Neukölln Literature | "Born in the Long Summer": Scene destroyed

"I'm sitting in the Laidak, drinking an espresso. The sky is gray. I'm wearing a black polo shirt, as always, and my hair is neatly parted on the side. I'm agitated. As I was walking down Sonnenallee earlier, a group of boys insulted me. They said I looked like a faggot. I clutched my cloth bag tightly to me and quickly ran to the Laidak."

Thus begins Jens Winter's debut novel "Born in the Long Summer," published at the beginning of June by Berlin's XS publishing house. The parallels to Christian Kracht 's "Faserland" (1995) are striking. Barbour jackets, S-Class, and P1—that was the code of the German upper class back then. In contrast, Winter sends us into the Berlin cliché hell of the middle class. This includes anyone who can small talk about the New Marx Readings and buys their notebooks from Modulor. As in the literary source material, the narrator stumbles, Simplicissimus-style, not through half of West Germany, but through a trendy Berlin. From situation to situation, he encounters old acquaintances, who quickly disappear from view again.

So it goes from the trendy bar to the afternoon shared apartment party to the lecture at the Brecht House, finally taking the train to Freiburg. In the escape from the milieu, no stereotype is left out. People drink vodka and mate, never Aperol Spritz. Islamist beards prompt long ruminations. Background noise for ever-present lifestyle attitudes, "brand fetishism" as they called it back then. Relevant personnel appear: In Kracht's film, it's trend researcher Matthias Horx on the ICE; in Winter's film, Ines Schwedtner gets to agitate the conductor for the next strike.

Above all, Winter steals the typical "Faserland" sound: short, clear, first-person sentences, almost primitive descriptive prose. The tone is an incredible mixture of naivety, irony, and cynicism, exposing both the outside world and the inside to ridicule. Kracht was celebrated and criticized for this. In 1995, this was exciting and radical, because, at least in this country, it was new. Three decades later, Jens Winter is now writing the anti-German "Faserland"—is that possible? "Faserland" was already the anti-German "Faserland." In the relevant circles, the book enjoys cult status; satiated trade unionists were satirized in it, as were left-wing green taxi drivers. This culminated in the rumor that Kracht himself was a subscriber to the magazine "Bahamas."

The anti-German tabloid plays no role in "Born in the Long Summer"; this milieu is less dogged, the approach is pop and culturally open. Diedrich Diederichsen instead of Justus Wertmüller . The paradigmatic novel for this sect was already written by Finn Job ("Afterwards") in 2022. It depicts excessive drug use as if it weren't already socially acceptable keyhole peeping. Add to that the no-longer-so-niche complaint about the dire conditions in North Neukölln. Winter is right to mock this in the very first sentences. Job cultivates identity and therefore writes tendentious literature. Some may get excited by it, others may foam with rage. So-called solidarity with Israel has now become fashionable even among the German middle class, but no one's head is any brighter afterward.

Let's add another post-Krachtian reference work. In Leif Randt's "Allegro Pastell," there is also a passage set in "Laidak." Randt, a complete outsider, cites a few lines about the "split of the Anti-Germans" from Wikipedia. His method consists of a narrative that is as non-judgmental as possible. Everything is presented; nothing is allowed to have consequences. With the absurd result that some wanted to read into "Allegro Pastell" the sharpest criticism of the current inability to resolve conflict, whose perpetrators, however, saw their frivolous attitudes confirmed and celebrated. Eating Bifi and saying "I love you." This is supposed to be hyperirony, as Randt himself calls it – beyond any political idiot wisdom; at the price of complete arbitrariness.

Winter's text now sits exactly in the middle of these Kracht-Randt poles. The stylistic copying leads out of the dilemma; it neither simply duplicates political judgments nor does the subtext degenerate into an anything-goes attitude. Everything hinges on the sound: Anyone who only wants to recognize arrogance here overlooks the fact that the protagonist himself is a poor wretch. This self is helplessly trapped in the nonsensical logic of a movement that has regressed to the "scene." Where real politics has long since ceased to matter, all that remains are stubborn opinions and predictable reflexes. One can only empathize with it negatively. Essentially, every sentence says, without being able to say it: Everything is wrong! And I, the complete idiot, am right in the middle of it. Ideological critique, for once applied to one's own ticket-based thinking.

Thus, the caricature of one's own milieu is consistently refracted and actually self-ironic. But not entirely. Former best friend Michel, just returned from the USA, brings with him, along with his new, annoying girlfriend Attention, a torrent of postmodern theory. Overly obvious woke satire that persists despite meta-ironicization. So it tips back and forth. Are "woke" and "anti-German" just two different masks of the same misery? Fundamentally, it remains unclear "whether he's serious or feigning," as Winter himself, somewhat too nerdily, woven in as a poetic clue. Potentially, adepts could read the book for self-congratulation, just as, conversely, those hungry for experience could see it as an approach to disidentification.

So the novel works, with limitations. There's the author's self-misconception that this is contemporary literature. The political shocks of the Corona years, along with the wars that followed, have finally swept away the remnants of left-wing anti-Germanism as a phenomenon of late West German decadence. It's about the past, as the title suggests. It refers to Phillip Felsch's "The Long Summer of Theory," but above all to a catchphrase from the series "Game of Thrones": Winter is not coming but already there. Realism isn't Winter's thing, but it would have contributed to greater internal consistency to dispense with all post-2020 references. It remains to be explained, for example, why the "Bajszel" wasn't chosen as the cozy trendy pub, which has long since replaced the "Laidak" in this respect.

However well-placed Winter's blows may otherwise be, only those in the know can truly hit home. The symbolic play on the surface will rightly raise the blood pressure of outsiders. The narrative indecision is also the novel's greatest weakness. For what leads out of the scene's swamp? That necessarily has to remain open. The suspicion will arise that the ambivalence merely represents the desperate extension of pseudo-politics into literature. The last sentence could be interpreted as implying that this self-referentiality is transcended: "His torso was still glowing," he quotes Rilke and, via the bandwagon, issues the great slogan of art: You must change your life. Experience teaches how deaf many anti-Germans are to this. After "Faserland," Christian Kracht never wrote pop literature again.

Jens Winter: Born in the Long Summer. XS-Verlag, 140 pp., hardcover, €22.