First published in 2018, this is by Lukas Rietzschel, who was born in 1994 in Raeckelwitz, Saxony (northeast of Dresden). After his university studies, he took up residence in Goerlitz, still in Saxony, but further east, on the border with Poland.

And the reason I do the geographical detail is that this book is intimately rooted in East Germany: What it was, what it is now, and the problems caused by the slippage between those two conditions. Punching the World (Mit der Faust in die Welt schlagen) is a good follow-on to Jenny Erpenbeck's Kairos.

To my knowledge, it has not been translated into English, but it was made into a film (directed by Constanze Klaue) just this year. In fact, I came across it via the Aufgeblaettert newsletter, whose review of the film sent me looking for the book.

So... We're in Neschwitz. Which is a real place. But Rietzschel says he's not describing the real Neschwitz: "It's not the people who live there or anything. I simply wanted a place that could be located geographically. Where you can see, oh, okay, it's near Bautzen, Hoyerswerda, that area -- and if you're being kind, then maybe you'll even say it's in the vicinity of Dresden. Ultimately, this is just an attempt to find a name for a shell." A bit risky, but anyway...



The book's time-span is 15 years, and we start in 2000, just over a decade on from "die Wende", the political "turning-point" (the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, and Germany reunified in 1990).

We're following the lives of two brothers, Philipp and Tobias Zschornack, aged eight and five respectively when we begin. Mum's a nurse, and Dad is an electrician (his certificates were not initially recognized in this new world, so he had to retrain, and retrain, and do further education...). Right from the beginning we hear people asking what happened to the things they had been promised...

But we start with something positive. Mum and Dad (I don't think we're ever told their names) are building a house. It's a step up.

But the environment is not cheerful. There's the chimney of the fireclay works, which hasn't smoked since the Wall came down; there's the canteen that closed overnight; there are the rusted remains of rails; Neschwitz, we're told, is like a footbridge between old clay pits and quarries. And over the course of these 15 years things don't really improve: "All this collapsed, abandoned stuff. Lost, sad shit. No-one on the street. Demolition and vacancy... The schools they closed, the savings banks and doctors' offices... There was money for Greece and for unnecessary bypasses, expressways that meant no-one had to drive through these sad places any more... First it was the primary school that was closed, and merged with another in the area, so now the children were interminably travelling around by bus. No more savings bank. No bakery. No pharmacy. No doctor."

And there are people like Uwe. He turns up asking for casual work on the Zschornacks' build. He's down-at-heel; his wife has left him to head west; and he's rumoured to have been a spy for the Stasi... (We never find out if that's true, and his nephew insists it isn't, but then we don't entirely trust the nephew; any which way, Uwe ends up committing suicide, so it's a sad story.)

Always lurking in the background is a mixture of discontent and looming lawlessness. There's random vandalism; there are groups of young men lurking at the school gates. There are complaints about the "shit EU" from Ramon, whose mother runs a small-scale farm that's ever less cost-effective. When the chimney of the old works is demolished, it seems like a symbol: "Something else that has collapsed and disappeared... 'Fuck the chimney, it's not important! But we used to be big and powerful. Before we were forbidden to be that way.'"

Bit by bit, a nationalistic rightism gathers strength. First it's painted swastikas, and low-level xenophobia. There's resentment of the Sorbs (a West Slavic minority) at the swimming-pool; there's a generalized family intolerance of Polish driving. When Felix, an erstwhile friend of the boys, becomes a drug addict, his father blames the Czechs for the explosion of crystal meth: "We were promised open borders, and now it's only filth that comes into the country."

But the book illustrates how low-level aggression can easily shift the narrative, and prepare the way for worse things. Before long we're into incitement, intimidation, violence, and arson.

It's Menzel, the darkly charismatic leader of the violent rightist group that Philipp and Tobias become involved with, who articulates the words that inform the title: "I'll punch everything until it all bleeds. All the crap that nobody gets... This whole system is fucked up... This society where no-one can say what he wants any more. Where you're told what to eat, how much you can drink, and how fast you can drive. You're a racist! You're a sexist! Just let them shut the fuck up."

Racism and sexism... Yes, the two often go together. Certainly there's an undercurrent of misogyny that's depicted here. Women are blamed if they head off to the west; and they are mostly absent from the young men's social scene. Tobi says to his mother, when Dad is off with neighbour Kathryn: "Why don't you do anything?" She asks what she could do, and he replies: "You could at least start making him supper again." Yeah, that would fix everything... Later, he blames his mother for her lack of career prospects: "You could have been a doctor. But you let them take everything from you, and dictate to you."


Lukas Rietzschel

It's definitely interesting to follow the diverging trajectories of the two brothers. Philipp is the one who is initially sucked into the right-wing coterie, simply because he is insecure, and desperate for acceptance and approval. He goes along with a soft form of nationalism, but Menzel spots that he's just a follower, not really a believer.

He gradually detaches himself. That sounds like a good thing, but it's not really, but he's isolating himself more generally. When Mum and Dad divorce, he moves into his own place. He loses touch with friends; splits with his girlfriend; barely communicates with family.

Tobias initially seems like the more sensitive one. He continues his contact with Mum, and helps Grandma with her shopping. But he has grown more aggressive and self-confident. He becomes a much more convinced and active part of Menzel's little circle, and takes part in several destructive campaigns (from feigning victimhood at a festival, in order to provoke "retaliatory" action from the waiting thugs, through intimidating a family who've adopted a Turkish child, to setting fire to their disused school, to prevent its use for asylum-seekers).

