Evil premonitions - "The Comet" by Durs Grünbein

Literature - Evil premonitions - "The Comet" by Durs Grünbein

Durs Grünbein (61) is a citizen of the world and has long been at home in various metropolises. In his works, however, he always finds his way back to his Saxon hometown of Dresden. "Die Jahre im Zoo" was an autobiographical look back at life in the Hellerau garden colony. His new book "Der Komet" is also inspired by his own family history, but this time focuses on the life of his grandmother Dora.

The second main protagonist of the book is the city of Dresden during the Nazi era until its downfall on the night of the bombing on February 13, 1945, which also forms the dramatic conclusion of the book.

The work can be classified neither as a novel nor as non-fiction, but rather as an account with fictional elements. Much is undoubtedly based on the grandmother's stories; we mostly experience the world from her point of view, with the author only rarely intervening directly. In this way, the book has a very direct and moving effect. "The Comet" is the story of an ordinary woman in the Nazi state, a classic story from the bottom up.

Dora is born in the most modest of circumstances in rural Silesia. She grows up in a loveless home, has to herd goats as a child and her education is neglected. Then she falls in love with the butcher Oskar, a handsome and down-to-earth young man. She follows him to Dresden, where he takes a job in one of the largest and most modern slaughterhouses in Germany. At the age of just 16, Dora becomes a mother, later marries Oskar and has a second child with him.

For the country girl, the big city is a revelation. Dresden combines pulsating modernity with the beauty of its baroque heritage. The city also offers her a sense of ease and freedom that she sorely missed in her suffocating childhood. Together with her unconventional friend and neighbor Trude, she enjoys urban life in parks, shopping streets and art galleries during these few good years. The lyricist Durs Grünbein uses brilliant descriptions here to portray his then still undestroyed home town with dignity.

Dora may be a simple woman, but she has a keen sense of impending disaster and lurking dangers. She senses how the Nazi state is closing in on people more and more, for example through air raid drills in the midst of peace: "She had this hunch from an early age. At any time, something could befall her that was bigger than her daily routine. Then the comet came back to her mind, which everyone had been expecting at the time..."

Halley's Comet, to which the author alludes in his book title, sent many people into a doomsday panic in 1910. Dora's bad premonition turns out to be right. The war soon begins and Oskar has to go to the front. Neither Dora nor Oskar are convinced National Socialists, rather the opposite. Oskar, the great taciturn and denier, hermetically seals off his inner life. Dora distrusts the grandiloquent propaganda and condemns the harassment of the Jews that she witnesses on the streets and in her own home. She sees herself and the little people in general primarily as passive sufferers of overpowering circumstances: "We have always been the stupid ones." A sentence that becomes the family's leitmotif.

Durs Grünbein does not justify this kind of followership, but neither does he condemn it. He shows a great deal of empathy for the life of this simple woman, his grandmother, whose undisguised, life-affirming nature makes her likeable. This beautifully written portrait of a woman is not only an enriching read, but also an important puzzle in the history of everyday life in the Nazi state.

Durs Grünbein: Der Komet, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 282 pages, 25.00 euros, ISBN 978-3-518-43020-0