Daniel Schulz Wir waren wie Brüder
[We Were Like Brothers]

Daniel Schulz was born in Potsdam in 1979, grew up in Brandenburg, and now heads the “Research and Reportage” department at the Berlin newspaper taz. In 2018 he was nominated for the German Reporter Prize for a journalistic piece that bore the same title as his debut novel. In it he described from the perspective of an adolescent the disintegration of the GDR and its structures, the consequences for those who dropped out of the job market, and the transition to an era that has since become known as the “years of the baseball bat,” referring to the shift to an openly rightwing or neo-Nazi mindset that has served as a breeding ground for many of the problems we are still grappling with today.

A lurking suspicion that the novel is merely filler, a puffed-up version of his reportage, soon proves unfounded, as it’s immediately clear that this is an author with a literary perspective, with a literary language all his own – a writer with a sense of narrative flow and dramatic tension. “I got my first Nazi.” This is the novel’s opening line. The narrator, now 20 years old, sits on a train in Berlin. Another passenger, a neo-Nazi judging by his outfit, has just found a potential victim when he spots a third passenger with long hair, glasses and fleece jacket, setting off his “hippie sensor.” But the evening ends unexpectedly, with the skinhead bleeding on the floor and the first-person narrator being bundled off to the police. End of exposition, flashback to 1989 when the East German state was collapsing and many new things were in the offing. The ten-year-old protagonist is living with his parents in a fictitious small town in Brandenburg where he has a good eye for change, before and after.


A reader might be forgiven for thinking he has seen enough news reports and heard enough eyewitness accounts to understand how the structures of radical rightwing violence were allowed to develop unchecked in the East. But Schulz’s study of a certain social environment over the course of eleven years is not just a gripping read, it also has something to tell us. The neo-Nazis thugs – they didn’t just land like UFOs in the backwaters of eastern Germany, they grew organically, as it were, out of a mixture of hopelessness and opportunism. Daniel Schulz depicts in a microcosmos a large-scale and comprehensive process of social transformation. A strange cosmos it is in which the disparate songs of Matthias Reim and Böhsen Onkelz are equally valid. A fitting image for the notion that good and evil cannot be neatly separated.

This social climate rapidly transforms when it becomes increasingly apparent that the grandiose promises of reunification, the “flourishing landscapes” just around the corner, were at best a massive delusion. A once working population sinks into depression or undergoes retraining, which in a former workers’ state is tantamount to a loss of identity. Hardship only grows, along with xenophobia and a propensity to violence. Discos, swimming holes, refugee homes – there are no safe spaces anymore. The narrator, too, has to decide whom he is going to spend his time with, what he can talk about and which things he should keep to himself. He also needs to decide how he feels about his classmate Mariam, whose family comes from Georgia and who is fearless in the face of new (East) German realities.

The pressure, the psychological violence of the post-Wall era, Daniel Schulz once said in an interview, is more distressing in hindsight than any of the kicks and punches he took. “We Were Like Brothers” is not a historical novel, but it does show a number of continuities. The title is taken from a song by the West German band Böhse Onkelz, a band which later tried to distance itself from its radical rightwing past, unconvincingly. An Onkelz song, “Thanks for Nothing,” blares from the cassette player of a car radio at some point in Schulz’s novel, a song containing the following lyrics: “You don’t know where I come from / And even if you did / You don’t know how I feel / You don’t know what it means / To be me.” These are the identity politics of the 1990s, the rightwing extremist sort. And, sadly, it sounds like the world we live in.