Judging from the recent crop of novels, growing up in the former East Germany (GDR) was anything but idyllic. Last year Peter Wawerzinek wrote about being abandoned by his mother at the age of two in his award-winning Rabenliebe. The anonymous girl at the center of Angelika Klüssendorf's powerful new novel Das Mädchen ("The Girl") isn't nearly so lucky as Wawerzinek. Her mother sticks around to beat her and her younger brother, when she's not off on a drinking and sex binge. Welcome to the Worker- and Peasant-State, where eveyone marches lockstep to a glorious socialist future – except for the throw-away children living in the shadows.
We first encounter the Girl as she throws excrement from her tenement window on the passer-by's below. She and her brother have been locked inside for days without food as her mother is out on one of her sojourns. But starving inside a stifling apartment is a picnic compared to having the mother around. The beatings begin almost as soon as she returns, Klüssendorf describes the horror in a factual, laconic style, The third person narrator hews closely to the perspective of the Girl but eschews all sentimentality. The Girl suffers the blows silently, but then turns around and torments her helpless younger brother mercilessly. The cycle of violence is complete, or, rather, nearly complete. For what is missing is the father. The father returns- temoporarily – and the beatings take on a new quality:
Er benutzt seine Hände beim Schlagen, anders als ihre Mutter, die den Gürtel bevorzugt, und das kommt ihr irgendwie gerechter vor.
(He uses his hands to hit, not like her mother, who prefers the belt, and this somehow seems more just to her.)
The Girl comes to realize that the world is an absurd, violent place. And the violence is completely arbitrary; there is no cause and effect, and her behavior has no bearing on the outcome:
Es gibt keine erkennbaren Gesetze für ihr Zusammenleben, keine gültige Gerechtigkeit; ein Vorfall, der ihr morgens eine Tracht Prügel einbringt, kann abends nur ein müdes Lächeln bei ihm hervorrufen.
(There are no discernible laws for their coexistence, no valid justice. An incident that might earn her a spanking in the morning can bring a weary smile to his face in the evening.)
What prevents Das Mädchen from becoming just a morbid sociological study of child abuse in the GDR is Klüssendorf's precision in creating her central figure; the narrative perspective provides just the proper amount of distance. The reader admires the Girl for her will to survive but at the same time recognizes her cruelty.
Language proves to be the Girl's best means for survival. While locked in the cellar for hours on end as punishment she discovers books: The Count of Monte Cristo, and Brehm's Life of Animals. She she can change her bleak world through metaphor: her broken brother is a tadpole, her mother an electric eel. And she can see herself in a new light:
Sie kommt sich wie eine Stabheuschrecke vor oder ein Stelzvogel; lange schlaksige Gliedmaßen, zwei Brustwarzen, der Bauch leicht geschwollen und ein nackter Hamster zwischen den Beinen.
(She sees herself as a stick insect or a wader: long, spindly legs, two nipples, a slightly swollen belly and a naked hamster between her legs.)
The Girl – in fits and starts – develops a voice. Whatever the world has in store for her – and there is plenty of cruelty and disappointment to follow – we know she will make it. Nothing will silence her.
Angelika Klüssendorf''s Das Mädchen was selected as a finalist for the 2011 Deutscher Buchpreis (German Book Prize).
