Sky Glow (Streulicht) – The German novel looks at class society with a fresh pair of eyes
Deniz Ohde’s debut novel Sky glow (Streulicht), published in August 2020, offers an innovative and original look at German class society and its bad moods.
The novel received the ZDF television network Appearance Literary Prize in 2020, as well as Literary Prize of the Jürgen Ponto Foundation. Ohde’s work has also been shortlisted for the prestigious German Book Prize, has been translated into five languages and was staged as a play last year. (Example of English translation here.)
Sky glow it is part of a literary vein centered once again on the life and experiences of workers.
Deniz Ohde, born in Frankfurt am Main in 1988, the daughter of a chemical worker and a Turkish mother, sees the narrator in first person return to her father’s house for a short visit at the beginning of what is clearly a semi-autobiographical novel .
The fragmentary memories are evoked in a very immediate and sensual way as soon as she arrives in the area where she grew up. “The air changes when you enter the city.” You can smell the immediate vicinity of a gigantic chemical industry plant, which German readers will easily recognize as the Höchst Industrial Park on the site of the former Farbwerke Hoechst AG in Frankfurt.
It’s not just the acid smell, the permanent buzz and the diffused light that the industrial zone (home to dozens of chemical and pharmaceutical companies) casts on its surroundings at night, that leave their mark on the people who live in the neighbourhood. Nor is it simply the recurring chemical accident drills, the vouchers issued by the industrial park to the population when the air is too polluted, or the stench from its waste incineration plant…
Feelings of discrimination and oppression, of shame and helplessness, emerge with a vengeance. “Even my face changes,” the narrator explains, “in the sign of the city, hardening into the expression my father taught me, a look of anxious indifference he wears himself whenever he ventures out, a look to stop you to be seen.”
Nominally, Ohde recounts the stifling path through “education” institutions and his failure on the formal educational path. But right from the start, this experience connects with an image of contemporary society at a deeper level, which Ohde alludes to through a rich imagery that is sometimes poetically picturesque, sometimes frenetic or enigmatically humorous.
The narrator’s two childhood and later teenage friends, Sophia and Pikka, move effortlessly from one grade to the next, but her bad report card prevents her from transferring to a higher grade. The verdict without appeal, “I have to leave this type of school!”, catapults her out of the community of friends forever. Her failure leads initially to shock, breakdown and depression, but gradually also to self-confident understanding and resistance.
“It was not an identity that was formed, but rather an identity that was taken from me” is his tentative assessment, a judgment that will be familiar to most Ohde readers, both from their own youthful experiences and like teachers or helpless parents who face their desperate children when they leave school. Like a jigsaw puzzle, Ohde pieces together and demonstrates the connection between poverty and a so-called lack of education.
The question of identity, “Who am I?” runs through the entire book. The conclusion: “I was not born wrapped in foam, but rather born of dust, of soot”, that is the fate suffered by millions of working-class children. “Wrapped in foam” – these are those friends from the best families and academic circles, as embodied by Sophia’s mother or Pikka’s father, who hold a leading position in the chemical company.
How she wished the narrator had a life similar to that of her friend Sophia! The chic backpack, the blonde hair pulled back softly, looked after by a mother who not only asks for information on the school routine, but also pays attention to a balanced and healthy diet for the family. Sophia receives riding lessons and ballet lessons, which her mother considers essential for a “complete education”.
One involuntarily remembers Victor Hugo The Miserables when Ohde brings to life this typical representative of the compliant upper class. “Sophia’s mother silently came down the stairs. With each step she pushed forward with an expert movement of her own, her pear-shaped hips which, despite all their softness, testified to a firmness of life: the volleyball evenings she had spent in her early twenties, the preference for black bread. She wore mottled wool sweaters and glasses with red metal temples, two thin bars on the bridge of her nose, with no rim around the lenses.
Her friend’s mother proudly refers to her short career as a skilled clerk, “back in the bank,” someone who knows her stuff and stands apart from the housewives on the street. She organizes her life in a simple way, with a sporty and energetic drive, as exemplified by the well-stocked hygiene and cosmetic items in her bathroom, testifying to “a sure sense of femininity”. Its well-enclosed paradisiacal garden, with the family house painted white, clean, fragrant, tidy in the centre, almost makes you forget the proximity of the industrial area.
The home of the narrator’s parents is very different. In a rented apartment, the smoke and smell of her father’s cigarettes mingle with his alcoholic fumes. When he comes home no one asks: how was he at school? Instead, on the doorstep of the apartment, he looks for telltale signs: has his father been drinking again? Is he sleeping or is another drunken outburst coming? Will she find her anxious mother in the kitchen picking up broken glass?
