Review: Dana Vowinckel’s novel “Anton and Alma”

“Oh, I am the fool of fate!” cries Romeo in complete despair, but the quote could also come from Anton, one of the two title characters in Dana Vowinckel’s novel “Anton and Alma”. In it, the author confronts a Gen Z couple with an insurmountable difference: Anton is Jewish. Not Alma. They can love each other, but can they recognize each other?

Vowinckel, born in Berlin in 1996 and already awarded for her debut “Gewasser im Ziplock”, can wonderfully tell what sounds like a minimum requirement for a novelcière, but is not self-evident given the top of the bestseller lists. She strings parataxis after parataxis, which gives the text an excited character - as if your best friend wanted to update you on a love affair after a long absence. The author tenderly explores her characters, striving for ironic distance, for example when the young couple discuss privileges.

It is clear that Dirk has to serve as a signifier of an insurmountable Germanness; of being German that gets excited about agitation and hatred at the first opportunity. As if the German collective guilt could only be overcome with the mother of all transgressions, Alma wants to cook kosher according to orthodox regulations - even though she knows that Anton's family does not adhere to dietary regulations and eats oysters, which Alma naturally finds disgusting.

A wonderfully readable novel

Alma's philo-Semitism magnifies the couple's crisis because she tries on Jewishness like a costume. In the novel, this behavior explains Anton's sudden withdrawal from Alma. After all, she, “a girl from Biesdorf,” is already fantasizing about Jewish babies. The processing of all shades of identity politics at this point seems somewhat calculated. As a reader over forty, one wonders whether the conspicuous absence of passion represents a personality or generational crisis. Imagine Romeo exclaiming at the height of a conflict with Juliet, “It’s simply a matter of habitus!”

Alma's decision to convert to Judaism (finally) shakes up the story. Vowinckel has been preparing for the escalation of the conflict for a long time: Anton is researching the history of the Khazars, a Turkic people who converted to Judaism. In doing so, the author not only discusses the question of conversion, but also the basis of a conspiracy theory according to which today's Jews (as supposed descendants of the Khazars) have no claim to Israel. Alma finds himself in Judaism. After October 7th, Anton realizes that in Alma he has found what he was missing: home, if you can call it that. The catastrophe that follows hits him and the readers even harder. Identity crisis, German guilt and tragedy: a wonderfully readable, yet demanding novel with a well-calculated reference to the present: Vowinckel is likely to be the favorite in the race for the German Book Prize.

Dana Vowinckel: Anton and Alma. Suhrkamp, ​​542 pages, 26 euros