How it shines

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How it shines is a novel by Thomas Brussig from 2004.

It takes place from August 1989 until the reunification in 1990. The stories of the individual protagonists trace this time from different perspectives. The individual storylines are developed separately and meet, put together like a mosaic, from time to time, so that a snapshot of the German-German turning society is created. Brussig mixes fiction with actual events and people and thus brings an essential piece of German-German history to life.

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In August 1989, when more and more people were leaving the GDR , something was brewing. It can't stay the way it is. The public prosecutor, the people's police officer, the director of the palace hotel , the boss of Sachsenring but also the physiotherapist, the photographer, the secretary of a law firm, the hotel porter and many others notice this .

Lena , the roller-skating physiotherapist from Karl-Marx-Stadt , sensed in August '89 that things only change when everyone does something unusual. That's why she drives through Karl-Marx-Stadt on roller skates in her white coat.

I just do something that normally nobody does. And if even more do what nobody does, if everyone does what is new, then maybe soon nothing will stay the same.

She becomes the symbolic figure of the demonstrations through a hit written by her that hits the zeitgeist.

Lena's big brother is not her big brother at all, but a boy from their neighborhood. He is passionate about taking photos with his inconspicuous Leica . He has developed a technique that allows him to get close to the people he wants to photograph without appearing intrusive. He has a feeling for the right moment and always pulls the trigger with his eyes closed.

Maybe because the important thing always happens when we have our eyes open.

Waldemar Bude is a hotel porter of Polish origin in the palace hotel. He came to the GDR at the age of 12 and speaks neither German nor Polish properly. His words and phrases are imprecise and blurry. Nonetheless, he is writing a book about a pole vaulter and would like to publish it on the day the censorship is abolished. Because of its strangely blurred language, his book is already an insider tip in the Aufbau-Verlag , to which he is submitting the manuscript, and it seems to be a success. He invents new words and asks questions that no one else asks.

For example, why the alarm clock caught on. Everyone hates this thing, and yet everyone has it. How did most of humanity begin each day with reluctance? How can something prevail that nobody wants?

The Wild Willi , a swashbuckling ambulance driver in Lena crush. Without being asked, he shows his big tongue to everyone to explain that he is not drunk, but only babbles because of his big tongue. His driving style makes him remark in the clinic that he is probably the first ambulance driver to die in the ambulance.

Daniel Detjen is secretary in Gisela Blank's law firm. He knows a ton of people and is part of the intellectual scene. As a pastor's son, he could not do a high school diploma and is looking for a niche in which he can still develop. After the fall of the Wall, he called himself back in Detienne according to his Huguenot ancestors , as he “simply looks more attractive in the West”.

The attractive lawyer Gisela Blank mainly defends prominent cases and has a good connection "to the top". For career reasons, she got involved with the Stasi , is there under the code name “Notary” and, after the fall of the Wall, rose to become the PDS's bearer of hope . She hopes to get away with the burning of her files in the presence of her senior officer. The figure of Gisela Blank shows parallels to the biography of Gregor Gysi . The novel alludes to these parallels, among other things, to the reference to the code name “Notar”, which is associated with Gysi (not proven), and the shortening of Gisela Blank's name to “Gisi”.

She once defended the civil rights activist Jürgen Warthe , who went into politics during the fall of the Berlin Wall, took part in the round table discussions and sits in the newly elected People's Chamber . Embittered by his imprisonment and now striving to find recognition and validity, he loses the ground under his feet. He only found his zest for life and impartiality (now terminally ill) on the beach in Thailand .

Helfried Schreiter , boss of Sachsenring , loses his daughter Carola Schreiter during a vacation in Hungary in summer 1989 . Together with her holiday acquaintance Thilo from the Rhineland, she runs off to the west. Helfried Schreiter notices that if his daughter is already "overpowering", something has to change. His wife is writing a letter to the Minister of the Interior to prevent her son, who is currently doing his military service with the riot police, from being used against demonstrators.

She had it all. Nothing was wrong with her. But when she saw the world through the eyes of her children, she found it couldn't go on like this.

