The mussel meal

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Das Muschelessen (1990) is a short story by Birgit Vanderbeke who was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1990.

content

The setting for the story is an evening in which mother, daughter and son wait with dinner for the arrival of the father, who is due to return from a business trip at 6 p.m. and then wants to celebrate his promotion with a bottle of wine and his favorite food: mussels that remind him of his honeymoon and “certain personalities”, namely the belated honeymoon from the GDR to his brother-in-law in the west, who lived by the sea and “had cooked a mussel meal for them, which they did not know because it was, of course, in the east there were no mussels ”.

When the father has not yet turned up at 6:03 p.m., the family gets nervous, because the head of the family usually comes home on time. One talks, not only begins to criticize the clams that family members find disgusting, but also the head of the family himself; hesitantly at first, then more and more bluntly, and it soon turns out that the two children would find it better if their father stayed away forever. The construct of a “real family”, which was artificially maintained at the father's request, has only functioned superficially for a long time. When he was at home, everyone had to keep strict order, the daily routine was strictly regulated and everything had to follow him exclusively.

Since the father is still a long time coming, you bravely open your wine and become visibly relaxed. As the evening progresses, the mother gradually frees herself from the pressure of her husband and also begins to complain about his behavior. The family gives up their submissive submission step by step, gets more and more excited, makes fun of the patriarch and decides to rebel more decisively against him in the future. The reactions become more and more indignant, the stories that are told about the brutality of the father are more and more monstrous.

Shortly before 10 p.m. the mussels are still untouched in the bowl, now cold and even more nauseating. Suddenly the phone rings, but nobody dares to pick up the receiver. Only after the twentieth ring does the mother get up slowly and wants to go over to the phone in the next room, but then stops in the door frame, turns around, takes the bowl with the clams, dumps it in the garbage can and turns to the son: “Would you you please carry down the garbage? "

shape

The first-person narrator of the story is the 18-year-old daughter. Without stopping, that is, literally without a single paragraph and almost "without periods and commas", the sentences gush out of her apparently unfiltered, repeat themselves, make the almost childlike narrative tone more and more transparent and the truths about father and mother hidden underneath and younger brother shine through. They pull the reader under their spell and develop an irresistible pull, which (especially through the frequent use of indirect speech) allows the martyrdom of the family to be felt up close. Almost imperceptibly, the endless stream of words whirls up new cases of fanaticism and performance terror, more and more examples of violent oppression, revealing and overcoming the long repressed fear of those affected in the same breath.

The father

The focus of the family is the father, a ruthless upstart who, having grown up as an illegitimate child and in poor circumstances, is secretly ashamed of his origins and therefore wants to break away from his past and push through his ambitious ideas by all means. His views of a happy family mean in practice that only he can fulfill his personal wishes and that the other family members must hold back and submit.

The father's image of a “real family” is shaped by traditional role-based thinking. The mother should run the household and "make herself pretty" for the man, the son should one day emulate his father and become a scientist, the daughter should rather embark on an artistic career. However, to the chagrin of their father, the children did not get on with his ideas. The father regards the son as "too soft" and cowardly, the daughter as "too cold", too ugly and callous.

The mother, a teacher who likes to console herself with Schubert songs on the piano, has been a product of the wishes of others all her life. She was denied her professional goal of becoming a musician - one day she found her violin smashed by her father - and now her father treats her more or less like cheap labor. When she once had to go to the hospital because of a severe kidney infection, her father "took her home after barely a week" to take care of the household again.

In order to keep the father happy, each family member regularly reports to him the offenses of the others, which he punishes with physical violence whenever one does not follow his instructions or he feels otherwise disturbed, the brutality of which escalates into the inhuman: he allegedly has already "thrown her daughter against the wall" as a toddler because of her nocturnal "roar" and would later like to hit this "devilish child", this "Satan roast", with the flat of his hand in the face and "with her." then step on the head on the floor with the wooden slipper.

interpretation

The story, which takes place at the time of the beginning of the collapse of the GDR, can be understood not only as a social and psychological study of a German post-war family, but also as a political parable of that time.

The control by the father and the low-keying in the family are definitely reminiscent of the spying and intimidation attempts of the Stasi , under which free coexistence was practically impossible. The discontent that broke out in the course of the story can be interpreted as a sign of the growing opposition in the GDR, which ultimately led to the revolution of 1989. Throwing the mussels "in the trash" at the end symbolizes the detachment from the bond with the father and thus the turning away from the old rulers. The open conclusion corresponds to the resulting unclear political conditions in the former GDR.

Although the author expressly emphasizes that any resemblance to living people is unintentional, there are many parallels to the biography of Birgit Vanderbeke, whose parents fled with her in 1961 before the construction of the Berlin Wall from the GDR to the Federal Republic and there with the Federal Republic's economic miracle faced. Its opportunism, superficiality and narrow-mindedness are at least as much at the center of the criticism of eating mussels as the reckoning with the hypocrisy of the GDR regime.

literature

The story has meanwhile become school reading:

  • Gerhard C. Krischker, Ansgar Leonis (ed.): "Birgit Vanderbeke: Eating mussels" [text and commentary]. In: Buchner's modern school library . Buchner, Bamberg 2002, ISBN 3-7661-4360-3 .
  • Brigitte Noll: LiteraNova. Lesson models with templates: “Birgit Vanderbeke: Eating mussels” . Cornelsen, Berlin 2004, ISBN 978-3-464-61638-3 .
  • Bertold Heizmann (Ed.): Interpretation aid German: "Birgit Vanderbeke: The mussel eating" . Stark, Freising 2010, ISBN 978-3-8944-9691-3 .