Class in German Society (Part I) Mittagsstunde by Dörte Hansen
Like other western societies, German society has become more and more divided. I would like to show how class divisions have become visible in modern German literature, how characters define class, and what effect the class structure has on them and on their lives. The first novel I would like to discuss in this respect is Mittagsstunde. (1)
Mittagsstunde is the second novel by Dörte Hansen (2) and was first published in 2018. The story is set in the village of Brinkebüll in the far north of Germany and describes the many changes that the village and village life underwent since the land consolidation of the early fifies. The novel focuses on the lives of Sönke and Ella Feddersen, their daughter Marret and grandson Ingwer.
In regard to social change and German class structure, Ingwer is the most important character in the novel. Before analysing in what way Ingwer’s life is affected by class, one needs to take a closer look at his family background.
Ingwer Feddersen’s family
During Ingwer’s childhood in the sixties and seventies the village of Brinkebüll is a closed community where people and families have their specific place in the village hierarchy and assume certain roles (3). The Feddersen family have owned the village inn for generations and the inn is the centre of village life, much more so than the church.
Ingwer feels particularly close to his grandparents, Sönke and Ella, because they raised him. Ingwer was born out of wedlock and never knew his father. His mother Marret was seventeen when she got pregnant by accident. Marret is slightly deranged and disappears one day when Ingwer is still a child. She is never heard of again. For a long time, Ingwer thinks of his grandparents as his parents and of his mother as his sister.
Ingwer’s relationship with his grandfather Sönke is aggravated by the fact that Sönke is not his real grandfather. During the war, Sönke and Ella had only just married when Sönke was drafted and sent to the Eastern front. He was captured by the Russians and interned in a soviet POW camp. Ella assumed her husband to be dead, fell in love with the village teacher Steensen and got pregnant by him. When Sönke unexpectedly returned, he and Ella resumed their marriage as if nothing had happened. Sönke was surprised how quickly their daughter was born and suspected the child might not be his, but he kept up appearances. Despite being aware that Ella secretly continued the relationship with the teacher (4), Sönke looked after their wayward daughter Marret as if she was his own.
Brinkebüll
Secrets and secrecy are necessary to hold the small community together. “They left much unsaid in Brinkebüll. […] The silence was like a second mother tongue which you picked up like a language, like learning how to talk. Even the children knew what you could say, and what you couldn’t.” (S.166) Although secrets and secrecy are necessary tools for the villagers to keep up appearances, it is also difficult to keep something secret in a small place like Brinkebüll. People get drunk and start talking, and secrets have a way of seeping out; this often happens at Sönke’s inn. (5)
Although Ingwer doesn’t have a terrible childhood like his schoolmate Heiko Ketelsen, who is regularly beaten by his father, the circumstances of Ingwer’s birth and his upbringing are quite far from the norm. To spare him pain, his grandparents pretended to be his parents and Marret his sister. But Ingwer finds out the truth, because people in the village keep dropping hints. As might be expected, the truth hits him hard. “It made a huge difference whether one was ashamed of one’s sister or one’s mother.” (S. 165) Once he has learned who his real mother is, he can’t help wondering who his real father might be. He secretly compares physical traits with a local man who is always kind to his mother despite her many strange antics. But, again, he learns more about his origins through hints dropped at the inn by a drunken customer. When he asks his grandfather Sönke to explain, Sönke dismisses those hints as drunken ramblings. Ingwer then turns to a girl from the village to find out more. Gönke Boysen is highly intelligent and ambitious and doesn’t see her future in the village. Therefore, she doesn’t feel bound by the unwritten code of silence most villagers observe and tells him what little is known about his father. (6)
Village teacher Steensen singles out students he regards as talented and helps them to continue their education at a grammar school outside the village. Steensen goes out of his way for Ingwer, however, because he has a vested interest in Ingwer’s success: Steensen is Ingwer’s real grandfather. “Four more years now, and teacher Steensen would use this time well. To get Marret’s boy on his way, to get him out of Brinkebüll […], first to the Gymnasium, then to university, then into the world of practices and chambers, evenings at the opera and travel. That was where he belonged, and teacher Steensen pushed him, slowly and gently he felt, towards the village exit. Away from Sönke Feddersen and his inn, his small barn full of animals.” (S.239) Once Ingwer starts grammar school, he loses touch with his classmates who continue at the village school. “Ingwer Feddersen, grammar schoolboy […] and Heiko Ketelsen, village schoolboy, suddenly led two different lives.” (S.290) The German three tier system ensures that class division is established and/or confirmed after primary school.
