the option of continuing "Faserland" and its world from back then. No reunions with Nigel, Alexander, Katja or Anna! So when they say: "Eurotrash" is the sequel to Kracht's "Faserland", then that's true from the first to the last word, but it's still only half the truth. Actually, with "Eurotrash" Kracht continued his acceptance speech at the Wilhelm Raabe Prize and his Frankfurt poetry lecture. He picks up the thread of the authorship and authenticity debate that he developed there. In this lecture, Kracht - in line with the expectations of this genre - inscribed himself as an author in his own literary scenario by making it known that he had been the victim of sexual abuse during his time in a Canadian boarding school. This event, says Kracht, had a lasting influence on his literary texts. However, Kracht never finally resolved the ambivalence between authentic speaking and self-portrayal during the lecture. His new novel continues this form of authorship staging with an almost routine ambiguity. Namely, by depicting the main character from "Faserland" as a mere fiction, while the first-person narrator from the current novel is supposedly so authentically real that one could almost touch him through the lines of writing. Christian Kracht from "Eurotrash" makes it clear when looking at "Faserland": "The first-person narrator, i.e. me, should preferably hear the Eagles, I copied that from Bret Easton Ellis. That impressed me very, very much back then because I, the real me, found the Eagles horrible [...] and not only found the Eagles horrible, but also people who liked the Eagles."

The sexual abuse

Kracht forces these ever new entanglements of different, supposedly "invented" and supposedly "real" egos. Like his poetry lecture, "Eurotrash" keeps throwing out new markers of authenticity in order to immediately undermine their effect. Other authors have also mastered this process to perfection: Karl Ove Knausgaard, Didier Eribon, Edouard Louis, Angela Kraus, Otessa Moshfeg and Rachel Cusk. Except that Christian Kracht would not claim like Cusk: all fiction should be avoided because it is nothing but a lie. Rather, that our reality is interwoven with fiction down to the finest fiber. In this respect, the memory of the sexual abuse plays an important role in the novel. However, the novel immediately lifts this memory into a further constellation – once again the double movement of asserting and withdrawing evidence has an effect. The mother now says: "Very quietly and with the hesitant, calm words of a child, she told me what had happened to her at the age of eleven in northern Germany in 1949, in Itzehoe, that she had been raped again and again, whereupon I cried, cried and took her in my arms and told her that she was safe now, [...], and she no longer had to be afraid and that something similar to what happened to me, also at the age of eleven, had happened to me, only in 1979, at the Canadian boarding school She always knew that and believed me, she said, even then, she just hadn't been able to talk about it, never, the pain had prevented it, the pain of her own mistreatment and the shame of not being able to prevent it with her own child, exactly three decades later."

Battle of memories

These statements should be taken seriously. But the counter-movement is just as important. In the concrete memory work, first of the mother, then of the son, things are constellated, condensed and shifted. Just to give one example: In the Frankfurt poetry lecture, there is still talk of "the then twelve-year-old boy". Now he is eleven, just like his mother. This is where Kracht's characteristic writing process crystallizes from seriousness, recording, exaggeration, to the point of parodying what is supposedly serious. All conversations between mother and son are now about a common, but also against each other, battle of memories. Mother and son negotiate in the sense of an economy of mystery, what can be forgotten, what one only pretends to forget, what is better kept silent, what one prefers to distract from, where one refuses: "I don't want to. Oh, come on, please "No, I don't want to. Why not? I don't want to tell you that either. Does it have to do with my father?"

Germans with a Nazi background

The struggle for remembrance crystallizes in such dialogues. Little happens on the action level. But the mental cinema, in which what is said out loud is only a marginal feature, runs at full speed from the first page. It is a great, tragicomic pleasure to witness this battle of memories. Because mother and son don't give each other anything with their memory tricks and finesse, their silence and skilful distraction. And when in between the present sticks its head out of the past, they don't shy away from throwing a lot of money on their heads. One should by no means imagine that the work of remembrance will lose itself in sadness. Especially since dealing with the abuse quickly forms a kind of "common sense" between mother and son: they know about each other. The real contested area of ​​memory is different. The question of abuse is woven into a broader context, which has lost none of its explosiveness to this day. It flares up when, at the end of February this year, the photographer Moshati Hilal and the author Sinthujan Varatharajah retell the success stories of three - as they called it - "Germans with a Nazi background".

She said (something not)

According to the two interlocutors dressed in brown, today's highly praised activities in the cultural sector are based on the wealth that their families have gained through the cooperation with and participation in the Nazi regime. However, the three of them – like the general public – spread a cloak of silence about this prerequisite for their cultural work. This is exactly the topic that drives Christian Kracht's "Eurotrash". Only the Christian Kracht of this novel points to himself and his family. He reports himself. At first there's just this vague sense of eeriness: "So I lacked the explanation of the larger context of my family's circumstances. It was as if I had been walking on the brink of enormous wickedness for decades and just couldn't see it, as if it were only within my suspicions further conjectures, as if I were afflicted with a morphic field disease, a cruel malice radiating up from the past."

