Translated by Jo Heinrich

I am frantically reading shorter novels to find my next book for book club. We have a month to read a book which seems like a long time until it isn’t! This is one that I read hoping that it would be suitable but it isn’t, although that is not to say that I didn’t like it.

Set in Marzahn, a district that used to be in the GDR, Russian built and mainly concrete but housing a community that has been there for some time. It has a history that is not always delightful:

Marzahn was the site of a labour camp (today a water treatment plant), where Romani were interned during the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, away from visitors’ eyes. As a part of the Nazi Porajmos extermination policy, up to 2000 inmates remained there until 1943, when they were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where most of them were gassed. In 1941 the large factory of the Carl Hasse & Wrede machine tool company (now Knorr-Bremse) was erected, where hundreds of forced labourers were employed. The victims were buried at the nearby Parkfriedhof; a memorial marks the site.

Wikipedia

It was a model socialist town but now one that has lived through major changes.

This book gives us character descriptions of people in the community who visit the chiropractice where the narrator, author(?), works. All quite elderly now, but there is something about having your feet looked after that encourages discussion and confidences. There is a pride in the place and the people, making the novel a love letter to Marzahn, as the title suggests, and showing it as a somewhere where people stand on their own two feet.

Framing the book which I suspect is more non-fiction than fiction is the story of the narrator/author who decided mid-life to leave writing and retrain as a chiropodist. Like so many women of that age she felt invisible caring for her partner, her children leaving home and struggling with her writing. And I think it is this invisibility that runs throughout the book – the stories of these characters matter. They are people that might seem invisible both to themselves and others but who have lived through the transition from communism to capitalism with all the effects this has had on their lives and have had lives that now must feel much larger than their present ones.

This is a story about serving others in small ways but ways that make a huge difference to the recipients. It enables us to see that small matters and that people who are often overlooked have a life that is more interesting than we might expect. And it is through this service and noticing of people that Oskamp found her writing again. Win win I would say.