Anke Stelling
A Crush on Markus Häfele

There’s no shortage of unhappy people in unfortunate situations in Anke Stelling’s stories. But while Claudia, Franziska, Simone and Carina rail against their circumstances, Hannes, Heiner, Markus and Varut tend not to let themselves be hampered in their self-fulfilment.

By Marit Borcherding

© Verbrecher Verlag Grundlagenforschung or “Basic Research” isn’t a particularly poetic title for a book of short stories. But in these short works, Anke Stelling does what was already evident in her novels: She dissects the distinctive bearing and the use of status symbols of the saturated, seeminly enlightened and tolerant middle class, for example in the biography of a social climber in her book Schäfchen im Trockenen, for which she received the 2019 Leipzig Book Prize. Literary critic Hubert Winkels detects leftist, sociological thinking in Anke Stelling on Deutschlandfunk, explaining, “She immediately partitions everything she experiences personally in the categories of sociology.” That makes the title basic research quite fitting.
 

The narrow volume, the first of a new series from Verbrecher-Verlag, brings together 14 stories from the years 2002 to 2019 – almost all of which, according to the editor’s remarks, already appeared elsewhere but have been revised for this edition. And the stories actually read as if they were cast from one piece – also because many themes and motifs from Stelling’s literary cosmos appear from changing perspectives. And the more people Anke Stelling presents in her stories, the more one realises that although these are individual fates, there are also some faults in the (capitalist) system that the protagonists are desperately attempting to fit into.

Who belongs?

The author described her focus when writing in an interview, saying, “I’m interested in group dynamics. So questions of inclusion and exclusion, isolation and mixing of different milieus and classes. Which, in turn, are often tied to external appearances or at least can be told on that basis.” She continues, “The work-life balance is a lie. Anyone who thinks they can make the two compatible is actually outsourcing.”
 
In line with this literary programme, the story Die Stelle, for example, outlines a life from childhood to a silver class reunion, recapped by a first-person narrator attempting to negotiate her dissatisfaction with her appearance and alienation from her own body against the backdrop of world events; trying to reprogram herself, in part to endure the fact that the universally adored and self-assured Markus Häfele will never fall in love with her. Should she try it with Rainer Bergmann? But everyone thinks he – and themselves in a way – is disgusting. And then there’s the marriage with a man “who’s smarter than me,” the children arrive and eventually the class reunion where Markus Häfele drives up in an SUV and Rainer Bergmann reports that he quit drinking a few years ago: a good opportunity for the narrator to talk to him about sex.
 

Left alone

Many other stories could be summed up here – for example the one about Varut and Franziska, once a hip couple – he a barkeeper and lecturer at the university, she a writer. After their two children are born, Varut becomes an autocrat and tyrant; he stirs up the children against everyone, including their own mother, and Franziska doesn’t offer opposition because she thinks little of herself, allows herself to be unsettled and manipulated. From society, embodied by her girlfriends, she initially reaps understanding and sometimes moral support but no active assistance. Instead, she cuts off contact with them. So in the end “apart from Varut and the children, there’s nothing left; they are Franziska’s life. Anyone who can’t share that with her is out.”
 
Although they strive to follow orderly pathways, try not to offend and seem highly enlightened, the frequent failures of the female characters – because of social egoisms, the lack of committment, the primacy of economics and, last but not least, themselves – is woeful. Yet Stelling’s precise and sometimes sarcastically comical analyses of modern relationships are not only a delight to read, but also create awareness of social grievances and challenges and prepare the ground for courses of action. And that’s exactly what basic research is supposed to do.