Having set out from the suburbs to procure 11-year-old Tobias' trousers he longed for in Cologne's newly opened "jeans store", Eva, his 38-year-old mother, has a peculiarly pleasant experience. She is persuaded to try on a pair of jeans. She hesitates and finally refuses to buy. But the emancipatory-erotic potential of this scene has an effect.

The novel "My Mother's Summer" already suggests a neat arrangement of action and relationships on the first pages. No wonder with the literary veteran Ulrich Woelk, 58, who was awarded the "Aspekte" literature prize in 1990 for his debut "Freigang" and most recently with the thriller "Pfingstopfer" (2015) and the novel "Nacht ohne Engel" (2017 ) on the book market.

A few pages later we learn how Eva refuses to give Walter her husband in bed:

"May I not say what I want?"
"That puts me under pressure."
"It's what I want."
"And I do not want it that often," my mother said.
"But you do not want it , " said my father.

In this bedroom conversation Eva also mentions - jealous? - the neighbor next door, Mrs. Leinhard, whom the father had helped to transport drinks crates.

Does the story develop into a thieving of neighboring couples? They represent very different milieus: Walter, as an engineer's executive, and Eva, housewife and mother of Tobias, are the more staid contemporaries. Especially compared to Uschi, the translator, and her husband, the lecturer at the university, along with her almost 13-year-old, precocious daughter Rosa.

Opposition of culture and technology

Tobias, from whose perspective the happenings are told, already notices the difference that Uschi Leinhard wears jeans. Rosa sets clearer accents, she explains to Tobias, her parents are communists, and: "My name is Rosa because of Rosa Luxemburg." The space-crazed boy takes note of it confused, also that it uses the model of a Saturn V rocket he has crafted to denounce the US war in and against Vietnam, exceeds his horizons.

"The summer of my mother" is actually dated, because Tobi and his father follow again and again the sequence of Apollo moon exploration in 1969. So Woelk knows his way around, he also studied astrophysics before his literary career. This has been reflected for example in his books "The Solitude of the Astronaut" (2005) or "Starry".

Bettina Keller / CH Beck

Author Woelk

Woelk ambitiously uses his new novel to outline moods and mentalities of the sixties: he reflects the conservative and slightly jammed habits of technical intelligence in the illusory ideology of the cultural sphere, which is driven by social change, as described by the translator Uschi and her left-wing philosopher. Man is portrayed. "Philosophy, Bloch, Adorno, Frankfurt School ..." Wolf explains his job to the neighbor. He looks through "rimless glasses, smokes filterless Gitanes, wears turtleneck" and proceeds with "a wine red Volvo".

But such stereotypes and stereotypes just do not replace the necessary psychological characterization that Woelk consistently misses. How he too easily makes the too flat opposition of culture and technology.

Moreover, the decision to choose an eleven-year-old boy as a witness and narrator is more than once strange. That the scenario is also extended by the reactionary uncle Hartmut, the Stuka pilots in the Second World War, Eva is gifted by her husband with a Citroen 2 CV, Rosa hangs the Doors and Janis Joplin when she squats with Tobi - so hardly a prop of those years is left out: all this rattles the novel too much mechanically.

DISPLAY

Ulrich Woelk:
My mother's summer

CH Beck publishing house; 189 pages; 19.95 euros

Order at Amazon. Order from Thalia.

In any case, Tobi and his mother miss the moon landing of Apollo 11. Both experience a sexual initiation instead. The consequences are serious, there is a dramatic dissolution of the neighborhood.

The epilogue-like very last chapter lets the adult astrophysicist Tobias, who now works at the European Space Agency, visit the reading of a successful author of erotic novels called Rosa Leinhard. She does not recognize him. An indication that the memory of his own childhood sweetheart left author Ulrich Woelk neglecting the distance that would have helped the novel.