un the fifty chapters in Anne Rabe’s novel The Possibility of Happiness, only five have headings. Four of them relate to the life of the grandfather of the first-person narrator Stine, or rather: his previous life before the granddaughter was born in 1986. It is the story of Paul Bahrlow, who was born into a poor Berlin family in 1923, grew up during the Nazi era, was wounded on the Eastern Front (fortunately for him) and was enthusiastic about the newly founded GDR – “We came from the war, Stinchen, we only wanted one thing – never again fascism!”
To his disappointment, the government has not returned the enthusiasm to the extent he had hoped. His career stalled, Paul ended up as a lecturer in the provinces on the Baltic Sea coast. In his second marriage he at least finds late family happiness; after a daughter who died shortly after birth, two more girls are born, one of them, Monika, is Stine’s mother. In 1989, the state that Paul was committed to in more than one way collapses, and that’s when the real drama begins, which can now be told entirely from Stine’s point of view. In order to understand it, long after the death of grandfather Paul, she sets out in search of traces of the contradictions in his life. What she has found is compiled in those four chapters.
They are each entitled “The Story of Paul Bahrlow”, and that could also be the name of the whole novel. Because its theme is something that Ines Geipel described as a transgenerational trauma: the passing on of the damage of a life under totalitarianism to those descendants who could no longer be directly shaped by it.
Seen in this way, Paul Bahrlow is the starting point for all of Stine’s experiences of violence, which, however, do not originate from this much-loved grandfather, who was her teacher and conversation partner as a child – the parallels to the grandfather from Judith Schalansky’s debut novel “Blue doesn’t suit you”, who also Baltic Sea as a central setting are amazing. No, the nemesis is her own mother, teacher and convinced communist, who is a dictator to her two children, Stine and the slightly younger Tim, whose repertoire of power ranges from psycho-terror to corporal punishment to sadism. One scene in which she forces her two children into scalding hot bath water is one of unforgettable brutality.
“Everything Violent”
She stands pars pro toto for life in East Germany, where the population is traumatized: “It was all violence, you think,” Stine explains to herself (the monologues are in italics), “everything full of violence.” And she saves herself in sarcasm when talking about it with her peers: “The stories you tell yourself with Pit and Vicky, Krissi and Ada are all about alcohol abuse, violence and brutality, and you laugh about it like there’s something to laugh about. Because you don’t know what else to do.”
