Amina's restaurant
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Amina's restaurant. A modern fairy tale is the third novel by the writer and political and Islamic scholar Michael Lüders and was published in 2006.
The novel deals with the story of a family who immigrated to Bremen from Morocco and opened a restaurant in the Hanseatic city. The excellent oriental food and the storytelling of the restaurant owner exert a previously unknown fascination on the locals, who come to the new location in droves. After several weeks of success, the restaurant's supporters and supporters come into conflict with conservative Muslims who want to disturb the peace. Ultimately, they succeed in destroying Amina's restaurant, but not the spirit that shaped the summer. A subplot also describes the critical family situation of one of the protagonists, whose parents are divorcing because of an affair, as well as the resulting conflicts and their resolution.
content
In the last days of spring, the twenty-five -year-old student Alexander Kirchhoff meets the Moroccan immigrant family Boucetta at the weekly market not far from St. Martini Church in the middle-class Bremen district of Lesum in the Burglesum district . This comes from Marrakech and plans to open an oriental restaurant on the Lesum . Mohammed Boucetta, a former German teacher, has bought the former clubhouse of a yacht club that is being converted. Alexander feels drawn to Jasmina, the Moroccan’s daughter, and for this reason spends most of his free time at Amina , named after Amina Boucetta, Mohammed’s wife. He makes close friends with the family of three and becomes a test eater even before the official opening.
Alexander's mother Eva and his father Volker, who runs the Bremen wholesale market , welcome and share this friendship, but are now going through a marital crisis. This has its origin in Eva's assumption that her husband would hide a relationship with his secretary Teresa Meißner from her. Alexander himself tries to avoid the problems at home.
The initial skepticism of the locals gives way within a few days after the opening of the restaurant, caused by Amina's excellent cooking skills, which awaken happiness in people and make them forget their worries. Mohammed, whom everyone calls Sid Mohammed (Sid as an abbreviation of Sayyid ), begins to tell stories. These are about the son Sid Allawis, whom he describes as the "greatest donkey of all time" and who studies the books of the Africa researcher Gerhard Rohlfs . He admires this and Sid Mohammed traces the life of the young Moroccan in richly decorated stories, with which he draws more people into his spell every day. Within a few weeks, the Amina developed into an intercultural meeting place for the masses and an exchange platform for the most varied of opinions and views. The mild summer nights contribute to the fact that groups gather on the Lesum dike until well after midnight or wander through the front gardens and tell your own stories. The calm, reserved and almost shy Sid Mohammed serves the male guests as a figure of identification, while the women admire Amina for her extravagant, colorful clothes and her cooking skills. In order to convey the latter, Amina soon organized several cooking courses in the restaurant. The regional media become aware of the new culinary attraction in the north of Bremen and begin to report on it.
The Amina works during the summer months international communicating, seems to awaken the kindness, tolerance and serenity of visitors, which is due to food, according to many Amina. Enjoying it loosens the tongue and so, for example, Volker Eva admits his affair during a meal, while his wife reveals her own secrets and, contrary to what was expected, does not react quickly. On the contrary, she befriends Teresa Meißner and separates on friendly terms from Volker.
At the beginning of August, conspicuous Muslims appear among the Amina guests for the first time. You interrupt Sid Mohammed in his remarks, ask questions and criticize the concept of the restaurant. This is largely taken with disapproval by the other visitors. It turns out that they are members of the "Licht und Glaube" association based in the Gröpelingen district , a conservative Islamic association that rejects the cosmopolitanism and tolerance of Amina and Sid Mohammed and would rather see the restaurant not being a place of pilgrimage for people from Bremen would. Sid Mohammed loses the thread of his stories due to the disturbances and these come to a standstill for several days. Jasmina and Eva propose to exclusively offer pork schnitzel for a few days in order to keep away the association members, whose beliefs forbid the consumption of pork. The measure actually shows success - but only until the menu is switched back to the popular oriental dishes. Subsequently, “Light and Faith” followers appear again in front of the Amina , who no longer try to get a place in the restaurant, but insult the guests in front of the same. Jasmina and Alexander decide to intimidate the chairman of the association, Smihi Abu Muslim. They drive to Gröpelingen and threaten him with a true-to-life toy gun, whereupon he claims not to know anything.
Following this action, Sid Mohammed decides to bring his stories to an end. He reveals to the hundreds of listeners that he is the son of Sid Allawis and that he had told his own life story all these weeks, a fact that some had already suspected. The guests of the Amina , knowing that a beautiful summer is slowly coming to an end with the stories, thank Sid Mohammed and Amina with storms of applause lasting several minutes. Only a few days later, Alexander is Sid Mohammed's representative in the Bremen-Nord regulatory office. Karl Möller, the department head for the area of commercial concessions, has announced that Amina will be revoked the restaurant concession due to various violations . Alexander recognizes Möller's weak point: the love of old furniture. He offers to lend him numerous pieces of antique furniture that are stored in the basement of the restaurant and Möller then agrees to postpone the closure for a month.