Ingwer’s life in Kiel
Despite his employment and success in academia, Ingwer feels like an impostor at times. “One of those children in hooded coats who sneaked into lecture halls and university classrooms like stowaways, like guests nobody had invited. Up till now he was still astonished that he had never been found out in all these years.” (S.23) Ingwer also feels he cannot hide his roots. “Sometimes he saw himself striding across the Kieler university campus like a farmer, with long wide strides, as if he still had the wheelbarrow in front of his belly. […] He saw himself in the high window panes of the humanities department, a countryman on his way to work, no suit could disguise this, no white shirt.” (S.19)
Ingwer has also inherited a certain disdain for the work he does now which makes it harder for him to feel content with his current life. “Somebody could catch him sitting in the basement, archaeological digging reports and pollen diagrams in front of him, his nose in the books, instead of doing something worthwhile: like chopping corn, welding a fender to a tractor, or waxing and polishing the dance floor in the big hall and then setting the tables for eighty people.” (S.23)
Upwardly mobile people like Ingwer seem to leave their roots behind, but they often remain strangely attached to their place of origin and end up living in a suspended state. “For some strange reason the potato children kept circling their villages all of their lives, they remained in their orbits that kept them not too close and not too far away.” (S.27)
Differences between social classes
Ingwer shares a house with Ragnhild and Claudius. The villa the three of them live in belongs to Ragnhild’s upper class family. Ragnhild despises her diplomat father and claims to want to shed all upper-class trappings. But she can only afford not to care about class distinctions, because she’s firmly entrenched in her social class. When necessary, she possesses the easy confidence of an upper-class person. She knows how to dress and how to talk appropriately which is crucial for her job as an architect. Mundane problems like grimy windows, an untidy, dirty flat or an overflowing sink neither bother nor interest her.
The third party in their shared accommodation is Claudius who also has an upper-class background. He is different from Ragnhild in so far as he is willing to do some household chores. But for Claudius, household duties need to be magnified into an important project to make them worth his while. Cooking dinner has to be a major event, cleaning windows needs to be planned in such detail the work takes days. Unwilling to fight with his flat mates, Ingwer quietly takes over. And the workload is considerable: Their shared flat has fourteen windows which Ingwer cleans all by himself. When Claudius cooks a large dinner for friends, it’s Ingwer who cleans the kitchen afterwards. Now that he’s begun to reflect on his life, Ingwer realizes he doesn’t like the role he’s been playing willingly for so long. He also notices the difference in attitude when he lives with his grandparents again. In contrast to Claudius and Ragnhild, his grandparents never considered work like cleaning to be beneath them and even try to do their share now, after they’ve become either physically or mentally unable to do so.
Ingwer’s professional success hasn’t translated into private happiness, because he doesn’t feel close to the people he met and befriended in later life. “He had a lingering feeling of having left Brinkebüll without permission and of having secretly gate-crashed into the university crowd, the intellectuals. Into this villa in Kiel, the shared accommodation with the daughter of a diplomat and the son of a judge. Now, after two and a half decades, there still seemed to be an invisible wall that separated him from these two.” (S.161) Rightly or wrongly, Ingwer thinks they didn’t have to earn their position in society the way he did, that they only know upper class life. “Claudius and Ragnhild grew up with sailing boats and silk carpets, with books, paintings, stucco and antique furniture. It belonged to them, this life, always did. They had inherited it, and didn’t have to do anything to attain it.” (S. 162) Ingwer doesn’t have their self-assuredness, their sense of entitlement, he tends to be undemanding and eager to be of service.
