Kosakenberg
Sabine Rennefanz
222 pages
Aufbau Verlag, 2024
I came across Sabine Rennefanz’s Kosakenberg a while ago. I hadn’t read anything in German in a long time and I spent over two weeks on it, slowly and gradually getting into a good pace, and it was a very enjoyable and touching read.
The novel begins in 1997 when Kathleen leaves Kosakenberg, her hometown in the former East Germany, first for her study in Berlin, then for work in London. The book consists of ten homecomings, and each time the contrast between those who choose to leave and those who stay becomes ever starker. Nadine, her childhood neighbor and a former nurse, raises her son in the hometown, while Kathleen goes away to see the big world, wide-eyed in London’s graphics design circle. Nadine eventually buys out Kathleen’s family house, which her mother insists can only be sold to a local—especially since the Wessis all seem to be only interested in buying a place in the East and converting it into an exotic attraction. Kathleen knows she has no future in the backwater, but at the same time she resents Nadine for her seemingly much simpler presence as a true local, her taking over of the family house, and, in a way, her being the ersatz daughter of Kathleen’s mother.
People in Kosakenberg raise chickens for their eggs, and eggs mean everything there. Good times or bad times, there are always eggs as food, gifts, or even means of exchange. The significance of eggs as seeds of life is not lost on Kathleen, which only makes her feel worse upon reflecting on the diverging paths Nadine and she are now on. In the end, she decides to have a child of her own through a fertility clinic without a man, and she starts to wonder, during a visit to her mother’s grave while visibly pregnant, what the topsoil she is sitting on really means to her:
Warum hieß es Vaterland, aber Mutterboden? Bei Vaterland dachte ich an den Staat und seine Institutionen, an Gedenksteine und Uniformen. […] Mutterboden war ein Fundament, aus dem etwas wachsen konnte, das Halt gab. Kraft spendete. Mutterboden nahm das Alte, Abgestorbene, Verbrauchte auf und verwandelte es, damit etwes Neues daraus entstehen konnte.
Why was it called fatherland, but Mutterboden [topsoil; literally mother-ground]? When I thought of fatherland, I thought of the state and its institutions, of memorial stones and uniforms. […] Mutterboden was a foundation, from which something could grow, a foundation that provided support, that gave out strength. Mutterboden took in the old, the dead, the exhausted, and transformed them, so that something new could come out of it (209, my translation).
Kathleen’s complicated feelings towards her townspeople as well as her own life in London should sound close to home to many people who have chosen to leave, no matter where they grew up. She admires the cosmopolitan world that is London but also reports the insouciance her colleagues exhibit before Brexit. Das Heim, on the other hand, is not what it seems. At a Lesung in Groningen, the Netherlands, in late 2024, Rennefanz talked about how the word is always loaded with strong political meanings (and her Dutch audience responded that many terms derived from that word—such as heimwee—are most certainly German imports). Decline is something that we never handle well, hence the resentment. I do wonder, as I have now finished the book, whether we are too unimaginative about the meaning of home and ponder too little the notion of rebirth. Perhaps home doesn’t need to be a place that you only go back to; it is also a place that comes out from you. Perhaps it is the same for rebirth, the seeds of which you can carry with you.
2025-04-15