Humor as a weapon when dealing with family fate

“Yes, humor is of course a coping mechanism, but it is also the only weapon I have,” the 38-year-old writer Dana von Suffrin recently explained about her new novel. For her debut novel “Otto” (2019), which revolved around a Jewish family patriarch, the Munich-based historian, who has a doctorate, was awarded the Hölderlin Prize, among others.

In the new novel, the protagonist Rosa Jerusher not only tries to reconstruct her own family history, but also somehow smoothes over the numerous dents that exist. The plot begins with Rosa being informed of her father’s death by telephone at her workplace. The main character has long since grown up when his father dies as a result of cancer.

For Rosa, this represents a huge turning point – especially in her head, because she is now alone with the complicated family history. She remembers her parents’ heated discussions, which she followed passively but with great attention: “So I did what I usually did: nothing at all, I didn’t move and I remembered everything.”

Israel, Germany and the difficult relationship

After the Holocaust, the mother obviously struggled with severe feelings of guilt in her role as a German woman. The father came to Germany from Israel (influenced by the Yom Kippur War) and wanted to pursue a career as a chemist, but ended up working in an insignificant laboratory.

The difficult German-Israeli relationship weighs on the family like a rock. There were also personal disappointments, accusations and accusations of failure. The mother leaves the family at some point, Rosa’s older sister Nadja had reduced contact to a minimum.

“The last time I called her (three years ago), all she said was: Hello? and I replied: Nadja, it’s me, and she said: Who?, and then she asked again: Who is it?, and then I realized that Nadja hadn’t even saved my number.”

The book title “Again from the beginning” implies both the desire for a new beginning and the difficult attempt to somehow sort out the biographical chaos. Dana von Suffrin has repeatedly interwoven fragmentary events from world history and consciously avoided a linear plot.

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Top-heavy things told easily

She jumps into the past, incorporates her father’s traditional memories and imagined dreams into the plot, and just as quickly switches back to monologues from the time after her father’s death. “Later, the commission commissioned complained that Hitler had failed to sharpen his pencil. It was blunt, and a line that was far too thick now became the border; at the scale of the map, it was six kilometers wide,” says a historical anecdote.

Dana von Suffrin told this “top-heavy” topic surprisingly easily, without any pathos, but with an affinity for black humor that cannot be overlooked.

The protagonist Rosa tries to iron out the family history for herself; behind this lies the search for “normality”, for light-heartedness, perhaps even for joy in life.

The author recently explained that she wanted to show how history is conveyed to us. “Can’t one also be very serious when laughing?” says Lessing’s “Minna von Barnhelm”.

Yes, you can. Dana von Suffrin mastered this artistic balancing act with flying colors and never lost her artistic balance. One of the most interesting novels of this spring season.