Ingwer is aware of his friends’ condescending attitude towards country people and is easily offended by their ridicule. He remains sensitive to their mockery, because he still identifies as someone from the countryside. One time he and his on-and-off partner Ragnhild visit his grandparents: “All of that [the mess she made in the car while they drove to the village] didn’t bother him, but her smirking out of the car window did, her “oh, God” every time she spotted a large concrete flower plot or a plastic front door from a hardware store. Her “Holy shit” when they passed the signpost for Brinkebüll bothered him, and the way she grinned when she repeated that on the parking lot of his grandfather’s inn. Loyal like a sheep and mortally wounded, he needed a long time before he could forgive her. He also needed to forgive himself that she had seen him like that, which was the hardest part. The boy from the countryside, no thick skin on the belly, oafishly offended.” (S.19)
Ingwer didn’t want the kind of life his grandparents had, but doesn’t feel at home in the life he has chosen for himself. “What difference did his excellent exam results, the PhD with a summa cum laude, make? He still felt like a fraudster with a made-up CV, who wasn’t where he belonged.” (S.162) His office reflects his unease about his current position: “The office looked not fully furnished yet, as if somebody had moved there for an interim period, a subtenant. Someone who expected to get a notice anytime. This did not look like the office of an archaeologist with a PhD. The boy from the village bench was squatting here, indifferent and frugal like a tuft of heather.” (S.194)
Looking back on his childhood, Ingwer concludes that his sense of not belonging has little to do with leaving the village, but that he felt left out there too. His sense of not being like others goes deeper than class distinctions. “He had always been there [parties at his grandfather’s inn], Ingwer Feddersen, marinated in dance music and cigarette smoke, watching the dance hall with the counter between him and Brinkebüll. Always there yet never among the crowd, and basically it had stayed that way. No matter where he went or what he did, there still seemed to be a counter between him and all of the others.” (S.64)
Dialect as a social marker
Dörte Hansen’s characters frequently think and speak in Plattdeutsch, the strong Northern German dialect. This recreates the past when people in rural communities predominantly spoke in dialect. If someone spoke a dialect, however, that was regarded as a distinct social marker. Aware of this, the village teacher Steensen does all he can to stop his pupils from using dialect once they start primary school. Speaking standard German is the most basic requirement for upward social mobility. “He [Steensen] tried to purge the farmer’s language from them, he didn’t tolerate a single word of it during his lessons, it had to be destroyed like a weed or the plague. Even during breaktime he fought the language of the hicks and the dunces with the zeal of a plague doctor.” (S.69) This zeal to stop the village children from using their dialect is all the more remarkable since Steensen is otherwise quite averse to change and takes great pride in local history.
Over the years the attitude to dialects has reversed. Now they are prized as local cultural heritage and much time and money is spent to keep them alive. Ingwer suspects, however, that society’s opinion of dialect speakers has not changed. At least that is the impression he gets when he talks to people like Ragnhild’s sister. Beatrice is learning Plattdeutsch in evening classes and regularly tries out her newly acquired skills on Ingwer. “She always bellowed as if someone who was speaking Plattdeutsch inevitably had to be deaf and/or slightly retarded. And essentially that was exactly what she was thinking too. Deaf as a post and simple in the head – but loveable somehow, that’s what countryfolk were like.” (S.158). For Ingwer the apparent change in attitude isn’t necessarily an improvement, because dialect speakers are still not regarded as equal: “In the past you were ostracised for speaking Platt, […] and now you were pampered like an endangered species on the red list as soon as you opened your mouth. So cute – like a field hamster, another species that was almost extinct. And so sweet. And so quaint.” (S. 159)
Inheritance
When Ragnhild turns fifty, Ingwer goes to Kiel for the weekend to celebrate with her and her friends. On his drive back to Brinkebüll, Ingwer feels lonely and disconsolate, and he can’t stop remembering lines from old pop songs. His mother Marret used to play them for him and sing them with him. Although Ingwer never rails openly against his fate, he does feel bitter at times. Not only did his mother not pass on anything of value, but she managed to burden him with sloppy songs whose banal lyrics now clog his thinking. “The way other parents left sailing yachts and silk carpets, Marret had left him a great potpourri of German pop songs.” (S.223)
Ingwer feels indebted to his grandfather Sönke, because he became a substitute father for him. Moreover, Sönke assumed this role knowing full well that they were not related by blood. Ingwer thinks he failed Sönke, because he didn’t want to continue the family tradition of keeping the village inn. He did not even want to stay in the village. He failed his grandfather, because he didn’t repay his love in the way Sönke would have wanted. And Sönke does have trouble coming to terms with Ingwer’s life choices, because Sönke’s generation wasn’t afforded much choice and generally expected to continue the work of their fathers. “One inherited work, one didn’t complain, one did it.” (S. 257)
While Ingwer’s successive acts of rebellion (refusing to get his hair cut by Sönke, continuing his education outside the village, etc. S.257/8) are reasonable and sensible choices, Ingwer continues to feel guilty about them, because Sönke did much more for him than could be expected under the circumstances. Ingwer tries to ease his conscience by coming home for a year to look after Sönke and Ella. He also wants to help to fulfil Sönke’s last dream – a party for their 70th wedding anniversary. The dream remains unfulfilled, because Sönke dies just a few days before the date of the party.
