Deniz Ohde Streulicht
[Sky Glow]

The little girl is like a tracker reading the landscape. Each time she steps into her home, the nameless first-person narrator of Deniz Ohde’s gripping debut Sky Glow must immediately interpret all the signs and spot any changes. Has the furniture been shifted, is a particular door shut, is there something in the atmosphere? She must gauge the situation carefully to avoid provoking her father: a false move or an off-key remark is enough to set him raging. The girl enters into a tacit alliance with her Turkish mother, but they are powerless in the face of the man’s violence which he ends up taking out on things in the flat to avoid attacking his wife and daughter. The girl, who is highly sensitive, is in a frequent state of anxiety, but no one notices, least of all her teachers. School is no sanctuary.
 
The realisation seeps into the girl like the air that she breathes: with her unusual name, her foreign mother and her working-class father, she is inferior to the others. She is pigeonholed, harassed, chastised and eventually forced out. Her father, who is incapable of getting rid of things and drowns all his fears in booze, advises her to conform as much as she can. For his part, he makes himself invisible on the local industrial estate where he has been dipping aluminium sheet into electrolyte for thirty years. ‘Not my thing’ and ‘We don’t need that’ are standard phrases he rolls out to keep the family in check. His wife must have had spirit once - as a young girl she ran away from the Black Sea village where she grew up - but her rebellious streak seems to have been exhausted. The balance at home is precarious: in the absence of family meals, the television dictates the rhythm of the days, and nothing is ever talked about.
 
Such processes are impressively conveyed in Deniz Ohde’s debut novel. The title Sky Glow is inspired by the light emissions from the industrial plant close to where the narrator grew up, and the mechanisms of exclusion are every bit as subtle and penetrating as the scattered light and heavy, acidic air that fill the atmosphere. Ohde uses a frame story: at the start of the book, the grown-up narrator returns to stay with her widowed father for the wedding of childhood friends. The moment she sets foot in her hometown she is enveloped in the distinctive smell of the factories. The story of her childhood is told in dense flashbacks. She shares a close-knit friendship with Pikka and Sophia, but is plagued by shyness, and struggles to live up to her teachers’ expectations. There is a sifting process in place, the children are told when they start grammar school and the defenceless heroine is promptly ‘sifted’. Her parents, who deny any racist abuse, are equally helpless, and her friends give her to understand that university is no place for her. But something in her clings to the idea of a good education and she battles through.
 
Ohde uses precise, vigorous prose to set the scene of her novel, which is set in a thinly disguised version of the Frankfurt district of Höchst. She describes the smoking factory chimneys, the dirty streets with their corner pubs and discount shops, the well-groomed front gardens and basement workshops at the homes of the narrator’s bourgeois friends, and the sticky surfaces and clutter of her parents’ flat. She returns repeatedly to the figures of the parents, illuminating their brokenness without condemning it. Ohde has written a novel on a subject rarely tackled in German literature: social class. There are, of course Ulla Hahn’s tales of social climbing, Angelika Klüssendorf’s compelling portraits of a depraved GDR family and Christian Baron’s nightmarish autobiographical texts, but Ohde’s novel tells of a twofold discrimination. The narrator’s sense of coming from the ‘wrong’ social class is exacerbated by her mother’s Turkish origins.
 
Deniz Ohde was born in Frankfurt in 1988 and studied German literature in Leipzig where she lives today. Social struggles over wealth distribution are familiar to her from experience, but she doesn’t give us a story of emancipation and progress; there isn’t a trace of triumph in her tone. Flickering through the story like the writing on the wall is the warning tale of a woman who immolated herself in the mid-nineties; a photograph of her distorted face has etched itself on the narrator’s mind. Does the narrator manage to break free? If nothing else, she now has a voice. In this impressive novel, Deniz Ohde has succeeded in giving us literary access to a shockingly little-known segment of life.