According to Anna Karenina, every family is unhappy in its own way.

And every family novel develops in its own way.

She hadn't even realized how well she knew and liked the genre, says Fatma Aydemir, in whose novel Djinns a family gathers for the father's funeral.

Only afterwards did she realize that many of the books she valued belong to this genre.

It's not exactly homely with Aydemir's Yilmaz family, says Alf Mentzer, who moderates the performance of the six writers whose novels made it onto the German Book Prize shortlist, together with fellow critics Sandra Kegel and Christoph Schröder.

"I think that's because of the concept of family," says Aydemir.

About the title of her book, which names spirits better left unconjured,

Her mother was slightly shocked: "She prayed quietly to herself." But the presence of the intangible has its meaning.

Silence, ignorance – a lot of family things are frightening due to their vagueness.

"The more concrete you try to do something, the smaller the fear."

Florian Balke

Culture editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Almost all works that could win the award for the best German-language novel of the year in a few days are about families: about history, repressed things, the place that individual members occupy in a family, caring for others.

Autofictionality is another commonality between several titles.

Jan Factor writes in "Trottel" about the GDR, but also about his son's suicide.

Like the other five authors, he made it to the only joint appearance before the award was presented on October 17 in the Kaisersaal des Römer in Frankfurt. It is the first shortlist reading in front of a sold-out theater since the beginning of the Corona pandemic.

The death of his son was ten years ago, says Factor: "The bad time is long gone.

I wouldn't help my son if I spread gloom.

Beyond Gender

Kim de l'Horizon's debut novel "Blutbuch", which received its literature prize from the Jürgen Ponto Foundation, is about a body that stands outside of the conventional gender order. It will be presented to the non-binary author in Frankfurt in November.

Nonbinary is also the main character of the novel.

Under the copper beech in the grandmother's garden, the child learns how to transform, encouraged and strengthened by the fact that the tree is constantly changing its dress, shedding it, making a new one: "In this novel, I tried to build a cauldron with space for everything that is brought to you when you are a body in this world." The book is intended to remind you that life is a "process of becoming" that does not end with the transition to adulthood: "Childhood, puberty, adulthood - that is never finished.

There is a fluent transition to lying, with the title and text of Daniela Dröscher's “Lies about my mother” playing, on the first page of which “Anna Karenina” is also quoted.

As with the Yilmaz family, their characters are mercilessly trapped in the system of advancement, says Dröscher: "I tried to make a plan of who is at enmity with whom." But she lost track.

The book is set in the Kohl era.

Building savings contracts, homes: “These longings are made – through stories that are told to us.” The calorie chart popular with women to lose weight at the time was also momentous and dangerous: “You could say it’s a private problem.

But it is a classic tool of repression.”

Ideals are uncanny

Kristine Bilkau's novel "Nebenan" also revolves around the unpeaceful and uncanny in everyday life, in which a vacant house on the Kiel Canal, from which a family has just disappeared without a trace, causes unrest in the life of a 40-year-old ceramist with an unfulfilled desire to have children.

"Having uncanny moments was a resistance to all forms of idealization," says Bilkau, as if she and Dröscher had agreed to march separately and beat together: idealizations "of the domestic, the family, motherhood."

Only Eckhart Nickel's "Spitzweg" is not primarily about family relationships, but about the growing up of three outsiders shortly before they graduate from high school.

Above all, it's about the art.

She tries to be window and mirror, but falls short of both, claims the narrator, who is promptly betrayed by his author on the stage of the play.

"Art is actually exactly what is denied in the first chapter," says Nickel, who grew up in Frankfurt and remembers numerous visits to the municipal theaters: "It is a window and a mirror at the same time." He himself looks through one and in the others back to a time when he and his friends formed a "closely knit community" and visited the opera, the theater and the Kammerspiele.

There it is again, the autofictionality.