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

a leftie — in other words, pro-justice, pro-respect, and pro-everybody-being-equal — and I think the world still has a long way to go. But if everybody is equal, that doesn’t settle the question of who is right and who gets to decide. Quite the opposite, in fact. People mistrust claims to power, so much so that they sometimes prefer doing nothing than being suspected of claiming power. Lefties are terrified of blame, precisely because they are so pro-justice and pro-respect. But the opposite of power is powerlessness, and the opposite of having your say is letting others have it.

‘You abuse words,’ says Friederike. ‘You use them to wipe the floor with people.’

Is she right?

At parents’ evenings, I do see my words as a weapon. It’s calming to picture myself later describing how insane it all was, and to imagine shaking up the world with my report.

But that’s ridiculous: that’s not how it works.

Exactly the same thing will happen at the next parents’ evening; or, as Erich Kästner put it: ‘You can’t prevent the catastrophe with a typewriter.’

I’m just holding myself together. I write for my sake, no one else’s, or at any rate not for Friederike, who thinks my writing is mired in clichés. Why do the journalist dads have to be greying at the temples, for God’s sake?

And if I go even further and say that the people in the group who said nothing all evening were the young women in yoga pants and tailored fleeces and Birkenstocks made of vegan leather, then, Bea, you’ll think it’s beside the point. But these are important indicators of reality and have to be included in a text, even if they make it unbearable; even if it pinches, and bites, and bursts with clichés.

I would have preferred things to have turned out quite differently.

I could start writing sci-fi. Fantasy.

As I was going up the stair

I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today

I wish, I wish he’d stay away.

I can’t do it, Bea. No matter what I do, it always comes down to the same thing. I like rhymes — and it’s comforting when a word reminds me of my childhood.

Bähmullig, for example. Do you know what a Bähmull is? A tetchy — or just pretty annoying — fourteen-year-old, say, but possibly even forty-year-old, who turns up her nose at everything. A perfectionist who quickly gets in a huff. In a word, a fusspot.

Maybe it’s my vanity that makes me want to preserve this word in literature. Somebody else could do it; after all, there are enough books, millions of stories, so why does it have to be mine? But if you start thinking like this, you could start asking: What’s the use of me? There are enough women. The world is overpopulated, on the verge of collapse.

‘You don’t have to write,’ Friederike said. ‘Please don’t act like it was anything but your own, selfish decision.’

She had recognised herself, and she didn’t like what she saw. No one wants to be a fusspot.

‘Don’t be like that,’ Ulf said to me in the same café where I had sat with Renate, as well as Friederike, Ulf, and Ellen. I met them one after the other and had to explain the reasons for what I’d done. Ulf just wanted to be a go-between, he said, because he hadn’t been as deeply affected as the others.

‘Affected by what?’

‘You know exactly what.’

I said nothing.

‘Imagine somebody wrote about you.’

‘Okay.’

‘How would you like it?’

‘I wouldn’t have to like it.’

‘You’ve exposed people’s private lives!’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It doesn’t seem that way to me. It seems like you’d do it again at the drop of a hat.’

‘Yes, I would. Because I think it’s necessary.’

‘Hurting others is necessary?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’

‘And then you’re surprised when they stop talking to you?’

‘Yes. I’m surprised that they don’t understand. I was just using them as examples. But it was about the bigger picture.’

‘About you.’

‘Of course it was about me! I’m the one condemned to silence!’

‘That’s what I was worried about.’

‘What?’

‘That you’d make yourself out to be the victim.’

Ulf, my old friend. Not as deeply affected, but at his wits’ end all the same.

Speaking of wits. Ulf was top of the class, even did Latin. He studied it as a hobby when he was still at school. Always make sure you pick the A-class boys, Bea, forget the B class! My parents thought that only applied to Benzes.

Ulf believes in good. I’ll have to make a show of understanding or else there’ll never be peace.

Peace comes when people agree on a story, on who plays which role and what the script is. Things can’t settle down while everybody is fighting for the role of victim. As long as I decide who’s who.

So, there’s Friederike. The fusspot. The princess whose whims everybody tries to satisfy. She can’t help herself. It’s her role to be the fusspot, and it always takes two: one (usually a woman) to say no to everything and another (usually a man) to keep making new suggestions and do everything right. Fusspots and do-righters belong together like peas in a pod. You could almost write a rhyme about them.

And then there’s Ulf, my go-between, with whom I went to primary school and who was my first proper boyfriend. Back then, at Gymnasium, our university-track secondary school.

That’s where we met Friederike, who nowadays says I should have thought beforehand whether I could afford to have children. ‘Everybody knows that,’ she said when I complained how expensive school excursions were.

Friederike has two children, Silas and Sophie, with Ingmar, the doctor she met at Christian’s wedding — the same Christian who also went to Gymnasium with Ulf, Friederike, and me.

Vera didn’t. She changed to a private school after fourth grade.

Vera went to primary school with Ulf and me, and then joined the same tennis club as Friederike and Christian.

Vera and Frank also have two children, Willi and Leon.

Ulf doesn’t have any children: he has Carolina and his architectural firm.

Christian and Ellen have three children: Charlotte, Mathilda,