The German border town of Frankfurt (Oder) was a special place in the 1990s. Here the proximity to the young capital Berlin, there a bridge to Poland that was suddenly open. In the surrounding area there were meeting places for guys with smuggled goods, for local politicians with thick Stasi files and for neo-Nazis. Most apartments did not yet have telephones; If you owned a fax modem, you were technically up to date. Everyone knew everyone, the easternmost German border town was a place of short distances.
It was also a biotope in which all kinds of colorful existences might thrive. Many of these appear in Christian Bangel’s debut novel, Oder Florida. There is the long-standing Mayor Krautzig, nicknamed “The Eternal”, who always goes to the diving station when Spiegel Online is in town. There is Francis, a knight of the turning point, an entrepreneur who preaches the free market economy to his compatriots. Günther Franziskus wants to be the next mayor, so he hires Fliege, a punk and former squatter who has started an agency. Mathias Freier also works there, he is 20 years old, doing community service, hates Nazis, local patriot and the narrator of this novel.
“Freedom,” said Francis, “is always the freedom of the more able. In the West, they have understood this for a long time, but we Ossis eat every day the prosperity that others have given us. You, for example,” he pointed with his finger to me, “You’re young, healthy and a handsome guy. Good teeth. You should get up at six o’clock every day and say: What can I achieve today? But do you do that too?” Well, sometimes I slept a little longer. I looked at Fly, who gave the slightest nod. “Yes,” I said.
Roman thrives on its characters
Mathias Freier’s story begins when his friend Fliege and businessman Franziskus decide to make him a spokesman and put him in charge of the upcoming election campaign. This is the call our hero must now heed. Since Freier is equipped with a good portion of peace of mind – he likes to live his day and when things don’t work out, mom sends food packages – the ground for the comical local posse is well prepared. “Or Florida” belongs to the genre of the entertainingly told post-reunification novel, in which what happens in detail is actually not that important. This novel thrives on its characters.
The author Christian Bangel erects a monument to the quirky, odd, colorful types of his post-reunification years. When they are young, their names are Klarlack, Mike Mischjemüse or Töffel, they party, smoke weed and beat the post-reunification summer of 1998 around their ears. Until Nadja shows up, the narrator’s great childhood love, who tears him out of his rut with a jaunt to Berlin. Here is an opportunity for a snapshot of Potsdamer Platz:
“I was standing in front of something huge. It wasn’t exactly broken, but it wasn’t intact either. Not in the city, but certainly not in the country. Directly in front of us there was an apocalyptic, kilometer-long jumble of cranes, shell structures, moats, metal scaffolding, wooden planks. Hundreds of floodlights , in impossible, hidden places, turned night into day. A concrete jungle, without a single person. I had never seen anything like it. “Potsdam Square,” said Nadja, examining a strand of her hair. This brightness, this silence. How under floodlights in an empty stadium. I pressed my face once morest the struts of the site fence. “Räuberleiter,” said Nadja.”
Roman of the constant passage
“Or Florida” is more like a memoir than a novel. Bangel writes materially and animatedly, at times also very comically. A time and an attitude to life come alive, it is the mood of those who were children in East Germany in the year of reunification. They vacillate between euphoria and excessive caution, two positions that Mathias and Nadja occupy in the novel. In their encounter lies the chance for the hero’s emotional development, coming of age would be the keyword here, but Christian Bangel also interprets this narrative strand rather incidentally.
The result is a novel of constant passage, somewhat talkative and casual, the author does not quite succeed in bundling his narrative material. In the end, Mathias Freier did what many young people did in the 1990s, he left his homeland. Freier is supposed to set up a pet shop in Florida for Frankziskus and is trained beforehand by an entrepreneur friend of his in Hamburg. It works quite well as a capitalist cliché and shows that the author can also use black and white:
Strössner got up and closed the window. “I said yes immediately when Francis called me,” he says. “It’s a point of honor for me to help our friends from the new federal states.” He sat down once more and began to unwrap a lollipop that was lying on the table. “Terrible, the conditions there. I was in Dresden two years ago,” he said. “They really made something out of it. But all the rest. It has to be completely worked through.” He put the lollipop in his mouth and looked at me. “But you, you got out of there.”
One suspects that someone like Mathias Freier does not want to come out. His journey back to Frankfurt is a journey into a new freedom, he decides to stay where he comes from. That doesn’t move the world, but it always warms the heart. And it preserves the memory of a few years following the reunification in East Germany, which are already history once more.
Christian Bangel: “Or Florida”.
Novel. Piper Verlag, Munich 2017. 352 pages bound 18.00 euros.
