Christoph Hein’s new novel “Under the Dust of Time”: The Rhetoric of Demagogues

In his best novels, the writer Christoph Hein looks back into Germany’s past to tell of the great crises in Europe in the 20th century. Hein unfolds his historically versed stories, which are often based on biography, with almost chronic accuracy.

However, these novels are not dusty, also because they tell a lot about current conflict situations without explicitly mentioning them. This is also the case in his new prose work “Unterm Staub der Zeit”, which tells the story of fourteen-year-old Daniel, who came to West Berlin from his East German hometown of Guldenberg in 1958 to go to high school there.

As the son of a pastor, Daniel was not allowed to take his Abitur in the GDR. So the father accompanies the shy but attentive boy to Grunewald. Already at the border the insanity of that time becomes clear. The police officers find some textbooks in their luggage. Greek! Latin! highly suspicious. Then the border guard comes across a dictionary with Cyrillic characters. The policeman is pleased and speaks of a useful “Soviet dictionary”.

The father can’t resist lecturing the border guard that there is no Soviet language, it’s actually Russian. The uniformed man’s pockmarks are turning color, and he would like to arrest the smart-ass man. But he’s probably afraid of making a fool of himself, so father and son are allowed to cross the zone border.

Hardly arrived in the West, Daniel is divided into the so-called C-branch of the high school, in which only students from the GDR sit. At that time, integration was not yet a requirement, and the pedagogy was sometimes limited to angry speeches against “the rulers in the Kremlin”. The Cold War also took place in the classroom, but the students didn’t care about world politics. The much more important question was: how to earn a few pennies in your free time? Daniel works as a newspaper seller and soon he can afford a pea soup in Aschinger’s “Standing Beer Hall”. The food in the dormitory is inedible.

The descriptions of the rough conditions both in the boarding school and outside in the city are detailed and seem so authentic that the question of whether the author is using his own experiences is almost obsolete. Nevertheless, or precisely because of this, Christoph Hein maintains a linguistic distance from the experiences. He never writes from the perspective of personal concern, and certainly not as a moralist. In times when people are constantly talking about current sensitivities or the interpretation of past epochs, his novels are works of enlightenment simply because of their laconic tone.

Star preacher Billy Graham

In fact, many scenes in “Unterm Staub der Zeit” are reminiscent of current phenomena. Daniel also attended the performance of an American revivalist. In his sermon, Billy Graham divided the world into good and bad; he referred to the political and religious camps as either wonderful or as terrible. His vocabulary was limited but always clear.

Insta hearts or Facebook thumbs, tearful smileys or anger emojis didn’t exist back then, but the atmosphere among those present corresponded to the usual social media atmosphere. Daniel and his friends didn’t raise their arms at the acclaimed conclusion of the speech, however, but remained seated, which “earned angry looks from those around us.”

For Hein, prose is just a finger exercise

Of course, Billy Graham and his teachings on salvation are not fiction. Just as little as a rock concert by Bill Haley described in the book, which ended in a mass brawl. As the first-person narrator, Daniel remains an uninvolved spectator in these events; he will soon concentrate on what really drives him, namely the theatre. Which closes the biographical arc again. Christoph Hein once said that he sees himself primarily as a dramatist, that prose is just finger exercise. A large part of the new novel is also dialogue, as if the author had not lost his literary passion for the stage.

Historical autofiction

Christoph Hein was already writing historical autofiction before the term existed. In fact, it would be superfluous to label his prose. His earlier novels “Horns Ende” and “Willenbrock” as well as later works such as “Trutz” and “Glückskind mit Vater” have long been part of the canon of German-German literature. Hein rarely appears because he wants to use every minute to continue writing.

Whenever he reads from the new work, as he did at the last Leipzig Book Fair, his events are sold out, even in the largest halls. The writer, who was born in Heinzendorf in Upper Silesia in 1944, then seeks critical dialogue on the podium, above all with subsequent generations; his public reflections on the present are certainly the opposite of Graham’s missionary outreach, but rather an ironic reflection that requires no collective approval. This is precisely why the author is so popular to this day. With “Unterm Staub der Zeit” Christoph Hein has once again succeeded in writing a novel that reads like a classic.