Only a few days later, Sid Mohammend now sells CDs with his stories, the Amina burns to the ground in one night. Although arson is widely believed, no perpetrators can be identified. Amina and Sid Mohammed have the financial means to rebuild, but decide against it. At the end of September, along the Admiral-Brommy-Weg from the ruins to Knoops Park, a donation-financed banquet will be set up under the motto “Bremen won't let its friends down”. Volker Kirchhoff places Sid Mohammed in charge of the “Food from the Orient” department in the wholesale market and Amina establishes contacts with fashion designers.
In November, Jasmina and Alexander stay at the Boucettas' house in Marrakech. In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of November 24th they read that frozen roasted chickens have been falling down over the Bremen district of Lesum every night for several days. Numerous roofs have been damaged. A crisis team had been set up, headed by Mohammed Boucetta.
Recipes
The appendix to the book contains various oriental recipes that Lüders collected during his travels to the Middle East and the Near East. He recommends cooking them again and states that they are “recipes from Amina's kitchen”. The following are listed in detail:
- Schai Nana (Moroccan mint tea)
- Sweet tomato salad
- Sikouk (a cold soup)
- Nile perch with dried limes
- Couscous with lamb and dried fruit
- Lamb tagine with plums
- Figs with thyme honey
- Turkish honey
History of origin
Lüders began designing the novel around July 2005 with the aim of writing a novel that would transfer his newly gained experience from the Orient to his homeland in Bremen and link the two together. At first he had no clear idea of the book's content. This developed in stages while I was writing. After completing the manuscript , he turned to Arche Verlag , which had already published his first two novels and two of his non-fiction books. They were immediately interested in a publication. This is due, among other things, to the fact that the Hamburg- based publisher sees one of the focal points of its work in literature that describes the region and makes it accessible to a wider audience, which is given by the detailed city and landscape descriptions in the novel.
At the beginning of March 2006, Amina's restaurant finally came onto the market and was presented by the author in several readings. One of them took place in the summer of 2006 in the club house of the yacht club on the Lesum that Lüders had converted in its factory in Amina's restaurant. At this event on the occasion of the “Burglesumer Kulturtage”, the interiors were decorated in an oriental style and the same dishes were served. In the meantime, two bound editions have been published by Arche-Verlag. In 2008 the Rowohlt Verlag printed two more editions in pocket book format.
Style and language
Amina's restaurant is written in an authorial narrative situation and, despite the title as a fairy tale, dispenses with the introductory phrase "Once upon a time ..." , which is typical for this literary genre ; on the contrary, the quick entry into the book is more like the beginning of a short story ( in medias res ).
In contrast to numerous other books that describe an anonymous world, Amina's restaurant has detailed descriptions of places and locations with street names and even house numbers true to the original. Lüders treads this path in order to create a greater identification with his hometown, to bind the reader more emotionally to the book and to give readers from abroad the opportunity to track down the locations on maps. In general, however , Amina's restaurant uses very few stylistic devices. The novel is characterized by a very calm and balanced language that is seldom overstretched and only radiates emotionality in a few situations. The mentioned landscape descriptions, the linguistic decoration of the restaurant and the hard, sharp and dark color drawings of Gröpelingen almost seem like descriptions .
In his book, Lüders plays with targeted comparisons between the protagonists. Sid Mohammed and Amina have had a harmonious relationship for several years, which, it seems, is even supported by the restaurant. Eva and Volker Kirchhoff, on the other hand, have drifted apart and are faced with the emotional ruins of their marriage. Both couples meet in Amina's restaurant, which connects their stories. In these sections, Alexander Kirchhoff acts as a wanderer between the worlds, who experiences marital peace every day in the restaurant and is confronted with his parents' conflicts at home.
A further stylistic subtlety is shown in sentences or sentence fragments that the protagonists drop by chance, which at first glance seem arbitrary and as a single opinion, but can be summarized with similar lines when looking at the entire novel. So mentions Jasmina
- "However, we are dispensable, as history shows."
and thus refers to the immigrants in Germany, who in their eyes are often dispensable, and from whom most people felt threatened. A good three dozen pages later, Volker Kirchhoff expresses himself with the sentence
- "Ultimately, we are all interchangeable."
about the working conditions in the modern capitalized world. Both sentences apply to different topics, but ultimately have a similar message.
