learn to lie
To learn to lie is a novel by the Bochum-based writer Frank Goosen from 2000, which describes youth and growing up in West Germany in the 1980s and 1990s. The novel was made into a film in 2003 .
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The novel tells the story of Helmut, who began his political commitment as a high school student in 1982 - not out of pure conviction, but to impress the student representative Britta. The historical background ( NATO double decision , Contras and Sandinista in Nicaragua , Third World Movement ) gives both of them many opportunities to work together, but only appears in the novel as a background plot. The music of those days also plays a role, as Helmut is passionate about collecting records and later CDs. In numerous places, songs, performers and quotes from song texts from this time are mentioned and integrated into the plot. This is one of the reasons why learning to lie is seen as a zeitgeist novel. Helmut and Britta get closer on the study trip to Berlin . A few months later, on Christmas Eve, Helmut had his first sexual experiences with Britta, the two of them are lovers. When Britta moves to America for a year abroad in a "small town in Illinois ", Helmut remains distraught. Her contact by letter is quickly broken off because she has a new American friend. After that year Britta moves to her birth father in Munich and does not return to Helmut.
Helmut graduated from high school and then began studying history and politics after retiring from military service . Even if the city and university are never explicitly mentioned, it is easy to see from the descriptions that it is Bochum - Goosen's hometown - and the Ruhr University Bochum . The Raskolnikow is, as Goosen said at a reading, the Oblomow near Bochum's main train station.
Helmut starts some relationships, the only long-term relationship being the one with his former classmate Gisela, who is studying medicine at the same university . After a while, however, he jeopardizes this relationship because she has a very conventional life plan that does not correspond to Helmut, so that at the same time he begins a relationship with Barbara, one of her roommates. He has never forgotten Britta.
Helmut begins one relationship after the other, with a 27-year-old sports journalist, an 18-year-old lecturer at his university and a few other women. Meanwhile, he is always looking for traces of his first love. He experienced the fall of the wall in bed.
On the day the Wall came down, his school friend Mücke called him - he saw Britta in Berlin , and after some searching, Helmut found his childhood sweetheart. However, it has changed a lot. Mücke also reveals to him that Britta had several relationships and that he was by no means the only one at school who had something with Britta. The disturbed Helmut continues to wander around in the 90s, while his parents are divorcing.
Finally, in 1995, at the age of 33, he found Tina, a woman he wanted to stay with. She wants a child from him, which prompts him to visit his ex-girlfriends and want to see Britta again.
Striving for the ideal image of Britta, Helmut cannot stay with a woman, so to speak “stay where”. He lives his life with different women whom he constantly compares to Britta and treats all of them so badly at one point that they leave him. So he evades the responsibility of taking his life into his own hands, choosing a partner and sticking to her. He also left his last steadfast friend Tina for the time being after she had expressed the wish for a child together in order to look for answers in a renewed journey through his past.