Conclusion
At the end of the novel Ingwer has begun to make basic changes in his life, like moving out of the villa he shared with Ragnhild and Claudius. He has also become aware that his personal life choices are part of a much bigger societal change. Even if he had wanted a life like his grandparents, Ingwer could not have emulated their life in the Brinkebüll of today. The closed community of farmers and their respective families no longer exists. Modern technology and farming methods have completely transformed farm work and thus village life. Moreover, villagers are no longer confined to their village but are mobile. Compared to his childhood, rural life has changed beyond recognition.
The social structure in the village used to be relatively homogeneous, apart from the two authority figures, the teacher and the priest. While the latter had almost no power, the teacher determined to a large extent the future of his students. Ingwer’s unusual family situation catapulted him out of the village and he managed to move up socially. But Ingwer happens to be at the tail end of the generations of the fifties and sixties who had more opportunities than the generations before them. The class structure of German society had not been erased by the war, but had been shaken up considerably. Soon after the war, the economy was booming, there was a labour shortage and education was free. Thus there were plenty of career opportunities for those who wanted them.
In the eighties and nineties, however, a more clearly defined and less open class structure emerges again. While upward social mobility is still possible, family background matters much more again. This trend is personified by the Bahnsen family. Henning/Bambi Bahnsen, who is the same age as Ingwer, can reap the benefits of his father’s business acumen. “The Bahnsens who had always had the biggest farm in the village, now also had one of the last ones.” (S.281) While most of the village farmers give up over the years, Paule Bahnsen buys up their land and turns his farm into a modern enterprise. His son Henning inherits not only a large modern farm, but also follows in his father’s footsteps as the mayor of Brinkebüll, thus continuing the family tradition of being a leading member of the local community. “Bambi Bahnsen, head of the village heritage club, took after his father. When you looked at the Bahnsens you understood what heredity looked like. There was nothing about Bambi that was new, or his own, he was just a continuation of his old man. The same relaxed authority, the same stamina when partying, the father even seemed to have bequeathed the job of mayor to his son.” (S.281) While Ingwer has been successful in his own right, he feels far less sure of his position in life, in society than Henning does. “He avoided taking him up on his offer [a visit at Henning’s house], because he wasn’t sure whether he felt up to Henning’s effectiveness. Maybe this wasn’t a good time. You didn’t want to be seen by a pike when you were drifting about like a cork.” (S.281) While Ingwer manages to move upward socially, he doesn’t feel secure or have a sense of belonging to the class he has nominally joined.
1. The following text contains translations of quotations from the novel. All translations of the original German have been made by me. The page numbers reference the German paperback version published in 2021.
The publisher kindly granted the right to publish the translations on this website.
© Dörte Hansen, Mittagsstunde, 2018 Penguin Verlag, in der Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe GmbH
2. Dörte Hansen’s first novel „Altes Land“ (2015) was published in English by St. Martin’s Press in 2016 under the title “This House is Mine”.
Both novels, “Altes Land” and “Mittagsstunde”, made it onto the SPIEGEL bestseller list.
3. At the time of Ingwer’s childhood, the village is a closed community with its own set of rules. If somebody comes from a long line of villagers like Folkert Ketelsen, he is an accepted member of the local community, even though he beats his wife and children. Folkert’s behaviour is deemed wrong yet it is condoned and no-one, not even the village teacher or the local priest, consider getting outside help. (S.96)
4. Ella continues the relationship until Steensen dies.
5. Ella, who is quiet and a good listener, knows more than anyone about the other villagers. (S.147)
6. Finding out the truth is a huge shock for Ingwer and the pain cuts deep. It also has a lasting effect: As an adult Ingwer is wary of finding out the truth and tends to avoid it. (S.254)
Mittagsstunde is the second novel by Dörte Hansen (2) and was first published in 2018. The story is set in the village of Brinkebüll in the far north of Germany and describes the many changes that the village and village life underwent since the land consolidation of the early fifies. The novel focuses on the lives of Sönke and Ella Feddersen, their daughter Marret and grandson Ingwer.