The author worked in Amina's restaurant in irregular succession with paradoxes , mostly in answers, so that these initially confuse rather than enlighten. For example, when asked by a skeptic, Sid Mohammed replies whether an enterprising entrepreneur in Morocco would come up with the idea of building ships in the desert:
- "Certainly not [...] But anyone who builds ships in the desert has a dream that is stronger than the sea."
and Amina teaches the women one of her cooking classes:
- “Imagine a fish that is just dead bones and thinks its way back until it swims freely and happily in the sea again. When you understand this, the simplest meal becomes a feast ”.
In this novel, Lüders plays with the mutual communication between two people and their hurdles. For example, he often lets Alexander and Jasmina talk past each other and not deal with each other. On the contrary, one of the interlocutors often takes up set pieces that were discussed long before in the corresponding dialogue. At the end of these conversations, however, both people always find each other again and talk about the topic on the same level. This effect is particularly evident in the following lines:
- “That is their calling. Helping people find themselves. To listen to the inner voice. ”“ Tragedies may arise. ”“ We may be dead tomorrow. ”“ You are wrong. I can love. ”“ I like your closeness, Alexander, also your way. But for you I am a dream, an exotic dream, am I not? But that's not enough for me. "[...]" Nothing happens to you if you eat the things your mother cooked. "" I like to eat them, but I'm like you. "" Without a heart ? ”Jasmina smiled.
Likewise in this example:
- "I don't know what to do," she said. “I don't know what I actually want. That's not a good prerequisite for being happy. Do you understand what I mean? ”“ The cinnamon is all. We have to get new ones. ”[...] Jasmia looked at him. "Well. I take care of the cinnamon. We also need cardamom. "
Interpretation and autobiographical reference
"You have a home," said Jasmina. “You know who you are.” “Not really.” “Then you're an idiot. You have all the privileges in the world. ”“ That too is no guarantee of finding happiness. ”
The author himself rejects too intensive an interpretation of his work. Contrary to reviews to the contrary, he did not want to make a plea for successful integration, intercultural friendship or tolerance, but was glad that this was received. Amina's restaurant should not be understood as a textbook or an ideal worth striving for, but merely as a wish for such a restaurant in which, if it existed, he himself would be a permanent guest, according to his own statement. In his own eyes, the author wanted to create a literary place of encounter and harmony in the midst of a still inharmonious world. The effect he hopes for Amina's restaurant is most evident in the following lines:
- The great mystery of that remarkable summer in Lesum, in Alexander's eyes, was that to be different was not considered offensive. For some precious and unique months, the unknown and foreign was not perceived as a threat, but rather as a lucky chance to find your own way and actually go.
When asked whether the concept and spirit of Amina's restaurant could be extended to the whole of society, Lüders assessed wait and see.
However, the distinct autobiographical references of the novel can be determined with greater certainty. Michael Lüders grew up in the Burglesum district and, as an adolescent, often explored the familiar surroundings. It is similar in the book Alexander Kirchhoff on his lonely walks, which the narrator reveals in different places. For example, the protagonist answers the question whether he knows Bördestrasse in the Lesum district:
- "Like the back of my hand."
The following section can also be transferred directly to Lüders, who felt similar.
- From Amina's restaurant the Admiral-Brommy-Weg led to Knoops Park, through the foothills of the villa gardens, directly along the water. Alexander knew every tree and every bend on this path, he would not have got lost in the deepest darkness, the area was so familiar to him. Even as a teenager he had believed that a world full of wonder and adventure began here.
In addition, in his youth, Lüders was fascinated by Gerhard Rohlfs , who comes from Vegesack and is therefore omnipresent there , whose pioneering spirit and urge to research. He wanted to incorporate this admiration into his work and for this reason wove the corresponding subplot into it. Some reviewers suspected that Lüders had revived his own young ego with Alexander Kirchhoff, which was not expressly denied by him. Referring to the sentence
- "The GDR, which I created for my mother, became more and more a GDR as I would have wished it to be."
the Daniel Brühl published in his role as Alexander Kerner in the 2003 feature film Good Bye, Lenin! said, Lüders agreed that through the novel he had created a society and a district of Lesum that he would have dreamed of in his own childhood.
The fake-looking, dramatic conclusion of the novel after a previously relatively calm plot caused some irritation among the reviewers and the readership. Lüders stated that he had to incorporate the fire disaster in order not to slide into the greasy condition at the end. In addition, the chosen conclusion is a logical consequence of the previous events and, coupled with the failure to clarify the cause of the fire, is quite realistic. With the final roast chicken damage, he would have wanted the readers to pay attention one last time, so as not to silently release them from the novel, but rather to give them the opportunity to think about the sentences. Lüders relied on a true incident.
