An ego raises its voice three times, at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of Sasha Marianna Salzmann's novel “In humans everything must be wonderful”. The one who says “I” is Nina, the daughter of the emigrated Russian hairdresser Tatjana, who was born in Germany in 1995. At her new place of residence in the prefabricated building area of ​​Jena-Lobeda, more of a deportation station for resettlers from the Soviet successor states than a new home, Tatjana made the acquaintance of the doctor Lena, who comes from the border area between Ukraine and Russia. At that time there was no war there. But Lena's head of the clinic, under the impression of perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union, stated: “Our country lies on the operating table, cut open from the navel to the throat. These ... upheavals, these changes ... will produce more and more people,who are ready for anything. They only believe in themselves, because what else are they supposed to believe in? ”It is this type of post-Soviet person who drives Lena out of the country, because she believes in even more. This is the history of emigration in the novel.

Andreas Platthaus

Editor in charge of literature and literary life.

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Her good faith, however, is thoroughly shaken in Salzmann's book, which can be classified in a whole phalanx of German-Russian stories by young Russian-German authors who have all celebrated great successes with it, whether they are Olga Grjasnowa, Dmitrij Kapitelman, Lena Gorelik or Alina Bronsky. They are all children of the Soviet Union, come of age in Germany, and their novels offer double psychograms of their respective origins and their finding in their new homeland, which none of them describes as homely. This is because they had to deal with Germany rationally, while memories of early childhood are emotionally charged. Salzmann, born in 1977, is now leaving the beaten track by making a person the central protagonist of her book,who is ten years older than herself, which is why Lena looks at her native land with an unsentimental eye. But that doesn't mean that Lena will lose faith in other people.

Basically, she agrees with Chekhov, from whose “Uncle Vanya” the title of Salzmann's novel is borrowed.

But such literary reminiscences are again not the business of Nina, who is a generation younger - her year of birth corresponds to Salzmann's year of emigration.

“When I look at the memoirs of the former Soviet people,” says Nina in the middle part of the novel, “I have the feeling that they have never spoken to each other and do not even know that their realities were so different.

And they will never know because they only talk to each other in quotes from writers who died hundreds of years ago. ”This is the post-emigration story in the novel.

(And a quote itself that will be good for use over the next few hundred years.)