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Stand:
Von: Stefan Michalzik
Sanditz: Lukas Rietzschel presents an exciting and clever East German novel.
The scene is set in 1996. The Wall has fallen: Roland, Zimmer’s counterpart, stumbles upon this formulation. “Fallen,” sounds passive, as if the Wall had simply collapsed on its own, as if everything had happened automatically.
The Book
Lukas Rietzschel: Sanditz. Novel. dtv, Munich 2026. 480 pages, 26 euros.
Perhaps it is precisely the perspective of someone born in 1994 that has made the writer and playwright Lukas Rietzschel a sought-after talk show guest on East Germany after his award-winning and filmed novel “Mit der Faust in die Welt schlagen” (2018). His new novel is called “Sanditz.” The location is defined as a fictional small town “on the edge of the republic” in the Saxon Upper Lusatia, near the Polish border, the author’s homeland region.
One can think of Görlitz, the city where Rietzschel currently lives. Just like there, there is a Bismarck Tower (in the novel, it is a statue) on the Landeskrone. Like Rietzschel, the character Maria studied in Kassel – where, as “the one from the East,” she remained an outsider – and then returned to the region. After working as a local journalist on the fall of the Bismarck monument and the question of accountability, she would like to bring the case nationally to the “Zeit” newspaper. “AfD or Wölfe,” the fictional editor-in-chief remarks regarding the East, “everything else will be difficult.”
The Community Center as a Dissident Stronghold
Spanning from the past to the present, the story navigates two parallel strands, one starting in the seventies and the other in the year 2021 marked by COVID-19. The Protestant community center – with a library containing copies of unofficially desired Western books smuggled in, including Kafka and Wolf Biermann – serves as a conspiratorial hub of dissent, organizing demonstrations and eventually confrontationally besieging the local Stasi office to halt the destruction of files.
A focal point of the novel is the Wenzel family, who over three generations inhabit two of the four bungalows in a small settlement. An eerie place, secluded between two villages, originally built for people displaced by the coal mine. Poor cellphone reception, loneliness bordering on hermitage, uncertainty about one’s place in life – these are some of the motifs explored.
The narrative continues to shift between times and characters, with subplots branching out – providing readers with sketches and family trees for guidance.
Personal Life First, Politics Second
Politics? Central to the characters yet almost a peripheral matter at the same time. The primary focus is on mastering one’s own life. Failed love, including a gay relationship, unwanted pregnancy after a fleeting affair with a church official, and death.
And of course, there are moods. Most here don’t particularly care for “this pandemic nonsense.” Coming from the West, it has restricted freedoms. Closed borders, that was familiar somehow.
Left-wing parties – empty promises! – are not an option for Maria. While no one is explicitly attributed with far-right extremism here, the underlying reasons for the AfD’s electoral success are subtly and skillfully portrayed without didactic condescension. Rietzschel engages with his characters. The author does not align himself with AfD supporters. Mastering the art of nuanced characterization, he leaves judgment of his characters to the readers. There’s no pandering to victimhood myths.
There has been no shortage of novels on East Germany and post-unification – “Sanditz” is a significant addition.
