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Skinheads in Leipzig 1990: »The distance makes it difficult to remember, the repression mechanisms could work«
Photo: Michael Hughes / IMAGO
SPIEGEL:
Mr. Schulz, your novel We Were Like Brothers goes back almost 30 years and tells the story of growing up in the East, a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
How do you find the right sound for such a story?
Schulz
: There is something dirty, earthy about the village language that I remembered for this book.
Children enjoy playing with it, for example coming up with new insults.
But when you get to the next town, where people basically talk the same way, you're told you're "from the village," meaning you're an idiot.
In the even bigger city, at the university, one is even more ashamed of this language.
SPIEGEL:
With what consequences?
Schulz
: At least I tried to forget this language, to adopt a more academic sound.
Memory, as we already know from testimonies in court, is unreliable.
Still, I wanted to do something new with this language, it wasn't supposed to be a reenactment.
MIRROR:
How did that go?
Schulz
: I drove out of Berlin back to the countryside to feel the energy of this language again.
Hear how people talk there.
If this language, as I just thought, is really like earth or mud, I have tried, so to speak, with the literary sieve to work out the gold from it, the shiny and heavy.
SPIEGEL:
Right at the beginning, the hero argues with a friend about what a parable is.
Why?
Schulz
: That is also part of the language.
The protagonist comes from a Christian household, the Bible speaks in parables, and the parable should also have its place in the language of this novel.
SPIEGEL:
Did it take a while before you could put what happened in the past into words?
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Schulz
: For me yes.
There was even a specific occasion that showed me that it could be important to talk about it - that was the so-called "funeral march" organized by the AfD in Chemnitz in 2018. What became visible again, in terms of people and views, led me to realize that what I experienced back then is relevant.
MIRROR:
Why?
Schulz
: Because there is a form of forgetting.
After every beating you said to yourself: »Well, it wasn't that bad«.
They were just fists, they weren't steel-toed boots.
One then tried to erase the experience, the pain.
But as with every etching, it remains visible that there is something blurred, something spongy that simply cannot be erased.
SPIEGEL:
Also on a political level?
Schulz
: Exactly.
At that time and even later, those who were politically responsible always maintained that this right-wing extremism did not exist at all, that it was an expression of a certain youthfulness - or that it was imported straight away from the West.
SPIEGEL:
Like "gaslighting," the attempt to unsettle the actual victims?
Schulz
: Yes.
It makes you say to yourself, "Maybe it really wasn't that bad?
You don't have to overdo it!
I've experienced something before, but what did I experience anyway?' The past may make it easier to talk about pain and shame.
At the same time, however, the distance makes it difficult to remember, and the mechanisms of repression were able to work.
SPIEGEL:
When reading "We Were Like Brothers," one is reminded of Klaus Theweleit's "Men's Fantasies," this hatred of the masculine for everything feminine, soft, liquid...
Schulz
: I've never read Theweleit, but I work for the taz, so you might breathe that in.
SPIEGEL:
It's an offer to the young man to also get body armor.
This offer also goes to the heroes of the book, get tough, learn to hit.
Schulz
: This offer exists, and it also has something tender about it.
Alone that his mother sends him to work so that, as they said at the time, he »does not take off« and integrates himself into »normal life«.
In the trucking company, however, he meets people who repel him with their racism and right-wing extremism.
The group, the circle of friends, also has something caring about it.
SPIEGEL:
Why doesn't the hero manage to fit in there?
Schulz
: There are guys who just have a bite inhibition, they can't and don't want to hit you.
And then it becomes painful for them.
I knew people like that who had the physical stuff for it, but they became hippies.
Exercising alone doesn't do it, you also need the psychological predisposition for it.
There are very talented thugs who have never seen the inside of a gym.
But the contempt for people who let
themselves be beaten up
, for the hippie, comes from both the left and the right.
SPIEGEL:
Because it's a morally superior position?
Schulz
: I thought so at the time, yes, but I'm not so sure anymore.
Not making a decision also has something comfortable and selfish about it.
SPIEGEL:
Has the situation changed since then, locally, in the country in the east?
Schulz
: It has transformed, as Hendrik Bolz also shows in his book »Zero Years«.
Much depends on who is active.
One or two people can make a difference.
role models.
They don't have to be leftists either, an active church community might be enough.
SPIEGEL:
It hasn't gotten worse, but is it different?
Schulz
: Something like that.
The question is always: Is there a place where something other than the extreme right is possible?
And is this place defensible?
In contrast, there are entire regions in which right-wing codes have literally grown into fashion, into music, into a space that appears pre-political.
There, red, white, and black are common colors, and Fraktur is a common pattern.
This is right-wing identity politics.
SPIEGEL:
To what extent is that identity politics?
Schulz
: Insofar as there is a »That's just how we are, we East Germans«, and it has been for quite a while.
This is supported and represented by the AfD or the Free Saxony.
Someone like me, who lives in Berlin and writes leftist stuff, can therefore easily be expatriated.
Then I don't belong.
Someone like Björn Höcke, a teacher from the West, is naturalized.
It's very fluid.
