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“You can’t run away.” This is the central insight which Julian Collien, twelve going on thirteen, gleans from the end of a long summer that has changed his life in many ways. Like most of Rothmann’s novels, Young Light is a coming-of-age story. Once again, his subject is adolescence and the critical passage from childhood to young adulthood: a boy’s loss of innocence in a twofold sense, the painful realization of his inability to flee the constraints of family, school and economics, and his efforts to emancipate his own newly discovered individuality.
Young Light describes the events of several pivotal summer weeks in the mid-sixties in a lower-class mining town. The perspective of the adolescent Julien, a naïve, dreamy, yet sensitive and keenly observant boy, lends great intensity to the panorama of a very specific milieu – the daily routine and familial life of the miners – which at the same time is embedded in the typically stifling atmosphere of the sixties. Yet this tale of adolescence and initiation also has a relevance that reaches far beyond the time period.
Rothmann describes a tender, melancholy farewell to childhood. The shimmer of the hot summer air reflects the quivers of Julian’s inner confusion: full of forebodings, he registers what is going on around him, but he has not yet learned to interpret it. Because there is not enough money for the entire family to take a summer vacation, Julian stays at home with his taciturn father while his sick, permanently overwhelmed mother visits relatives in Northern Germany with his little sister. Julian cares for his father, solicitously making tea and packing sandwiches for his shifts under ground, all as a way of being close to him. When his father is at work, the loner Julian usually sits around in the apartment by himself to escape the bullying neighborhood boys who have excluded him from their “gang”. Either he spends hours in front of the television, trying to learn “French kissing” from romantic movies, or he observes Marusha, the precocious fifteen-year-old stepdaughter of Herr Gorny, the Collien family’s landlord. Marusha, with her constant stream of male visitors, both fascinates and frightens Julian. Especially as she keeps provoking him with a verbal and sexual directness to which he has no response.
Julian is not the only one who finds it hard to resist Marusha’s appeal and provocative behavior – his father is also attracted to the vivacious, self-confident girl, and in the end he actually sleeps with her. Julian witnesses the act of adultery which provokes the landlord Gorny to evict the family and makes Julian’s mother return from vacation in an even worse mood. For a number of reasons, Julian feels guilty for the fact that the family is being forced to move under such humiliating circumstances. For one thing, the slimy Gorny had made sexual advances on him, which he managed to escape. And he believes that he could and should have been able to prevent his father from committing this betrayal. He tries to shoulder all the guilt, asking absolution for both of them at confession. Of course, the priest refuses. It is hard for Julian to understand that it is impossible to repent for another person’s sins, much less atone for them – however dearly he might wish to make this sacrifice to prove his love for his taciturn, emotionally distant father.
The book ends with tentative steps into a future which remains open: the family moves, and with his old home Julian leaves behind his childhood. And he consciously begins a new phase of his life by deciding to follow the advice of cranky old Pomrehn, who leads a solitary existence at a nearby farm: “You can’t run away. Wherever you go, you’re in the world, my boy. And the world is always the same. So stay where you are, and if there’s a storm brewing, tell yourself: however bad it gets, it will pass. […] And once you’ve decided to choose freedom, nothing can happen to you. Ever.” (p. 212) Here the old man formulates an insight typical of Rothmann’s fictional worlds, in which the end of childhood is both a presentiment of early suffering and a consoling dream of fulfillment, whatever this fulfillment may turn out to be.
This floating uncertainty and subliminal menace is also reflected in the death motif which pervades a summer idyll charged with eroticism and aggression: at six points the narrative is interrupted by descriptions of the dangers faced underground by a nameless miner who is finally killed by a falling rock in a tunnel. These snapshots symbolize the omnipresence of existential threat and give this tale of adolescence a message of universal relevance.
With this novel, Ralf Rothmann returns to the constricted and constricting world of his childhood, continuing the Ruhr trilogy which began with the novels Stier (Steer, 1991), Wäldernacht (Forest Night, 1994) and Milch und Kohle (Milk and Coal, 2000). Like them, Young Light moves between coal mine and workers’ housing, depicting the daily routine of this lower-class milieu with cool precision and empathy. Once again Rothmann proves himself a keen judge of character, never resorting to explicit psychology, but revealing his characters’ inner lives, their vulnerability and their often futile search for meaning with a salutary discretion and sensitivity which never denigrates the characters and their way of life.
Rothmann is a master of understatement, describing his characters and their milieu with great precision, yet never straying into socially-conscious kitsch or idealization. With his striking images and his nuanced language, he has created a work whose atmospheric intensity makes the adolescent experience come alive in all its complexity.
Anne-Bitt Gerecke
August 2005
[Translated by Isabel Cole]
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