New novel by Juli Zeh and Simon Urban: Debates to the Blood

Cancel culture, wokeness, activism: Juli Zeh and Simon Urban’s novel “Between Worlds” wants to be contemporary. It just doesn’t work.

Watch separately, write together: Juli Zeh (l.), Simon Urban Photo: Peter von Felbert

There are fifteen passages on Martin Walser in this novel, which Juli Zeh wrote with a co-author, Simon Urban. Not to start with the obvious: What is it actually all about?

So. Both main characters, who, despite being under constant professional stress, send each other extensive e-mails and Whatsapp messages over 400 pages long, mostly arguing and sometimes consoling each other, adore Walser. Theresa, who inherited her father’s farm, used to read Walser to relax, and she once hit her husband with the Anselm-Kristlein trilogy (one of those places where you also have to laugh).

Stefan, on the other hand, who works in the feuilleton of a Hamburg weekly newspaper and constantly calls himself “culture boss” (which, by the way, a real culture boss would never do), feels the protests surrounding Walsers when things finally get heated around his newspaper Paulskirchen speech (“moral club Auschwitz”).

On top of that. Theresa and Stefan went on a pilgrimage to Nussdorf together as students, and when the dramaturgy of the book envisages them getting closer again, they plan (“Walser is still alive”) a new trip to Lake Constance.

Now one could expect that the novel gains a historical depth of focus at these points and expands the discursive topics of the present a bit. But he doesn’t. Martin Walser remains only a name. Neither is it discussed what these characters appreciate about him. The debate about the Peace Prize speech – which in reality fills entire anthologies – is still being broken down somehow.

From the perspective of the characters, the name Walser only functions as a reminiscence of a supposedly good, manageable time, until some students protested against him.

That’s where you stop. Walser of all people. Who was really involved in public strife all his life. The reference to him could have shown that even before social media and their shit storms, there were bloody debates, but it is broken down to, well, what actually? A reflex, a stick that you can jump over, depending on the setting, or not.

You can either nod off the Walser mentions: Ah, Walser, I know him too! Or you can dismiss: And then Walser – Juli Zeh again! But in neither case is what was previously thought extended in any way, or even shifted.

Jump over sticks

This is symptomatic. In their emails and messages, this Theresa and this Stefan keep holding out sticks to each other – and thus also to the reader – a whole parade of sticks. Stefan changed and initially shows an understanding of identity-political discourses around class, gender and race – which provokes Theresa to excitement and contradiction. For her part, Theresa occasionally talks about one of her employees on the farm named Christian, who for her is “the finest person I know”, to add: “AfD voters, by the way.”

Stefan has to swallow again: “Wow. Well, then nothing surprises me anymore in Brandenburg.”

This is one of the places where you can see the two engines that power this novel at work. On the one hand, there is the discursive engine, which runs at full speed to shovel as many current talk show topics into the book as possible. Open letters on the Ukraine war, radicalization of the climate movement, lack of rain, AfD in East Germany, storming of parliament, changes in the press landscape due to digitization, anti-racist language policy – everything occurs due to the antagonistic orientation of the main characters, including pros and cons.

Drift off in bubbles

On the other hand, there is the didactic motor. He too has to work hard, because the highlight of the book is that despite all the arguments, the two communication partners can stay together instead of drifting off into their respective bubbles. Which leads to a large number of quotable sentences: “Instead of constructive compromises, a merciless will to destroy flourishes,” they say. Or: “Has communication become a collective crime?” Or: “Just because someone is young doesn’t automatically make them right.” Or: “The so-called quality media have lost their compass. It will take revenge.”

Everything may or may not be right. But above all: If the mnemonic detector keeps moving while reading a novel, that’s not a good sign from a literary point of view. It is an expression of the fact that one does not take the figures seriously as linguistically formed art figures, but rather understands them as mouthpieces.

And how should one be able to take characters seriously who, like this Stefan, say of themselves: “After that I sat here with my new MacBook in my renovated apartment in the old building in the open Bulthaup kitchen at the breakfast bar, drank a fair trade Coffee from my outrageously expensive portafilter machine, and suddenly the silence was pounding in my ears…” What really rings in your ears while reading is the carefully composed cliché density.

marginalized youth

Of course, this book will be a bestseller, that’s as certain as the dismay that sets in when young people suffer from exclusion at school – which Zeh and Urban make good use of to illustrate the possible psychological effects of a shitstorm on the affected family. But what prevents this novel from being a really interesting book?

It’s not the topic that the plot eventually condenses into. The relationship between journalistic independence and social activism is actually being renegotiated under the conditions of the internet and generational change; sure, that could be exciting. Nor is it the constellation. Different careers, alienations and approaches, this is genuine literary material. It doesn’t even have to have been the somewhat cumbersome form of the modernized epistolary novel.

It’s more because Juli Zeh and Simon Urban are overly motivated on the one hand and taking it too easy on the other. They are over-motivated when it comes to the plot effort. So the problems of the main characters have to mirror each other; they both have to go through a development and deal with radicalized versions of themselves, Stefan with young environmental activists, Theresa with a radical eco-fighter.

Zeh and Urban can only accommodate all this because they treat their staff carelessly. The secondary characters, above all the environmental and anti-racism movements, end up being pure decals. The complicated negotiation processes within a top-class newspaper editorial office are boiled down to a few sticking points. And the fantasies about shitstorms, which are currently socially on the move, are well met by the team of authors – but they don’t have the ambition to get to the bottom of the mechanisms behind them.

dramaturgy of a thriller

Juli Zeh and Simon Urban have decided on the standards of a thriller: come to a head, let it escalate, showdown, final punch line. And not for more ambitious literary projects such as: feeling through characters and situations, making complexity shimmer, making the reader see and think something they hadn’t thought before, expanding the realm of human experience by differentiating.

What remains? This: If you really want to learn something about shitstorms, cancel culture, wokeness, and whatever the buzzwords are, that you didn’t already know before, or if you just really want to read something about the real people out there, you’re here – contrary to that Image of Juli Zeh circulating in public – not well served.

And as far as the thriller dramaturgy is concerned: Zeh and Urban wouldn’t get away with such decals of opponents in a good American series; the tension often also depends on the height of the conflicts that are actually being negotiated. In “Between Worlds”, however, even the actually interesting points of friction between journalistic independence and activism fall under the wheels of clichés.

In an interview in the NZZ Juli Zeh formulated her own reading as follows: “With the new book we stand up for differentiation, for perspective diversity, for pluralism, for the ambivalence and complexity of literature.” After reading it, one can only answer: No, you do that not at all, you only claim that.