Higher Ground by Anke Stelling (ap literature book list .txt) 📕

Marianne was nowhere to be seen. Luckily, Brigitte was unhurt, but Marianne wasn’t let off the hook — quite the opposite. Her punishment would remind her how lucky she was and how little she had earned it.

‘Just – count – your – lucky – stars,’ groaned her father in time with his thrashes, ‘that – nothing – worse – happened!’

With her arms covering her head, Marianne could feel just how lucky she was.

‘Put your arms down!’ yelled her father, and in the end, he thrashed her bottom.

Marianne couldn’t put her arms down. She instinctively protected her head. The paranoid child. As if her father would have aimed at her head. What did she take him for?

I hate this father. I hate him, but I don’t recognise him. Is he supposed to be my grandfather? That toothless old man who Grandma cut sandwiches into small pieces for? No, it can’t be him; he was completely harmless.

To recognise him, I’ll have to look at myself — the person who grabs you by the arm, Bea, who takes Jack’s tablet away, shoves Kieran onto the bed, and forces Lynn to look her in the eye. Always for your own good, so that you realise how lucky you are.

This burning desire for it to be someone else.

For it to be the others instead; preferably the evil father in the 1950s, or even better, in the 1930s — in any case, long ago, lost in the mists of time, when people still wore galoshes and thrashed their children with clothes hangers.

It’s nicer to tell stories about these people, isn’t that right, Ingmar? That’s what you wanted to imply when you confessed to being a book lover, somebody who reads real literature — whereas borderline Resi tried to remove the line between what she writes and what Goethe wrote, between her and her violent grandfather, between a modern man like Ingmar who is always concerned with everybody’s wellbeing, and, let’s say, Gauleiter Franz.

Idea for a real novel: the main character is Gauleiter Franz. A giant of a man, bull-necked, who hobbled and had a cleft lip. Never had much, was always poor, grew up in cramped conditions with eight brothers and sisters, and was the butt of his classmates’ jokes, but still worked his way up and made a career for himself. In the Party, in fact, at which point this simple locksmith from Rhön-Grabfeld became Gauleiter of Unterfranken.

First, it takes hard work and months of research to understand this man’s background and portray him credibly and conscientiously. The details are important; they make the reader able to see this monster as a man.

Shortly after the Nazis seize power, at the wedding of a Party member, Franz gets to know a woman who has been ‘left on the shelf’ — that’s what they used to call unmarried women over the age of twenty-five back then — and a year later, they move into an Aryanised flat in Aschaffenburg. It’s nice there. Fully furnished, with polished cabinet fronts.

Franz’s wife becomes pregnant, she bears him a son, Adi, and then a daughter. A proper family at last! The family grows proudly and steadily like the Third Reich, but it also perishes with the Reich — because something built on such wrongdoing cannot last.

Franz’s habit of striking the same tone at the dinner table as in the Party office is the first thing to make the attentive reader sit up and take notice. His wife doesn’t reply; she simply sends the children out into the street. The mood worsens with every battle lost; Franz has trouble standing his ground against the scathing gossip of the neighbours, who by now all tune into the enemy broadcasts—

When Franz is called up to the Volkssturm despite his gammy leg, even the inattentive reader knows that things are going to get tricky for Franz’s children—

At least there should be order at home! But then young Adi refuses to go for a Sunday walk.

Real literature has staff. People who sacrifice themselves for the story — and in doing so, spare you from having to tell your own story.

They’re like housekeepers or handymen; and here I am, trying to do everything myself yet again. Not just wanting to be the main character in my life but also the centre of my thoughts.

You can get used to staff: while the nouveau riche still tidy up before their cleaners come, and are embarrassed in front of their au pairs, the aristocracy regard butlers as an extension of themselves.

Perhaps that’s the difference?

On one side, there’s the freedom not to need art. Because it doesn’t offer anything to aspire to, achieve, or understand. At most, perhaps, it’s after-work entertainment, something to enjoy over a glass of wine—

On the other side, there’s hard work, collecting, sifting through ideas, weighing things up, observing: to understand, grow, and survive. And to prevent winter laying you low with all the other little mice—

I am naïve. Yes, of course I am.

I wasn’t aware of this divide. Wanted to serve without being summoned. Why summoned, I thought, when it’s me I serve? Who, if not us? Why say am I ‘serving myself’? I’m serving everybody!

‘Hello Ulf, it’s Resi.’

Silence.

‘Hey, I’m calling because I wanted to ask you what’s going on.’

More silence.

‘Back then, the article … To be honest, I still don’t understand. What was so bad about it?’

‘You mocked us. The façade. You said it looked delicious, like vanilla ice cream.’

‘Don’t you understand what I was trying to do?’

‘Yes, I do. Very well. I understood it as an attack. I worked on that compromise for weeks, and you know how hard it is with ten people who have a stake — and you know them all, and why it turned out that way.’

I don’t say anything.

‘You used that against us. To make us look foolish.’

‘This is it, boys, this is war.’

‘What?’

‘It’s Nena. “99 Red Balloons.” You know!’

‘Listen, there’s no point. Why are you calling me anyway?’

‘Because I think it’s weird that we don’t speak the same