Shortlisted for the Deutscher Buchpreis 2018, Sechs Koffer by Maxim Biller is first and foremost an autobiographical account of Biller´s family story of wandering from the then Soviet Union to the Czechoslovakia and to Germany. As I´ve previously read the memoir of Elena Lappin, Biller´ sister, there were many details I was familiar with already. As justly Biller mentioned, Lappin´s memoir rarely got any mentions in the German media.
However, the style differ and so the focus of the story. More than dealing with the language challenges and understanding displacement, Biller is adding facts trying to trace out the fate of the main family characters and the meaning behind their actions. There are complex love triangles and betrayal under unusual circumstances, and there are memory games through which fragments are saved from oblivion while the entire story may be completely forgotten.
While he travels to Europe or Israel to recover those fragments, one of his background literary reference is Flüchtlingsgespräche - Refugee Conversations - by Bertold Brecht, a tragi-comical conversation about the fate of the post-WWII Europe, published the year of Brecht´s death, in 1956.
Biller is the witness of his own family story, simple people facing unusual historical events, as a Jew (I dare to make the observation, though, that there is no way to have the ´Purimball´ in December, most probably it was in fact the Hanukka Ball, as the earliest date for the joyous festival of Purim can be only at the end of January) born in the Soviet Union, forced to leave for political-survival reasons.
The writing is clear, distant even, with a touch of polemic, but nevertheless a contribution to the emerging literature - although still at its very beginning - written in the German language about non-German post-war life experience in Germany.
Rating: 3 stars
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