Almost half a century

In the double of evidence production and withdrawal, and in direct conflict with the mother's concerns about memory, the narrator works his way step by step into the family history. He recalls the Nazi past of the maternal family (and the mother's lack of an outcry against this involvement). And he reconstructs the rapid rise of his father, Christian Kracht, who was born in 1921. The work of remembrance makes it clear how beautifully silent one's own family was in order to preserve the surface of a beautiful new European existence. "It's been almost half a century, radiant, European world," it says briefly at one point. Then, however, already in the conviction that behind the radiant surface - almost a pop phenomenon - the old fortunes are wafting in order to urge their circulation. Europe turns out to be "Euro-Trash" - not rubbish that has lost its former value, but "Trash" - manufactured in inferior quality from the start. There is no protection against this if mom pays in Swiss francs.

Luxury through robbery

Bringing this monetary family history up from the past and recognizing it as the basis of one's own author's life. As a privilege, as shame, as the coldness that resulted from the culture of silence, as an entanglement in which the two cases of abuse are also woven - that is the narrative principle of "Eurotrash". When the narrator finally emphasizes in retrospect how he "then came into contact with the whole story again for the first time", then this is a fundamental question of all previous Kracht novels. Even the protagonist of "Faserland" lived in luxury, subliminally financed by his parents' Nazi wealth. At least it is noticeable how densely "Faserland" is interspersed with allusions to the Nazi era. Last but not least, the important friendship with Alexander broke up because his girlfriend insulted the first-person narrator as a Nazi and at the same time as completely apolitical. There it says: "The whole thing kept escalating, I couldn't help it. The woman is just too stupid. At some point there was a real argument, and Alexander decided for Varna, that's how it was." It all escalated. And now, with renewed contact with "the whole", it is no longer enough to recognize the family continuum from the Nazi era and to hide behind the supposedly non-political. The novels "1979", "We will be here in the sunshine as in the shadows" and "The Dead" each play in their own way with analogous constellations in the respective temporal shift. Kracht's narrative economy of mystery always revolves around the Nazi financing phenomenon.

Pullover instead of Barbour

Of course you can't send your protagonists on such a memory ordeal if they don't wear the right clothes. That's why the narrator first acquires - in a wonderful parallel scene to "Faserlands" Jever at Gosch and to Eckart Nickel's raspberry purchase in "Hysteria" - a self-enlightening outfit: "I came into contact with the whole story again for the first time when I had just bought, as I said, in Zurich, down on the Bahnhofsstrasse, a dark-brown, somewhat coarse wool pullover at a small stall made out of planks, not far from the Paradeplatz." What an initiation. Which is only surpassed by this. When the narrator cannot resist the woolly entanglements of the sweater the next morning and pulls it directly onto the bare skin. However, putting on such a protective skin offers only limited protection against attacks from the mother's side. She greets her son simply, nostalgically remembering the days of Barbour jackets: "Tell me, what kind of horrible eco sweater are you wearing?"

Breakout and circle

No, a sweater like that doesn't help to get out of the family mess. Just as he cannot hide the fact that someone here has been familiar with all the subtle differences of the luxury-conscious from childhood. But is there any way out? According to Kracht, we – personally and socially – always go in circles. Even if moments of decision and, for example, the start of the journey briefly suggest a possibility of breaking out: "At that moment I knew that everything would either continue exactly like this until her death or that I would break out now, only now, right now at this very moment could be from the circle of abuse, from the great wheel of fire, from the spinning swastika." Then it flares up, the hope of being able to break out of circulation in the intensity of the moment – ​​the pop-aesthetic celebration of the now. With the means of waste perhaps? With this resolution at least, mother and son begin their journey. Coming back to Zurich 48 hours later with memories in my luggage. There is no escape for Kracht's characters, either personally or historically. Instead, book after book, they circle around.

It's the mother tongue

Or is it the language of literature that allows a way out? Because she maintains a direct connection to the fictional of this reality, to madness as well as to dreams? Once it says pointedly: "I had always lived in dreams, in the ghosts of language." Before the narrator continues: "It was always the language itself, the liberation and simultaneous control of the spastic tongue, it was the unique secret that lay in the correct sequence of syllables. And then it was always German. It had always been the German language. It had always been the scorched earth, the suffering of the battered earth itself, the war and the burning old town and the sterile vegetable fields in front of it, it had always been the ghetto cleaned out with the flamethrower."

No new beginning

No, language does not offer a way out. Just another form of circulation that goes far beyond the individual. But only if you master them in such a way that you keep tripping them up like in "Faserland". Or when, as in "Eurotrash", they are forced into ever new circulations through countless repetitions. No, this novel is not a new beginning. He's not a sensation. And no scandal. It forms the logical continuation of Kracht's poetics. It is the brilliant literary memoir circulation of a great and admirably idiosyncratic author. Christian Kracht: "Eurotrash" Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne. 304 pages, 22 euros.