Elke Heidenreich – Book recommendations of the week: About poverty and identity

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Elke Heidenreich, author and literary critic:

»Origin, identity, belonging: these are all important topics, but they are sometimes dealt with in a somewhat annoying and boring way.

So sometimes Annie Ernaux's bluster and Didier Eribon's arrogance become too much for me, no matter how important the books are: these "I, me, me" researchers always.

And now these two: Josef Brustmann “Everyone is someone”.

And Marco Ott “What I left behind”.

I would like to talk to you about these two books today.

These are unknown authors, both of them.

Unknown publishers, both.

Josef Brustmann “Everyone is someone”.

I mean, even the title sounds like kindness, like modesty, right?

I have a friend who looked after a touring theater for years.

And then famous people like Charles Regine were interviewed.

And once a reporter looked to the side, looked at him and said: "Are you who?" He deserves a slap in the face, I think.

So everyone is someone.

Let's remember that.

Brustmann is the eighth of nine children in a really poor farming family.

After the lost war, they fled Moravia, went to Bavaria and found accommodation somewhere and with difficulty and hardship supported their eight children - eight remained alive, one died - with all kinds of work, but always full of joy of life, kindness and love.

And that is not a given in such circumstances.

We know from literature many horrific children's stories about great poverty, which was often accompanied by great brutality.

That is not the case here.

The way Brustmann tells it is heartbreaking, it's interesting, it's impressive.

And that is, above all, the kind of clear, unaffected language and poetry that I only know from Christine Lavant, the Austrian poet who also came from a very miserable background and who could gild anything with her words, he can do that too .

This is a book full of love, with gratitude and kindness for the parents, the siblings.

He sprinkles wonderful poems in between.

He is also a poet.

And pictures, for example.

Maybe you can see that.

This is the last lock of mother's hair kept in a jar.

Or at another point, I think I somehow picked out - but it doesn't matter - the chest pouch, no, not the chest pouch, the father's wallet, which he sewed for himself in captivity.

So this Josef Brustmann is a person who loves people, who loves animals, who also loves things, who has regard and respect for everything and who also writes so beautifully about poverty.

He says there is also happy poverty.

We have completely forgotten that poverty doesn't always have to be miserable.

In our house there wasn't always something to eat, but there was always singing. It was harmonious.

Our parents loved us.

He plays many instruments himself.

The whole family was probably very musical.

It must have been a bit like that with the Biermösls.

He was a teacher for a long time and then started doing stage programs and writing this incredibly wonderful book.

And one chapter ends with the sentence “Long live our beautiful peace that has lasted so long.”

One can only be grateful for a book in a world in which so many peace-loving idiots are already at work again.

A book full of kindness and beauty and love.

Someone as constantly angry as me could use that, and you could use it too.

Read this.

So, the next thing I have: Marco Ott "What I Left Behind", Edition W - behind it is Rainer Weiss, who used to have the Weissbooks.

He discovered this Marco Ott and he tells us, “What I left behind,” how he set out from an uneducated, simple background: a working-class child from the Ruhr area, just like me.

And I know everything he describes: a home without education, without books.

How at some point you realize what you are sorely missing, how much harder it is for you as a student than the children who come from rich homes where clever things were said at the table.

That wasn't the case with me, and that wasn't the case with Marco Ott either.

He describes everything about how to learn to fight.

And all of this applies to many.

He writes it like a letter to his parents, like an apology, “Everything I left behind, including you.

I have read myself out of your world.

Because I studied and you didn't, we can hardly find a way to each other anymore.

But I couldn’t help it,” he writes.

I wanted to get out of the world, I wanted to go to a different one, without whining.

With gentleness, even with sadness, he describes great losses and great gains in his life.

Big changes with new opportunities for a different life that the parents no longer understand.

The price for advancement is often loneliness and he calls this loneliness.

He writes, »I got what I wanted, but in the end I didn't feel any joy about it.

The road was too rocky."

A heartbreaking book.

Marco Ott “What I left behind”, I really hold these two close to my heart and mind.«