In the middle of reading, this thought shoots through your head very briefly: is the “Russianisco” for the present? Is the spelling of the Dmitrij Kapitelman, born in Kiev in 1986, who came to Germany at first glance in Kiev, born in Kiev in Kiev, in the tradition of those columns and stories with which the Vladimir Kaminer, born in Moscow in 1967 brought closer? When the narrator in chapterman new novel “Russian specialties” reports about his youth in Leipzig at the beginning of the nineties and of the first Volkswagen tread of his mother, who “already consisted of seventy percent of Lidl or Kaufland brochures” and “for a further twenty from cigarette stumbles”, one could feel briefly back in fireplace-critical and yet euphoric described reunification time. Soon the mother can afford a golf and will always be “motorized” for the son later to “remove” from any emergency situations. A humor of the desperate then changes from the sentence to sentence, and one understands that the comparison does not continue because a completely different time has been grabbed. “Since the war moved between us, I don’t love to get in. During a new trip, Mama Rundheraus said that the massacre of Butscha fake was. That Ukrainian had staged all of this with actors who stand dead in the streets to open up against Russia. I try to keep a distance. ”Despite the insurmountable trench that has opened up between mother and son, the two sit in a boat in a certain way – and sometimes together again in the car because there are many features in Germany. The son tries to further describe the new reality with humor, even if it is sometimes a humor of despair. The mother looks on Russian state television while driving on the cell phone that clamped on the dashboard. “In my mother’s cell phone, Russian recruits are preparing for their first parachute jump. ‘Mr. Korporal’, asks one of the frightened, blood cubs of Russian cadets. ‘What if the parachute does not open?’ – ‘Then you get a new one afterwards.’ “The narrator has to admit that the punch line was” actually great “. So he smiles “behavior and, if possible, not war -relative.” In the middle of Saxony – and yet deep in Eastern Europe Chapter Man this car scene on the brink between wit and shock and is poetically condensed. He even succeeds in describing a piece of East German reality, while the further further gives way: “We turn onto the A 14, pass the Kleinpösna gravel pit, Saxon excavator lakes and more cement mixing. And put deep in Eastern Europe. ” Dmitrij Kapitelman: “Russian specialties”. Roman.Hanser Berlin exaggeration is also the principle of the work as a whole. In highlighted sections, the narrator designs the history of his family from the arrival in Germany around 1994 to the present. The shop for “Russian specialties”, which she has operated together in Leipzig for a few years and which gives the book the title, becomes alienated from the connecting place to the focus of a alienation: While initially vodka and crimean sect, Nowosiric Pelmeni and Ukrainian kwas go together under one roof and on a counter, this is suddenly appealing with the growing tensions between Russia and Ukraine Young sellers in that shop still “like a historical-Slavic Pawn machine”, into which the East German customers are in the case of nostalgia and back to “eternal unity” with Russia, is becoming increasingly evident in the friction on Russian products, and he recognizes the “unbearably senseless tragedy that has brought Russia into my birthplace”. Groteskdas means that he travels to Kiev in the second part of the book, in the middle of the war. The fact that he can do this without being drafted into the army owes his German passport, but makes the Ukrainian border officer angry: “Why should the Fritzland Braunschweig sausage in the safe Fritzland should eat! And we pass here! ” Communication with the parents who are true to Russia, on the other hand, sometimes accepts grotesque features: “Hello Mama, the mass murderer you support, did not annoy me. Go to eat Georgian Zazivi chicken. ”The most delicate topic of the novel is the language. While the narrator feels Ukrainian, he describes his mother tongue as Russian, and when he asks friends in Ukraine: “So you have to forget your own mother tongue?”, Which means that he thinks Russian briefly tomb. One then replies that he did not do a Ukrainian two years ago. But now the Russian disgust him. The narrator therefore describes it as a “default -called tongue mother language”, more on the topic of the trip, namely to convince his mother of the absurdity of Russian propaganda with reports and pictures from his own view, unfortunately fails in an absurd way. After a visit to Butsha, the narrator sits in Kiev when there is an air raid. The light goes out in the bunker, but the cell phone has reception. The mother writes from Germany that there is “no right danger”, because “Russia only shoots military goals”. The sarcasm of Dmitrij Kapitelman’s short but abysmal novel is sometimes so strong that it can hardly be endured. Even a half -wound conclusion with another shot of desperate humor does not help. Novel. Hanser Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2025. 184 pages, born, € 23.
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