But even Tobias is not full-throated in his action. He's conflicted. He's actually rescuable, if only someone could reach him.

On the one hand, he's driven by an inchoate anger, and hates the inaction of politicians: "What have you ever done? For Saxony? For Neschwitz? For my mother? For me?" He is horrified that his grandmother's allotment is going to go to Syrians: "Give the refugee your garden, he thinks. And your pension. And a job that he has no training for, and insurance that he's not worked for." Everything feels completely pointless, and it's only action that raises his adrenaline: "How sad everything was."

On the other hand, he secretly doubts what he's doing, suspects that Menzel is the archetypal inciter who always gets himself off the hook while incriminating others, and harbours hopes that Philipp will somehow stop him.

What he wants is to go back in time. Back to the evening when a friend shows him his new video game -- before the arsons start, and Granddad dies, and Dad moves out, and he begins to spend evenings hanging out with this group of people, whose hate-filled actions are the only things that punctuate a corrosive emptiness: "I can't stand all the shit here. Always the same, and everything going to the dogs. Always as though it had never been any different."

But we can't go back. And so we leave him, just as he has primed the school building for inundation, and -- for good measure, and more immediate gratification -- set it on fire. Now it's too late for any restraining message: "He ran to the window, and jumped from the canopy. A look at his mobile phone in the dark school garden. Two missed calls." From Philipp? We don't know.



***

It's a powerful text. But quite a difficult one. It's not the German that's problematic. It's very idiomatic, very comprehensible. But the language is jerky. A succession of incomplete sentences. Bits of description. Glimpses of ideas and feelings. Then on again. Fragments.

Yeah, like that...

The result is that nothing ever really flows. It's as though you look at something briefly, and then move on, left to make the connections yourself. We have varying viewpoints, which move the action forward in the manner of a relay race. And I guess incompleteness is a reflection of how life looks as we see it. But for the reader, it's a little tiring a la longue. You store up episodes, but can't really sew them together.

You keep expecting something to climax, and you do get the occasional gear-shifts: Uwe's death; 9/11; Walpurgis Night; the successive acts of violence. You get the acceleration: The faster right-wing drumbeats, the attacks. But the narrative is not so much an arc as a cardiogram, with a repetion of tension and release.

***

So do we end up any the wiser about the processes that turn angry young people into neo-Nazis? Some reviewers argue that we don't. Simon Sahner, for example, is not convinced by the causal chain: "Punching the World is fine until the novel tries to serve as an explanation for the current developments in Chemnitz and Koethen and for violent right-wing radicalism in general... At some point, the novel suddenly becomes not universal but specific, and seems to want to explain why young men from Saxony set fire to homes for refugees." He wonders about the extent to which its enthusiastic reception is due to its ability to fit into a current literary narrative: "Desolation in the German hinterland, where places end with 'ow' or 'itz'."

Much of what we see in this book, it's true, is a general problem. In many parts of the world, provincial life can feel dreary and frustrating for young people. There are plenty of places where the economy has turned to custard, hope is scarce, resentment creates a desire to blame someone (usually someone who looks different, or speaks differently), and stirrers are on hand to harness that frustration. In many parts of the world, there seems to be a problem about what constitutes masculinity. And for all sorts of reasons, it's harder to hold families together, potentially leaving young people more adrift. A reluctance to talk about past atrocities is, sadly, also a generalized phenomenon: Everyone wants to move on, whether stuff is fixed or not.

But the eastern part of Germany, we have to acknowledge, faces a gigantic additional challenge: Disappointed expectations. When you hope for something better, and what arrives doesn't seem to be that much better, and even seems often to be worse, then the seeds are sown for the exponential growth of bitterness and recrimination. We saw many of the reasons for this disappointment in Kairos. It's tragically understandable.

Being classified by others as a "problem" is then the next step downwards. Rietzschel says in an interview: "What bothers me is that we constantly discuss the east, but the east hardly has any part in that discussion... The novel is not intended to simply tell a story of radicalization, but to show the political decline of an entire milieu after the fall of the Wall."

Although Rietzschel doesn't support his protagonists to their bitter end, and distances himself from radicalism and violence, he insists that it's important to show compassion. But the key question, he says, is this: "To what extent am I allowed to feel compassion for people who no longer show any compassion themselves? Pushing that idea was incredibly interesting..." He admits, too, that he's not always entirely comfortable in Goerlitz, even though he feels it's the right place to be... Elsewhere he comments: "I would say that I certainly don't look at these people with contempt, but rather with love... To show that I'm actually on your side, I'm there where you are and where it hurts. And I also want to help you somehow so that this is understood from the outside. Not because I'm the interpreter of the east, or because I want to build a lobby for you, but because I want people to talk to the east, not about it." I guess that's a slightly dangerous goal. Definitely, it's good to see right-wing xenophobes as people, with histories of their own. To the extent that you reproduce their language and thought-patterns, though, I guess you're fuelling their fire.

Probably the last word on causation has to go to Matthias Warkus: "Rietzschel will become a popular school textbook. That's not meant as a put-down! I definitely benefited from reading it. It was stirring. As a village child (in the economically underdeveloped West Palatinate), much of it struck a chord with me. But how is the book presented to us? It doesn't satisfactorily answer the questions today's journalists are asking about why 'these people' are the way they are. It describes things pitilessly, and with almost no context or justification. It should be read, and it should be given to children (especially boys). But it's no substitute for social research."