In regard to social change and German class structure, Ingwer is the most important character in the novel. Before analysing in what way Ingwer’s life is affected by class, one needs to take a closer look at his family background.
Ingwer Feddersen’s family
During Ingwer’s childhood in the sixties and seventies the village of Brinkebüll is a closed community where people and families have their specific place in the village hierarchy and assume certain roles (3). The Feddersen family have owned the village inn for generations and the inn is the centre of village life, much more so than the church.
Ingwer feels particularly close to his grandparents, Sönke and Ella, because they raised him. Ingwer was born out of wedlock and never knew his father. His mother Marret was seventeen when she got pregnant by accident. Marret is slightly deranged and disappears one day when Ingwer is still a child. She is never heard of again. For a long time, Ingwer thinks of his grandparents as his parents and of his mother as his sister.
Ingwer’s relationship with his grandfather Sönke is aggravated by the fact that Sönke is not his real grandfather. During the war, Sönke and Ella had only just married when Sönke was drafted and sent to the Eastern front. He was captured by the Russians and interned in a soviet POW camp. Ella assumed her husband to be dead, fell in love with the village teacher Steensen and got pregnant by him. When Sönke unexpectedly returned, he and Ella resumed their marriage as if nothing had happened. Sönke was surprised how quickly their daughter was born and suspected the child might not be his, but he kept up appearances. Despite being aware that Ella secretly continued the relationship with the teacher (4), Sönke looked after their wayward daughter Marret as if she was his own.
Brinkebüll
Secrets and secrecy are necessary to hold the small community together. “They left much unsaid in Brinkebüll. […] The silence was like a second mother tongue which you picked up like a language, like learning how to talk. Even the children knew what you could say, and what you couldn’t.” (S.166) Although secrets and secrecy are necessary tools for the villagers to keep up appearances, it is also difficult to keep something secret in a small place like Brinkebüll. People get drunk and start talking, and secrets have a way of seeping out; this often happens at Sönke’s inn. (5)
Although Ingwer doesn’t have a terrible childhood like his schoolmate Heiko Ketelsen, who is regularly beaten by his father, the circumstances of Ingwer’s birth and his upbringing are quite far from the norm. To spare him pain, his grandparents pretended to be his parents and Marret his sister. But Ingwer finds out the truth, because people in the village keep dropping hints. As might be expected, the truth hits him hard. “It made a huge difference whether one was ashamed of one’s sister or one’s mother.” (S. 165) Once he has learned who his real mother is, he can’t help wondering who his real father might be. He secretly compares physical traits with a local man who is always kind to his mother despite her many strange antics. But, again, he learns more about his origins through hints dropped at the inn by a drunken customer. When he asks his grandfather Sönke to explain, Sönke dismisses those hints as drunken ramblings. Ingwer then turns to a girl from the village to find out more. Gönke Boysen is highly intelligent and ambitious and doesn’t see her future in the village. Therefore, she doesn’t feel bound by the unwritten code of silence most villagers observe and tells him what little is known about his father. (6)
Village teacher Steensen singles out students he regards as talented and helps them to continue their education at a grammar school outside the village. Steensen goes out of his way for Ingwer, however, because he has a vested interest in Ingwer’s success: Steensen is Ingwer’s real grandfather. “Four more years now, and teacher Steensen would use this time well. To get Marret’s boy on his way, to get him out of Brinkebüll […], first to the Gymnasium, then to university, then into the world of practices and chambers, evenings at the opera and travel. That was where he belonged, and teacher Steensen pushed him, slowly and gently he felt, towards the village exit. Away from Sönke Feddersen and his inn, his small barn full of animals.” (S.239) Once Ingwer starts grammar school, he loses touch with his classmates who continue at the village school. “Ingwer Feddersen, grammar schoolboy […] and Heiko Ketelsen, village schoolboy, suddenly led two different lives.” (S.290) The German three tier system ensures that class division is established and/or confirmed after primary school.
