The dinner is a bust, in a direly recognisable way (“the professor’s speech, which had included several anecdotes about his cab ride from the airport”), and as soon as they can, the crew duck out to go wandering through the Berlin night, with its reminders of unsisterly Europe, past and present: the canal into which Rosa Luxemburg’s body was dumped, the stumbling stones, a street whose name commemorates the 1953 uprising against the East German government, an allegedly hip nightclub tucked into a corner of the U-bahn – a descent into the underworld – which turns out to be frequented by racists. Sexual tensions rise and fall, desire is blocked and rerouted; they need to find a Burger King.
Loading
Zink’s tolerance does have the limits that progressive tolerance tends ultimately to have, and there is a villain, of sorts (when I say “of sorts”, I don’t mean he isn’t horrible; I mean he’s ineffectual): Klaus, a corrupt, lowbrow, right-wing cop who spies Nicole early on, becomes convinced she is the victim of the predatory adults around her, and spends the whole novel shadowing the group in the hope of seeing something he can flash his badge for. (A trog v the multi-culti and gender and sexually fluid? The title may be neither here nor there, but what’s inside is a smack at the MAGA mindset.)
You could complain that Zink withholds from Klaus the sympathy she extends her other characters, even the dodgiest, that this crude caricature is just the kind of elitist condescension that itself fuels populist resentment. Still, the punchlines land even when the content isn’t entirely fresh (“His movement loved Israel. He wasn’t sure where they stood on Jews … He would have to ask someone privately”).
And nowadays, though, you have to laugh, don’t you? Or else it would just be crying, all the time.