Worlds Apart
by
Julia Franck
Translated by Imogen Taylor
Moth Books
This memoir is an astonishing chronicle of recent German history seen through the eyes of a girl born in the East and brought up in the West. Except that she was not brought up at all. Julia, born in 1970, is one of three daughters of single mother Anna: girls fathered by different men. Anna neglects her children to the point of cruelty and Julia grows up in a pig-stye childhood from which this bright child longs to escape. It is the personal rather than the political which drives the narrative. This is a landscape where Nazi, post-Nazi, Communist and post-Communist worlds elide.
The fragmentation of this early life is reflected in the writing style where even the narrator is split into different personae. Sometimes the voice is in the first person, sometimes the third; occasionally she becomes the character – The Girl. The most striking parts of the story are when Franck shares the misery of the daily routine of maternal abandonment. The picture she gives us of the mother’s preoccupation with her own desires for sex, cigarettes and alcohol, and her inability to nourish or clothe her children, is compelling. We understand the years of filth, lice, warts and herpes and the living with pigs. This cruel emotional and financial poverty is child- Julia’s normality. The evocation of this stinking world contrasts with the family hinterland. Julia’s Jewish great grandmother spoke French at table but her mother ate with her hands. What is most gripping is the exposure of the German Century through one family’s experience. The road from bourgeois respectability to anti-bourgeois defiance is realised with an acuity that makes this book hard to put down.
Franck also offers us an insight into the fringes of a radical theatrical world. Anna was an actor in the Berliner Ensemble. There are glancing references to the appearances of playwright Thomas Brasch and connections to political activist Rudi Dutschke, singer-poet Wolf Biermann and other figures of artistic and political weight. Worlds Apart gives us the fringes of Bertold Brecht’s theatre revolution. Anna is the flotsam of a vibrant stage tradition but, as a woman with multiple children, and no money, her life is a mess, partly of her own creation. Anna is both a victim of her society and the country’s history as well as her children’s abuser. This is suggested as being part of the fall-out from the Communist and Nazi dictatorships.
Julia Franck is Jewish through her maternal line but this area of cultural identity, and historical resonance, is scarcely touched. One example is the lead-up to a school daytrip to Sachsenhausen. Julia refers to her fellow-pupils’ antisemitism but gives us nothing of what she saw or felt in this camp.
Reading the memoir offers a push-pull dynamic in other ways. When writing at length about her relationship with Stephan, the love of her life, which has occasional moments of cheesy prose, we learn that Stephan has told her secrets that she will never divulge. She tells us also that she will never share with us what she told him. Consequently, the reader feels a simultaneous sense of revelation and concealment.
If the German youth; both East and West; is the strongest part of this autobiography, the writing falls flat when she goes to the USA. Here the uncared-for girl becomes the young woman nurse other victims- gay men suffering from HIV/AIDS. When the action moves out of the German emotional war zone, there is a lack of bite in a writing style that is mainly descriptive.
Overall Franck is served well by Imogen Taylor’s translation which is seamless. It conveys the original German in a natural and original English. I particularly liked ‘I can smell a hiding coming’.
Despite the lack of edge in the later part of the memoir, there is enough drama in the childhood passages to offer a new vision of German postwar girlhood and the effect of Nazi and Communist dictatorships on four generations of damaged women.
Julia Pascal © 2025.
Worlds Apart
by
Julia Franck
Translated by Imogen Taylor
Moth Books
This memoir is an astonishing chronicle of recent German history seen through the eyes of a girl born in the East and brought up in the West. Except that she was not brought up at all. Julia, born in 1970, is one of three daughters of single mother Anna: girls fathered by different men. Anna neglects her children to the point of cruelty and Julia grows up in a pig-stye childhood from which this bright child longs to escape. It is the personal rather than the political which drives the narrative. This is a landscape where Nazi, post-Nazi, Communist and post-Communist worlds elide.
The fragmentation of this early life is reflected in the writing style where even the narrator is split into different personae. Sometimes the voice is in the first person, sometimes the third; occasionally she becomes the character – The Girl. The most striking parts of the story are when Franck shares the misery of the daily routine of maternal abandonment. The picture she gives us of the mother’s preoccupation with her own desires for sex, cigarettes and alcohol, and her inability to nourish or clothe her children, is compelling. We understand the years of filth, lice, warts and herpes and the living with pigs. This cruel emotional and financial poverty is child- Julia’s normality. The evocation of this stinking world contrasts with the family hinterland. Julia’s Jewish great grandmother spoke French at table but her mother ate with her hands. What is most gripping is the exposure of the German Century through one family’s experience. The road from bourgeois respectability to anti-bourgeois defiance is realised with an acuity that makes this book hard to put down.
Franck also offers us an insight into the fringes of a radical theatrical world. Anna was an actor in the Berliner Ensemble. There are glancing references to the appearances of playwright Thomas Brasch and connections to political activist Rudi Dutschke, singer-poet Wolf Biermann and other figures of artistic and political weight. Worlds Apart gives us the fringes of Bertold Brecht’s theatre revolution. Anna is the flotsam of a vibrant stage tradition but, as a woman with multiple children, and no money, her life is a mess, partly of her own creation. Anna is both a victim of her society and the country’s history as well as her children’s abuser. This is suggested as being part of the fall-out from the Communist and Nazi dictatorships.
Julia Franck is Jewish through her maternal line but this area of cultural identity, and historical resonance, is scarcely touched. One example is the lead-up to a school daytrip to Sachsenhausen. Julia refers to her fellow-pupils’ antisemitism but gives us nothing of what she saw or felt in this camp.
Reading the memoir offers a push-pull dynamic in other ways. When writing at length about her relationship with Stephan, the love of her life, which has occasional moments of cheesy prose, we learn that Stephan has told her secrets that she will never divulge. She tells us also that she will never share with us what she told him. Consequently, the reader feels a simultaneous sense of revelation and concealment.
If the German youth; both East and West; is the strongest part of this autobiography, the writing falls flat when she goes to the USA. Here the uncared-for girl becomes the young woman nurse other victims- gay men suffering from HIV/AIDS. When the action moves out of the German emotional war zone, there is a lack of bite in a writing style that is mainly descriptive.
Overall Franck is served well by Imogen Taylor’s translation which is seamless. It conveys the original German in a natural and original English. I particularly liked ‘I can smell a hiding coming’.
Despite the lack of edge in the later part of the memoir, there is enough drama in the childhood passages to offer a new vision of German postwar girlhood and the effect of Nazi and Communist dictatorships on four generations of damaged women.
Julia Pascal © 2025.
By Julia Pascal • added recently on London Grip, authors, books • Tags: books, Julia Pascal