Ingwer’s life in Kiel
Despite his employment and success in academia, Ingwer feels like an impostor at times. “One of those children in hooded coats who sneaked into lecture halls and university classrooms like stowaways, like guests nobody had invited. Up till now he was still astonished that he had never been found out in all these years.” (S.23) Ingwer also feels he cannot hide his roots. “Sometimes he saw himself striding across the Kieler university campus like a farmer, with long wide strides, as if he still had the wheelbarrow in front of his belly. […] He saw himself in the high window panes of the humanities department, a countryman on his way to work, no suit could disguise this, no white shirt.” (S.19)
Ingwer has also inherited a certain disdain for the work he does now which makes it harder for him to feel content with his current life. “Somebody could catch him sitting in the basement, archaeological digging reports and pollen diagrams in front of him, his nose in the books, instead of doing something worthwhile: like chopping corn, welding a fender to a tractor, or waxing and polishing the dance floor in the big hall and then setting the tables for eighty people.” (S.23)
Upwardly mobile people like Ingwer seem to leave their roots behind, but they often remain strangely attached to their place of origin and end up living in a suspended state. “For some strange reason the potato children kept circling their villages all of their lives, they remained in their orbits that kept them not too close and not too far away.” (S.27)
Differences between social classes
Ingwer shares a house with Ragnhild and Claudius. The villa the three of them live in belongs to Ragnhild’s upper class family. Ragnhild despises her diplomat father and claims to want to shed all upper-class trappings. But she can only afford not to care about class distinctions, because she’s firmly entrenched in her social class. When necessary, she possesses the easy confidence of an upper-class person. She knows how to dress and how to talk appropriately which is crucial for her job as an architect. Mundane problems like grimy windows, an untidy, dirty flat or an overflowing sink neither bother nor interest her.
The third party in their shared accommodation is Claudius who also has an upper-class background. He is different from Ragnhild in so far as he is willing to do some household chores. But for Claudius, household duties need to be magnified into an important project to make them worth his while. Cooking dinner has to be a major event, cleaning windows needs to be planned in such detail the work takes days. Unwilling to fight with his flat mates, Ingwer quietly takes over. And the workload is considerable: Their shared flat has fourteen windows which Ingwer cleans all by himself. When Claudius cooks a large dinner for friends, it’s Ingwer who cleans the kitchen afterwards. Now that he’s begun to reflect on his life, Ingwer realizes he doesn’t like the role he’s been playing willingly for so long. He also notices the difference in attitude when he lives with his grandparents again. In contrast to Claudius and Ragnhild, his grandparents never considered work like cleaning to be beneath them and even try to do their share now, after they’ve become either physically or mentally unable to do so.
Ingwer’s professional success hasn’t translated into private happiness, because he doesn’t feel close to the people he met and befriended in later life. “He had a lingering feeling of having left Brinkebüll without permission and of having secretly gate-crashed into the university crowd, the intellectuals. Into this villa in Kiel, the shared accommodation with the daughter of a diplomat and the son of a judge. Now, after two and a half decades, there still seemed to be an invisible wall that separated him from these two.” (S.161) Rightly or wrongly, Ingwer thinks they didn’t have to earn their position in society the way he did, that they only know upper class life. “Claudius and Ragnhild grew up with sailing boats and silk carpets, with books, paintings, stucco and antique furniture. It belonged to them, this life, always did. They had inherited it, and didn’t have to do anything to attain it.” (S. 162) Ingwer doesn’t have their self-assuredness, their sense of entitlement, he tends to be undemanding and eager to be of service.
