Machandel (novel)
Machandel is a novel by the author Regina Scheer that was published in 2014 . The name Machandel denotes both the fictional village Machandel in Mecklenburg , in which a large part of the plot of the novel takes place; but he also consciously refers to the Low German name of the juniper . The work is dedicated to the author Roger Nastoll , who died in 1990 . For this novel, the author received the Mara Cassens Prize of the Literaturhaus Hamburg in 2014 and the Ver.di Literature Prize Berlin-Brandenburg in 2017 .
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In the summer of 1985 Clara traveled with her husband Michael and her brother Jan from East Berlin to the village of Machandel in Mecklenburg. This is her first visit to the place where her parents Johanna and Hans Langner first met in 1945 and where Jan was born a year later. For Jan it is also a farewell to the place of his childhood, as he will leave the GDR shortly afterwards .
During this visit, Clara comes across an uninhabited, run-down cottage , which she and her husband are gradually renovating and using as a summer house. Clara is working there on her dissertation on a linguistic topic; At the center of her work is the fairy tale of the machandel boom and its variants in different languages and cultures. In the course of the novel, Clara herself often refers to the "song of the bird" (" My mother who slaughters me ...") from the fairy tale of the machandel boom: the image of collecting bones as a condition for remembering and resurrecting the dead brother. The image returns in various forms and modifications: for example in the letters that Jan wrote to his sister and friends in the GDR after his departure, but which had been intercepted by the MfS and reassembled from scraps of paper after the fall of the Wall; or in an attempt to recreate figures of the Pergamon Altar from thousands of fragments.
Little by little, Clara gets to know the residents and finds out more about their fate and the history of the cottage she lives in. In flashbacks, the reader learns about the fate of the Belarusian “ Eastern worker ” Natalja, who after the war - instead of being repatriated - stayed in Machandel and gave birth to her daughter Lena there in 1946. Natalja named Lena in memory of Marlene Peters, who, as the eldest of seven siblings, took care of her younger siblings after the death of her mother and was taken to a sanatorium and nursing home on a false report , where she was killed in 1944.
At the same time, the novel follows the further fate of Claras, who, together with her husband and acquaintances, is active in opposition groups and in this way is directly confronted with the events in the years before the "turning point". The history of the GDR is interwoven in various ways in Clara's life: her father, a convinced communist in Red American Legion and while the Nazis in concentration camps imprisoned, he barely survived, gained in the GDR high offices. On the other hand, Clara and especially her brother Jan are critical of the state. Jan, who worked as a photographer, was imprisoned after organizing a photo exhibition about the Prague Spring and finally left the GDR in 1985. Hans Langner himself has to justify himself to the party after former comrades of his who survived the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and the death march with him were convicted in the Slansky trial . A couple, friends of Clara and Michael, are involved in the Peace and Human Rights Initiative , are arrested and have to leave the GDR in 1988.
The relationship between Clara and Michael was already weaker in the period before the fall of the wall, and the couple eventually separated. After reunification, Clara leaves the university institute where she worked. The novel ends in the present; The family of Grigori, Natalia's lover and father of Lena, who had returned to the Soviet Union after the war and started a family there, moves into the cottage that Clara discovered in 1985.
construction
In 25 chapters, the events are described alternately by five different people - each from their perspective. In the first and last chapter, it is Clara who describes her arrival in and ultimately her departure from Machandel. In between, Natalja, Clara's father Hans, Clara's acquaintance and Jan's childhood friend Herbert and Emma, stepmother of the Peters siblings, have their say, as well as Clara again and again. In this way, ultimately only the reader can put together an overall picture, while the main character Clara only gradually learns part of the events.
Web links
- The pearl diver to Regina Scheer's novel "Machandel"
- Review of the novel by Michaela Schmitz on Deutschlandfunk
Individual evidence
- ↑ Clara's father Hans Langner mentions several times that he did not “tell everything” to his daughter.