The almond tree
The author introduces the almond tree as a central motif . His story is told in fairy tale form by Jasmina. The young tree once accidentally sown itself on a north German dike and with a strong will defied the unusual climatic capers. The following year it prevented the dike from breaking during a storm surge with its network of roots and the locals enjoyed the fruits that the tree bore. Soon, however, fresh almond trees sprouted in the surrounding fields, which made agriculture difficult, something the farmers were not happy about. They felt compelled to fell the tree at night. Although they could now cultivate their fields again, the subsequent storm surge broke through the defenseless dike and flooded the land. The people had to laboriously rebuild their houses and felt a sting in their hearts every time they thought of the tree.
Michael Lüders does not leave the reader with his own interpretation of this fairy tale in the fairy tale, but provides the interpretation afterwards. In the eyes of Sid Mohammed, the almonds symbolize himself and Amina. They thus represent the immigrants who encounter a culture that is foreign to them and who are initially highly valued by everyone. In this context, Jasmina expresses the quote previously mentioned in the section "Style and language" regarding dispensability and goes on to say that most people are afraid of strange trees and that life apart from that is not a fairy tale.
reception
Amina's restaurant was largely positively discussed and praised by national and international reviewers . For example, Beatrice Eichmann-Leutenegger dealt with the work on June 27, 2006 in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and found it “very delightful” . The journalist underlined the fairy-tale traits of the story and specifically named the clear separation between good and evil, the exaggerated drawing of the characters and the happy ending. She also praised the realistic reference to the present ( “rough winds of reality” ) and the fine pinch of irony that the author uses. Eichmann-Leutenegger was delighted with the recipes in the appendix, as they would turn the book into a “treasure trove of culinary ideas” .
The Kölnische Rundschau found:
- "The novel is a wonderful example of the power of the imagination and an impressive plea for tolerance."
and the Weser courier dared to guess:
- " Rafik Schami , who showered Lüders' novel The Treason with praise, will enjoy Amina's restaurant ."
During the culture period on 3sat , Lüder's work was judged as an “oriental fairy tale of the present” and subsequently as “a story of love and happiness that builds bridges between cultures” . On May 7, 2006, the ZDF published a review on its homepage under the heading “Sundays - tv for life” and found that Amina's restaurant was “a book like a thousand and one nights” that “stimulates all the senses” . At around the same time, the book was also discussed on NDR, where the result was:
- “We put the book down with a smile. And with the firm intention of enjoying our life more intensely in the future: be it sometimes spicy like the red harissa sauce or bitter like the peel of dried limes. "
The trade journal Buchmarkt made the claim:
- "Anyone who liked the film Chocolat will love Amina's restaurant ."
Sonja Kolb reviewed the book on March 28, 2006 in the Rheinische Post and came to the conclusion that the story that Lüders presented was actually a fairy tale. It seemed unlikely, however, that such a flashy Arab couple as Sid Mohammed and his wife Amina would open an Arab restaurant in Northern Europe and immediately have such a success. Kolb thinks that the reader should, however, generously overlook this and enjoy the story, and points out that the author draws wonderful people.
Book editions
-
Amina's restaurant. A modern fairy tale . Arche Verlag , Zurich 2006, ISBN 3-7160-2351-5
- Paperback edition: Rowohlt Verlag , Reinbek 2008, ISBN 978-3-499-24661-6
Individual evidence
- ↑ Lüders (2006), page 196
- ↑ Explanation of the publisher on its website Archived copy ( Memento of the original from January 23, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , found on November 5, 2008
- ↑ a b Lüders (2006), page 63
- ↑ Lüders (2006), page 113
- ↑ Lüders (2006), page 32
- ↑ Lüders (2006), page 78
- ↑ Lüders (2006), page 37
- ↑ Lüders (2006), pp. 51–52.
- ↑ a b c Michael Lüders' personal conversation with the user: Florean Fortescue on November 3, 2008
- ↑ Lüders (2006), page 119
- ↑ Lüders (2006), page 95
- ↑ Lüders (2006), page 67
- ↑ http://www.perlentaucher.de/buch/24564.html
- ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from October 3, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Weser-Kurier, March 25, 2006, page 12: "Summer happiness on the Lesum"
- ↑ http://sonntags.zdf.de/ZDFde/inhalt/28/0,1872,3930780,00.html?dr=1
- ↑ http://www.rowohlt.de/buch/Michael_Lueders_Aminas_Restaurant.21102008.2372474.html
- ↑ http://www.rp-online.de/public/article/kultur/mehr_kultur/324322/Michael-Lueders-Aminas-Restaurant.html ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically defective marked. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
