Thea’s mother had a cleaning lady, Tim’s mother was one. This is how the initial situation can be described in which two people try to master the chaos of their everyday relationship.
In Wlada Kolosowa’s novel “Der Hausmann” Tim and Thea form one of four narrative threads: At the beginning of the story, she, long-term student, lawyer’s daughter, gets a new job in a start-up for vegan dog food. He, an unemployed illustrator from a poor background, is suddenly – as the title suggests – a house husband.
After their apartment in the hip neighborhood on Neukölln’s Maybachufer was evicted, the two got stranded somewhere outside the S-Bahn ring, in a completely different microcosm and in the midst of new neighbors.
There, the story of displacement, gentrification and urban hipsterism, which always carries a certain romanticism, collides with harsh reality: a neighborhood between poverty in old age, drug dealing, unemployment, experiences of violence and the remains of cigarette butts flicked away. This interrupts the flow of reading from time to time – just as real life cannot do without chaos. But it’s always entertaining.
There is, for example, the 19-year-old unemployed Maxim, who fled the war in eastern Ukraine before 2018 and to whom Tim now teaches German more or less voluntarily. And the 80-year-old neighbor Ms. Birkenberg, who recently discovered the Internet for herself and now blogs more or less legal savings tips. The two form two further narrative strands.
Kolosowa mixes Tim’s perspective as a first-person narrator with chat transcripts from Thea, excerpts from Tim’s unfinished graphic novel – illustrated by Raùl Soria – about climate change, Ms. Birkenberg’s savings tips and Maxim’s German diary. The story begins when a man suddenly rings Tim’s doorbell and suddenly punches him in the face – and Tim suddenly finds himself involved in drug conflicts.
Vlada Kolosowa works as a journalist and has written several non-fiction books, for example about her relationship with her home country Russia. “Der Hausmann” is her second novel and at the same time a kind of experiment: “I wanted a book that mixed different formats together,” she says.
Kolosowa describes her approach as journalistic research – even if at the end there is a fictional story, as in “Der Hausmann”. “I often go to places and ask people to explain certain things that might be useful for the book,” she says. There are no real role models for the four protagonists in the book. And yet, when you read it, you are reminded of people you have met in Berlin several times in one way or another. “I’m generally attracted to different characters who are forced by external circumstances to interact with each other,” says Vlada Kolosova.
In doing so, she processes her own life experiences and anecdotes, even unconsciously. “Perhaps that also reflects a bit of the longing to break out of your own bubble,” she says.
Born in St. Petersburg, Kolosowa came to Germany at the age of twelve. She knows from her own experience what it feels like to live like Tim and Mrs. Birkenberg in precarious conditions and with little money. Like Maxim, she knows what it’s like to arrive somewhere and first have to learn the new rules of the game – even if you can’t compare her personal migration with Maxim’s escape, she emphasizes.
“Der Hausmann” reads like a modern tale of class struggle, with a feminist touch: Here Thea is the one who brings home the money – her father’s and also her own. But it is also Thea who ends up being swept away by the maelstrom of capitalism, which she cannot escape even on the outskirts of Berlin.
“Thea’s problem was: she wanted a job that was considered precarious but wasn’t precarious. Improving the world, but without grueling discussions in general assemblies. She would like to be an artist, but without being poor. Sometimes I had the suspicion that she just wanted a job that looked good next to her name on Twitter,” Kolosowa sums up a feeling that probably many young Berliners share.
The rest of the narrative strands are also about class differences: For example, when Ms. Birkenberg swipes umbrellas in the library and soap in public toilets in order to somehow make ends meet with a little dignity. The story of the Ukrainian Maxim then becomes unexpectedly topical. “The story takes place in 2018, when the war in Ukraine had just been forgotten,” says Kolosova. The fact that her book has now been overtaken by reality to a certain extent is “of course blatant,” says Kolosowa.
Suddenly she found herself confronted with the question: is this her war that she is telling about? Shouldn’t Ukrainian authors get the attention now? She then came to the conclusion that it is just as important today as it was in 2018 that the war gets attention. But also that the social problems that we have in Germany are not forgotten – and that can easily collide in a house in a neighborhood in Berlin.
