New novel by Markus Berges: Big feelings and social pressure

Fear of a nuclear state, falling in love and breaking away from conformism: In “Irre Wolken” Markus Berges talks about growing up in the eighties.

Novel author and singer of the band Earth Furniture: Markus Berges Photo: Matthias Sandmann

They call him “Ton” or “Big Pig” or “Hoss” after Ben Cartwright’s middle son. The year is 1986, the year of Chernobyl. Photos are developed at “Your Place”, there is smoking everywhere, headbutts from the teacher increase the ability to think. The first-person narrator is 19, has graduated from high school and is now doing a voluntary year of social work in a psychiatric hospital.

He’s still regularly yelled at by his father in the normal way, listens to Elvis Costello and the Talking Heads as part of the pop culture resistance, tries to read Ernst Bloch, and tears himself up when he looks at shadowy pussies in the magazines playboy or Lui. Above all, he is under the spell of his own embarrassment and therefore gives in to the introvert.

Now you’ll think: Aha, male boomer literature.

Not at all. This isn’t watching the Rudi Carrell show in your pajamas after taking a bath nostalgia. Contemporary horror elements like “The Puppeteer of Mexico” or “The Nipple” are used sparingly and precisely because the stuff was really on back then.

And Chernobyl is central because the woman he falls in love with returns to his clinic after the Gau. She suffers from schizophrenia, more precisely from the delusion of a totalitarian nuclear state. This is a great point because at the time, in circles that wanted to be progressive, this was not seen as a delusion, but rather as a necessary attitude. The delusions and conspiracy ideas of right-wing populists today reflect ours from the 80s, that becomes clear when reading.

Power of being deeply in love

At its core, however, this book is about something different, namely the liberating power of falling in love in the coming-of-age phase of life. It’s like this: Love and the first sex (at a high point) are more impactful for coping with life in Westphalia than this disaster in the Ukraine.

You usually write the first book about yourself, “autobiographically,” because you yourself are the only super story you can and want to tell. Markus Berges first wrote two novels that were far away from him, and that is not at all surprising for those who know him as the singer and lyricist of the truly unique Cologne band Erdmobile. Unlike Lindenberg, Grönemeyer or Whatnot, he never wanted to convey first-person narratives, first-person perspectives, first-person opinions with pop music and certainly didn’t want to create “discourse rock”. Having an opinion is not art, Berges once said.

On this day, Markus Berges enters a student café near the Humboldt University in Berlin-Mitte. Jeans, second-hand jacket, or at least that’s what it looks like. He comes from the ZDF lunchtime magazine Unter den Linden, where 10 or 15 minutes were devoted to his book. Apparently it was okay, he seems cheerful or even excited. “My attitude towards life has always been: I’m too bored in my life. There’s nothing to tell. That’s why writing about me is boring,” he says.

At some point he realized that fiction opens up opportunities to turn the supposed boredom of a normal life into a great story. He took the life of a boy born in Telgte in 1966 from a narrow middle-class environment (normally narrow at the time, brutally narrow from today’s perspective) who is exposed to a wide variety of social pressures. Berges connected this with his experiences as a nursing assistant in a closed psychiatric ward, with the disaster mentioned above, which, however, did not shake up many people’s everyday lives as much as one would sometimes think – and it all culminates in a forbidden love between this nurse and a patient.

The madness is not funny

She is an artist, a photographer, she believes that the “nuclear state” is sucking out her thoughts. The illness isn’t funny at all; once, in her madness, she almost kills a carer. The boy had never rebelled against law and order before (apart from a theft from “Your Place” where he was caught), but now he does something for her, which means a loss of control for him, which then triggers falling in love.

This is the trigger for his detachment from the all-dominating pressure of conformism of the law-and-order society and especially from his father, who represents the type of flak helper generation that was just too young to succumb to Nazi madness, but the consequences has suffered and now relies on small thinking, rules and keeping the ball flat.

But he also emancipates himself from the pseudo-rebellious peer group, such as his band, whose lowest common denominator is that they detest German rock. Because of this first love (before that he had only kissed one girl, but without tongue) he can admit that he also had a supertramp phase. He becomes more self-confident, bigger, freer. And less thick.

Was he a fat boy?

Now the uncharming question, but that’s what you already want to know: Was Markus Berges a fat boy?

“If it hadn’t been reality, it would have occurred to me,” he says over the noise of the cafe. A real Berges sentence, which most likely also refers to what else came to mind that wasn’t “reality,” but was necessary for the story to be successful.

So, yes, he was a fat kid himself, he was constantly bullied, he lost weight in his volunteer year after graduating from high school. But when he went back to his 80s for research purposes with old companions, they hardly remembered that he was fat. Let alone the constant bullying. It may have played a much smaller role in the relationship than he always feared. Very much in favor of it, you can’t sugarcoat how he was received by girls when it came to love.

The last third of the novel, now it gets spectacular, was written by Berges by hand. He had that in his head. There was no need for technology to rework and move the evolving words and sentences around many times. It was all there.

A reader who was supervising the writing process said to him: “I’m afraid of a tragic ending.” I had that in between reading it, Chernobyl, death and so on, I thought it would be way too bold and what good would it do? should be for a greater truth?

Lowered oomph

There is then an emotional oomph, but the content is deeper, a deeper good ending in several respects. The sarcophagus over Chernobyl was built in the fall of 1986, but that is only of marginal interest here.

The young man rides off into the sunset, his fat years are over, he now finds the usual high school talk about nuclear states and peace “popular”, as does distinction about pop bands. And while reading, this special atmosphere that Berges and his co-genius music director Ekimas can also create with Earth Furniture songs culminates; with which the unsayable is given expression and great feelings arise without slipping into sentimentality.

You think: Well, the boy doesn’t need a revolution, but neither does bowling nights and basement bars. He’ll manage everything okay. With his parents, with a life between obligation and freedom, with some decent job, with another great woman.

Seen this way, has it become boomer literature after all? “The word boomer literature is terrible,” Berges wrote when asked another day. Perhaps he himself is a “boomer” today in the sense of being non-ideological and quite pragmatic.

“Maybe I’m just 57 years old. But my first-person narrator is young. And for him it’s like it was for me when I was 19: everything is possible and nothing. Really everything! And above all, nothing.”