Ingwer is aware of his friends’ condescending attitude towards country people and is easily offended by their ridicule. He remains sensitive to their mockery, because he still identifies as someone from the countryside. One time he and his on-and-off partner Ragnhild visit his grandparents: “All of that [the mess she made in the car while they drove to the village] didn’t bother him, but her smirking out of the car window did, her “oh, God” every time she spotted a large concrete flower plot or a plastic front door from a hardware store. Her “Holy shit” when they passed the signpost for Brinkebüll bothered him, and the way she grinned when she repeated that on the parking lot of his grandfather’s inn. Loyal like a sheep and mortally wounded, he needed a long time before he could forgive her. He also needed to forgive himself that she had seen him like that, which was the hardest part. The boy from the countryside, no thick skin on the belly, oafishly offended.” (S.19)
Ingwer didn’t want the kind of life his grandparents had, but doesn’t feel at home in the life he has chosen for himself. “What difference did his excellent exam results, the PhD with a summa cum laude, make? He still felt like a fraudster with a made-up CV, who wasn’t where he belonged.” (S.162) His office reflects his unease about his current position: “The office looked not fully furnished yet, as if somebody had moved there for an interim period, a subtenant. Someone who expected to get a notice anytime. This did not look like the office of an archaeologist with a PhD. The boy from the village bench was squatting here, indifferent and frugal like a tuft of heather.” (S.194)
Looking back on his childhood, Ingwer concludes that his sense of not belonging has little to do with leaving the village, but that he felt left out there too. His sense of not being like others goes deeper than class distinctions. “He had always been there [parties at his grandfather’s inn], Ingwer Feddersen, marinated in dance music and cigarette smoke, watching the dance hall with the counter between him and Brinkebüll. Always there yet never among the crowd, and basically it had stayed that way. No matter where he went or what he did, there still seemed to be a counter between him and all of the others.” (S.64)
Dialect as a social marker
Dörte Hansen’s characters frequently think and speak in Plattdeutsch, the strong Northern German dialect. This recreates the past when people in rural communities predominantly spoke in dialect. If someone spoke a dialect, however, that was regarded as a distinct social marker. Aware of this, the village teacher Steensen does all he can to stop his pupils from using dialect once they start primary school. Speaking standard German is the most basic requirement for upward social mobility. “He [Steensen] tried to purge the farmer’s language from them, he didn’t tolerate a single word of it during his lessons, it had to be destroyed like a weed or the plague. Even during breaktime he fought the language of the hicks and the dunces with the zeal of a plague doctor.” (S.69) This zeal to stop the village children from using their dialect is all the more remarkable since Steensen is otherwise quite averse to change and takes great pride in local history.
Over the years the attitude to dialects has reversed. Now they are prized as local cultural heritage and much time and money is spent to keep them alive. Ingwer suspects, however, that society’s opinion of dialect speakers has not changed. At least that is the impression he gets when he talks to people like Ragnhild’s sister. Beatrice is learning Plattdeutsch in evening classes and regularly tries out her newly acquired skills on Ingwer. “She always bellowed as if someone who was speaking Plattdeutsch inevitably had to be deaf and/or slightly retarded. And essentially that was exactly what she was thinking too. Deaf as a post and simple in the head – but loveable somehow, that’s what countryfolk were like.” (S.158). For Ingwer the apparent change in attitude isn’t necessarily an improvement, because dialect speakers are still not regarded as equal: “In the past you were ostracised for speaking Platt, […] and now you were pampered like an endangered species on the red list as soon as you opened your mouth. So cute – like a field hamster, another species that was almost extinct. And so sweet. And so quaint.” (S. 159)
Inheritance
When Ragnhild turns fifty, Ingwer goes to Kiel for the weekend to celebrate with her and her friends. On his drive back to Brinkebüll, Ingwer feels lonely and disconsolate, and he can’t stop remembering lines from old pop songs. His mother Marret used to play them for him and sing them with him. Although Ingwer never rails openly against his fate, he does feel bitter at times. Not only did his mother not pass on anything of value, but she managed to burden him with sloppy songs whose banal lyrics now clog his thinking. “The way other parents left sailing yachts and silk carpets, Marret had left him a great potpourri of German pop songs.” (S.223)
Ingwer feels indebted to his grandfather Sönke, because he became a substitute father for him. Moreover, Sönke assumed this role knowing full well that they were not related by blood. Ingwer thinks he failed Sönke, because he didn’t want to continue the family tradition of keeping the village inn. He did not even want to stay in the village. He failed his grandfather, because he didn’t repay his love in the way Sönke would have wanted. And Sönke does have trouble coming to terms with Ingwer’s life choices, because Sönke’s generation wasn’t afforded much choice and generally expected to continue the work of their fathers. “One inherited work, one didn’t complain, one did it.” (S. 257)
While Ingwer’s successive acts of rebellion (refusing to get his hair cut by Sönke, continuing his education outside the village, etc. S.257/8) are reasonable and sensible choices, Ingwer continues to feel guilty about them, because Sönke did much more for him than could be expected under the circumstances. Ingwer tries to ease his conscience by coming home for a year to look after Sönke and Ella. He also wants to help to fulfil Sönke’s last dream – a party for their 70th wedding anniversary. The dream remains unfulfilled, because Sönke dies just a few days before the date of the party.