The director of the palace hotel Alfred Bunzuweit and his employee Judith Sporz, head of the Intershop experience in their hotel how their world is changing. Yesterday it was still a source of foreign currency for the workers 'and peasants' state, today it is a tough capitalist business enterprise. Bunzuweit's well-known Valentin Eich, the country's top foreign exchange buyer, regularly comes by for a giant portion of potato pancakes fried by Bunzuweit. This ritual with a final herbal schnapps and beer for 1.28 marks created familiarity between the two. Nevertheless, Bunzuweit is not sure whether Eich is actually his friend. The figure of Valentin Eich shows parallels to the biography of Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski .

After a number of years of service, public prosecutor Matthias Lange suddenly has complicated cases to solve. There are demonstrators who want to report police officers to assaults. His wife Verena Lange works in the Nationalgalerie and one day sees a blind person joining their tour and trying to explain Max Liebermann's paintings to the sighted . The blind woman is Sabine Busse , who is later portrayed by Leo Lattke for his news magazine.

Lieutenant Lutz Neustein witnessed attacks against demonstrators during a demonstration and had to experience how he himself became a violent perpetrator against a woman lying on the ground during the deployment. He now has to answer questions before the investigation committee headed by Jürgen Warthe . Since he is sure that nothing can be proven to him and that his “comrades” will hold back, he denies everything.

Werner Schniedel , a 19-year-old albino from Lower Saxony , is the namesake of the CEO of VW and after several unintentional mix-ups finally pretends to be his son. After several hotel stays, his imposture in the west is exposed and he decides to go to East Berlin, where the wall has just come down. He stayed at the palace hotel with Alfred Bunzuweit . This brought him in contact with Helfried Schreiter , whom he visited in Zwickau at the Sachsenring plant as a "special representative of a global corporation". Werner Schniedel meets the secretary Kathleen Bräunlich, who has just been released from the office of the party leadership, and decides to take Kathleen, who is neither pretty nor particularly clever, with him to Berlin as his secretary .

Leo Lattke , the star reporter for a Hamburg news magazine, is ordered to East Berlin and experiences writer's block there at the time of the fall. The cynic doesn't shy away from exposing “his” photographer, Lena's big brother , at a Christmas party in Hamburg as an East German who doesn't know what an answering machine is. In his almost one year in East Berlin, he writes only two stories: The story of seven "unfinished" transsexuals who were unable to complete their transformation due to the doctor treating them fleeing to the West, he writes in a cautious style that is atypical for him. which is also due to the pictures of Lena's big brother . His magazine publishes the article about a person who is blind from birth who can see after a spectacular operation and is still not happy because she can no longer learn to “see” and gets stuck in the gray area between blind and seeing, because of the pessimistic , mood not fitting into the euphoric time. Lena , who in her own way understands his report as a parable of the encounter between East Germans and West Germany and the state of limbo between two worlds, is ultimately the one who manages to break open its rough shell. She comments on his report:

Happiness tastes bland now. And if one of you is told that, they don't want to hear it. Always just how bad it was then and how fantastic now.
But it is not that easy. I'll never belong, I've never been able to say that so clearly. Only now through this report.

The journalist Matthias Matussek served Brussig as a template for the figure . After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Brussig was able to observe him in the “Palasthotel” in Berlin, from which Matussek reported on the GDR for “Spiegel” and where Brussig had worked as a porter. The description of Lattke as an unpleasant chunk of puke, whose facial expression signals “constant readiness to sniff”, and who presents himself as “Gröraz”, as the “greatest reporter of all time”, is considered by Matussek's journalists to be “pretty realistic”.

The little poet closes at the end, on behalf of the GDR intellectuals, with:

There I am still, my country is going to the west.
WAR THE HUTS PEACE THE PALACES.
I gave him the kick myself.
It throws itself away and its meager ornament.
Winter is followed by summer of desire.
And I can stay where the pepper grows.
And all of my text becomes incomprehensible.
What I never owned will be snatched from me.
What I did not live, I will miss forever.
Hope was in the way like a trap.
My property, now you have it on your claw.
When do I say mine and mine all again.

Individual evidence

  1. Friedrich Siering: Unrest at the 'Spiegel' , in: KStA v. December 5, 2007, p. 22.
  2. The poem bears the name The property and comes from Volker Braun : Lustgarten, Prussia. Selected poems. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1996.

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