Sasha Marianna Salzmann Im Menschen muss alles herrlich sein
[Glorious People]

Sasha Marianna Salzmann is one of the most exciting personalities amongst the Russo-German authors whose experiences of migration and integration have been enriching the colour spectrum of contemporary German-language literature for a good numbers of years now. Born in Volvograd in 1985, she spent her early years in Moscow before emigrating to Germany with her Jewish family at the age of ten. After initially aiming for a career as a boxer, she then studied Literature and Drama, and soon found herself notching up successes as a playwright and dramaturge. In 2013 she became Resident Playwright and then, for two years, Head of the Studio Stage at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theatre - just at the point when the theatre was turning itself into a ‘post-migrant’ cultural hotspot by staging works that were at once political and experimental. As a result, Salzmann - who defines herself as non-binary - was already quite well known when in 2017 she published her first novel, Ausser sich (‘Beside Myself’). Praised as a ‘bold and successful attempt to negotiate a path through a minefield of cultural and sexual identities’, the novel won numerous prizes and was translated into 16 different languages.

Her new novel Im Menschen muss alles herrlich sein (‘Everything about a person should be exactly right’) has also caused a big stir, and duly found itself on the long-list for the German Book Prize. Whereas in Ausser sich she had turned elements of her own life into the odyssey of an incestuous pair of twins that takes us from Moscow to Istanbul via Berlin and provincial Germany, and is simultaneously interwoven with an exploration of the centuries-old history of the pair’s Russian-Jewish family, in this second book Salzmann investigates other people’s accounts of their life and times. Four women are at the heart of this cleverly contrived multi-perspectivist story that recounts the collapse of the Soviet Union, its effects on individual lives, and the difficulties facing emigrants in their search for identity in a new country that can never become their true home.

Lena, a doctor, and Tatiana, a hairdresser, moved to Jena from the Ukraine in the mid-1990s, and became friends with each other. Both have a grown-up daughter, and this constellation with its rich psychological potential is the other major theme of the novel. The two mothers attempt to deal with the loss of their homeland, while the daughters have to cope with their parents’ state of uprootedness. Edi, who shares some of the author’s own traits, just about battles through as a journalist, while Nina, not born until after her mother’s arrival in Germany and showing symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome, withdraws into her own inner world. In addition to its geographical aspects and its focus on contemporary history, the book also spotlights the different perspectives of two successive generations on the past and the present, the disjunction between experience and perception, the problems arising from their lack of language skills, and their struggle to bring about mutual understanding and empathy.

The novel’s title - a quote from Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya - finds ambivalent resonances within the story itself.  Whereas in the latter days of the Soviet Union the quotation remained a handy moralising mantra for those still loyal to the system, it acquires more than a hint of sarcasm in the perestroika era with its shift from rigid orthodoxy to existential uncertainty and the melting away of the last lingering illusions of a social utopia. Sasha Maria Salzmann’s highly expressive yet easy prose, conditioned by a playwright’s skill in both character creation and dramaturgy, enables us not only to see but also to feel the cataclysm and its repercussions with great intensity.