Julia Franck: The Blind Side of the Heart
“Die Mittagsfrau”, the German title of this fine novel, refers to a folk legend from the eastern regions of Germany. At the height of noon, the phantom of a woman appears in front of workers in the fields. Her presence causes nausea, disorientation, even death at times. The only defence against her is to talk about your life, your work, your hopes and fears until the declining sun robs her of her power.
Soon after she won the prestigious Deutscher Buchpreis for this novel in 2007, Julia Franck gave several interviews in which she explained the connection between the novel and its title. Franck was born in East Berlin in 1970. Some years after her birth her family moved to the western part of the divided city. Franck studied in Berlin and has travelled extensively in the United States and Latin America. She has worked in both the electronic and the print media. Since the success of this novel – it sold 800 000 copies in Germany alone – she has devoted herself entirely to her writing.
Doubtless, Franck’s early years in East Berlin and the grim history of the last decades of the GDR would have provided material enough to beguile the Noonday Witch, but her novel turns its back on that subject to dig deep into the author’s family history during the turbulent first half of the twentieth century, in an attempt to placate other demons.
“The Blind Side of the Heart” begins in 1945 in Stettin – at the time still a part of Germany. The Second World War is drawing to an end. Alice, a nurse, struggles to feed and care for her young son Peter. Her husband, an engineer who had played an important part in the construction of the first autobahns, left her some time earlier – for another woman and because of an irregularity in Alice’s background. Eventually, Alice tells Peter that they will leave the city to seek shelter elsewhere. She packs a small bag of his belongings; the two manage at length to board an overcrowded carriage on a slow-moving train. Then, at a country siding, Alice abandons her child.
This is, in essence, what had happened to Franck’s father. He could never throw off, Franck has said, the effects of what he saw as a terrible betrayal. In later life he refused to have any contact with his mother – who never married again and spent the rest of her life as a nurse – just as Peter, at the end of the novel, hides in a barn when his mother comes to his uncle’s farm on his seventeenth birthday.
This grim tale of blighted lives forms no more, however, than a pair of bookends for the bulk of Franck’s novel, which explores a different world and (or so it would seem) the lives of entirely different people. Dark-haired Martha and golden-haired Helene are the daughters of the owner of a printing shop in the East Saxon town of Bautzen on the Spree river. Their mother Selma, from Breslau (now the Polish Wrocław), a “foreigner” is treated with suspicion, sometimes contempt, by the good burghers of Bautzen. She is a driven creature, resentful of her daughters who have survived while all her male children were stillborn or lived only a few days. The girls’ father was severely injured in a senseless accident during the first weeks of the Great War. He managed to make his way home to Bautzen to die not as a hero but as a victim of the idiocy of war.
Golden-haired Helene is a gifted child, but her family’s strained circumstances and their ineradicably conservative views prevent her from gaining a proper education. She follows in the footsteps of her sister Martha and Martha’s friend Leontine in trying to become a nurse. Leontine comes to experience a piece of good luck: to move to Berlin for further training in nursing and medicine. The sisters, especially Martha (who is sexually attracted to Leontine) are distraught, but good fortune seems to smile on them too. Their mother’s estranged sister Fanny invites them to live with her in her grand Berlin apartment. There the awkwardly provincial sisters experience the sordid glamour of Berlin during Weimar Republic – in these pages Franck’s writing mirrors the grotesque intensity of Otto Dix’s paintings.
Martha and Leontine are sucked into the drug-ridden world of Fanny’s circle, the reckless life of fashionable Berlin in the years just before Hitler’s rise to power. Helene stays largely aloof. Then she meets a young man Carl, the son of a renowned astronomer. Carl’s parents own a sumptuous villa on the Wannsee. Defying convention, Helene goes to live with Carl in his modest student’s room. They plan to marry but one icy day Carl loses control of his bicycle and is killed. Helene is consumed by grief, but political circumstances – kept discreetly in the background until this point – impinge on her woes. Her mother Selma is Jewish (as was Carl), so Helene and her sister are both classified as non-Aryan and find their daily lives increasingly circumscribed by restrictions of the most demeaning kind.
It is in these circumstances that Helene meets Wilhelm, the flower of Aryan manhood, the builder of roads who believes fervently in Germany’s golden future. He pursues her and she, at length, succumbs to his entreaties. They marry after Wilhelm manages to get false papers with an impeccably untainted bloodline for Alice, the name he has given her more or less at a whim. Soon the marriage turns sour, especially after Wilhelm discovers that his frail bride is not a virgin. Franck depicts his smug cruelty with unflinching clarity.
And so Alice/Helene is left alone with her child. Franck gives no firm explanation why she (and Franck’s grandmother) abandoned her son. Instead she presents, with extraordinary maturity and skill, the long train of circumstances – beginning in an older and more gentle Germany – that brought Helene to that point. The most telling moment comes late in the novel. In the last autumn of the war, mother and child go to the woods near Stettin to look for mushrooms. They are met by an appalling stench. It comes, they find, from a cattle truck on a siding. What is the source of that stench? the distraught Helene wonders. Perhaps some of the livestock had perished...
The Book
Julia Franck: The Blind Side of the Heart / translated by Anthea Bell - London: Vintage, 2010. - 424 pages. ISBN 978-00995-2423-6
Original title: Die Mittagsfrau (German)
