Moritz von Uslar
Right-wing Noise and Eastern Pride

What happens when a bloke from Berlin-Mitte travels to the eastern German backwoods to report on those frenzied fellows with dodgy pasts? About ten years later, author Moritz von Uslar repeated the experiment.

By Holger Moos

© Kiepenheuer & Witsch Moritz von Uslar’s book Deutschboden was published in 2010 and is based on a three-month stay in the Brandenburg town of Zehdenick in 2009. He called his work a “participatory observation” in which he accompanied and portrayed the everyday lives of some marginalised characters. Now, Uslar returned to Zehdenick and wrote about his experiences again in Nochmal Deutschboden. Meine Rückkehr in die brandenburgische Provinz.
 
On the surface, Zehdenick has developed splendidly. Its centre has been tidied up, unemployment has dropped significantly. And the kebab shop is open until at least one in the morning. The Kurds who own the kebab shop even opened a second shop, a Späti, a convenience shop that’s open late.

“IT HAS TO BE A POLITICAL REPORT, MORITZ”

With Uslar, we leave the orbit of the “good, fair, and tasteful” and spend some time with “the arseholes, the ugly, the broken, those guys with the ugly trainers, the ugly glasses, the eyebrow piercings, and the ugly tunnels in their earlobes, … all those wonderful small town people.” However, ten years after his first book, the political climate has changed quite a bit. A racist, misanthropic, and anti-democratic party now gets well over 20 per cent of the vote in the state elections in Brandenburg and Saxony. There’s more right-wing noise today, but also more Oststolz, eastern pride, than ten years ago, says Uslar in an interview with Deutschlandfunk Kultur.
 
His hero Raul, “a small town king,” gives him the following assignment right at the start: “It has to be a political report, Moritz.” The first Deutschboden book had been accused of celebrating the apolitical and trivialising right-wing ideology. Therefore, some interpret Uslar’s second book as a political and aesthetic attempt to make amends. Johannes Franzen writes in the FAZ that Uslar was not successful, politically or aesthetically. As in the previous volume, he stylistically delivers pop-literary fare. “The mixture of irony and exhibited naivety, the colloquial colouring, and the narrative transparency designed for readability” are distinctive.
 
In the SZ, by contrast, Cornelius Pollmer does not feel that the author conceals or trivialises everyday racism. He deems Nochmal Deutschboden as “a good document of our time” with a great “grip on Germany’s reality.” Uslar himself coquets that he is simply not a political reporter, writing, “Of course, the others were political reporters. Certain sentences – the ones that sound far too clever – I couldn’t write them although, of course, they went through my head. There was a block. I didn’t know it either.”

alcohol and testosterone-heavy environment

Uslar did not want to write a “stupid sequel.” The result is a personal long-term study of life in a small eastern German town, although the everyday rituals described in it – hanging out in an alcohol and testosterone-heavy environment – are again very male-dominated. This time Uslar also approaches the female sex and converses with a “beautiful baker’s wife,” but to his dismay she soon turns out to be a racist.
 
Of course, Uslar likes to play the role of the cool guy, who sometimes writes about himself as “the reporter” in the third person. In Zehdenick, he’s also an outsider, which may be why he was able to gain the confidence of the outsiders there and provide anecdotal insights into a world with which we have very little or no contact.