Silence and tiptoeing are part of the necessary survival mode in a group home marked by poverty, despair and bitterness. At the same time, they correspond to the necessary survival mode in the outside world, where it also wants to be as inconspicuous as possible.
Last and not least, she also bears the stigma of her mother’s “Turkish roots”: in the color and density of her hair, the shape of her eyebrows. As a young girl, her mother left her small home village and her mother beat her. She found herself stranded in the Rhine-Main area with no education or knowledge of German. Since then she has worked hard, outside the home as a poorly paid cleaner, and at home as an unpaid cleaner and cook for her husband and father-in-law. Her teachers treat her daughter as a foreigner, even though she does not speak her mother’s language. Only her daughter’s name, her “secret name”, which her mother uses calmly and only in her apartment and which (except for her father and two friends) no one else knows, connects her to her mother’s language her.
It is the period following the reunification of Germany, a time in which reception centers were set on fire by neo-Nazi gangs. Her mother, however, does not want to translate the graffiti against migrants on the walls of the houses. “You’re German, … they don’t mean you,” she says to herself and her daughter after the latter is racially abused by an older classmate and pushed so hard she falls and hurts herself . The school nurse and class teacher also cover up the incident, calling it an unfortunate coincidence. The class teacher goes so far as to blame her daughter for the accident: “She’s too sensitive” and she needs “thicker skin”.
On one occasion, a school assignment involves writing “identities.” After the narrator looks puzzled at her blank page, the teacher advises her that she has a name indicating a Turkish background.
In its most important aspects, however, its identity is not ethnically but socially determined. It is not ethnicity but class that shapes his destiny. “Who I am?” he will ask himself even later, when she will succeed against all odds in obtaining the high school diploma with the so-called second training course and will start her studies. She feels lost among her fellow students, the “daughters and sons of the established families of 1968,” who had inherited the “knowledge of proper college behavior” along with their parents’ old “Nuclear Power, No Thanks” patches.
A fleeting glance at her reflection in a glass door lets her know that she will never belong to “them”. When, in the evening after a student job as a cleaning lady, she is tired and still in work clothes, a stranger, a worker, helps her at the automatic ticket machine on the platform, she is struck by the solidarity and friendliness of her peers.
The more she becomes aware of social contrasts, the closer and more sympathetic she becomes in her relationship with her father, which Ohde describes very sensitively. Particularly with the character of the father, the author manages to go beyond the narrow framework of the educational theme of the novel and to develop a narrative on the problems of a migrant and working-class environment.
Like his grandfather, who lives on the ground floor of the same house, his father works as a shift worker in the industrial area. Both men are silent. Over the years, both become alcoholics and the father an inveterate “hoarder”. When her daughter asks her mother why she stays with him despite her outbursts and drunkenness, she replies that “he too had a hard life”. When his mother dies, the father does not want earth on the grave, but rose petals and not fir branches, but an arrangement of spring flowers. For the first time, he talks to his daughter about the contemptuous attitude he encountered during meetings between parents and teachers at the school.
The author gives a sharp characterization of the father on one of the first pages of the novel. “For forty years he worked for the same company, another one of his spiel. The pride of that worker mixed with defiance and an arrogance born of necessity (chin slightly raised, eyelids lowered a few millimeters, shoulders lowered). My father spent forty years soaking aluminum foil in electrolytes, forty hours a week.
Intuitively, the author captures the impact of the defeat suffered by a generation of workers whose previous social gains were undone following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the reintroduction of capitalism in Eastern Europe.
After decades of ideological propaganda announcing the end of the labor movement and the triumph of capitalism, the novel Sky glow it reflects the beginning of a new development, the return of working-class pride and self-knowledge.
The fact that the father is portrayed as a “hoarder” who buys plenty of cheap food and goods (after all, they had been “double bombed”), who refuses to throw away everything broken and old and refrains from sorting the memories of his family and beloved wife – this is simply not a whim, as it seems at first glance. Indirectly, this account also provides a metaphor for the fact that the working class cannot and will not shrug off its history.
The highest recommendation for this novel was provided through its spiteful rejection by right-wing critics like Denis Scheck, who hosts the Lessenswert Quartett, a literary discussion program on ARD television. This “woman can’t think,” Scheck raged. Deniz Ohde wanted to blame others for “the reasons for her social failure” instead of “starting with herself”. After all, Scheck said, today’s society offers great opportunities for advancement.
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