Conclusion
At the end of the novel Ingwer has begun to make basic changes in his life, like moving out of the villa he shared with Ragnhild and Claudius. He has also become aware that his personal life choices are part of a much bigger societal change. Even if he had wanted a life like his grandparents, Ingwer could not have emulated their life in the Brinkebüll of today. The closed community of farmers and their respective families no longer exists. Modern technology and farming methods have completely transformed farm work and thus village life. Moreover, villagers are no longer confined to their village but are mobile. Compared to his childhood, rural life has changed beyond recognition.
The social structure in the village used to be relatively homogeneous, apart from the two authority figures, the teacher and the priest. While the latter had almost no power, the teacher determined to a large extent the future of his students. Ingwer’s unusual family situation catapulted him out of the village and he managed to move up socially. But Ingwer happens to be at the tail end of the generations of the fifties and sixties who had more opportunities than the generations before them. The class structure of German society had not been erased by the war, but had been shaken up considerably. Soon after the war, the economy was booming, there was a labour shortage and education was free. Thus there were plenty of career opportunities for those who wanted them.
In the eighties and nineties, however, a more clearly defined and less open class structure emerges again. While upward social mobility is still possible, family background matters much more again. This trend is personified by the Bahnsen family. Henning/Bambi Bahnsen, who is the same age as Ingwer, can reap the benefits of his father’s business acumen. “The Bahnsens who had always had the biggest farm in the village, now also had one of the last ones.” (S.281) While most of the village farmers give up over the years, Paule Bahnsen buys up their land and turns his farm into a modern enterprise. His son Henning inherits not only a large modern farm, but also follows in his father’s footsteps as the mayor of Brinkebüll, thus continuing the family tradition of being a leading member of the local community. “Bambi Bahnsen, head of the village heritage club, took after his father. When you looked at the Bahnsens you understood what heredity looked like. There was nothing about Bambi that was new, or his own, he was just a continuation of his old man. The same relaxed authority, the same stamina when partying, the father even seemed to have bequeathed the job of mayor to his son.” (S.281) While Ingwer has been successful in his own right, he feels far less sure of his position in life, in society than Henning does. “He avoided taking him up on his offer [a visit at Henning’s house], because he wasn’t sure whether he felt up to Henning’s effectiveness. Maybe this wasn’t a good time. You didn’t want to be seen by a pike when you were drifting about like a cork.” (S.281) While Ingwer manages to move upward socially, he doesn’t feel secure or have a sense of belonging to the class he has nominally joined.
1. The following text contains translations of quotations from the novel. All translations of the original German have been made by me. The page numbers reference the German paperback version published in 2021.
The publisher kindly granted the right to publish the translations on this website.
© Dörte Hansen, Mittagsstunde, 2018 Penguin Verlag, in der Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe GmbH
2. Dörte Hansen’s first novel „Altes Land“ (2015) was published in English by St. Martin’s Press in 2016 under the title “This House is Mine”.
Both novels, “Altes Land” and “Mittagsstunde”, made it onto the SPIEGEL bestseller list.
3. At the time of Ingwer’s childhood, the village is a closed community with its own set of rules. If somebody comes from a long line of villagers like Folkert Ketelsen, he is an accepted member of the local community, even though he beats his wife and children. Folkert’s behaviour is deemed wrong yet it is condoned and no-one, not even the village teacher or the local priest, consider getting outside help. (S.96)
4. Ella continues the relationship until Steensen dies.
5. Ella, who is quiet and a good listener, knows more than anyone about the other villagers. (S.147)
6. Finding out the truth is a huge shock for Ingwer and the pain cuts deep. It also has a lasting effect: As an adult Ingwer is wary of finding out the truth and tends to avoid it. (S.254)