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Even the briefest glance at the superficial world of Heidi Klum’s casting show “Germany’s Next Top Model” prompts questions about how long this cosmos can possibly last – a place of corsets, commercialism, competition, Caribbean cocktails and career rivalry. The half-life of this glamorous existence played out between Paris, London and LA must be pretty short, even for those who make it. And the countless ambitious young women who never do make it big – unlucky enough to gain years, pounds and wrinkles – aren’t worth a single column inch in the tabloid press, let alone a photo. Their only chance to hit the headlines is a scandal casting them as fallen angels.
The facades of the modelling business are the passe-partout and the backdrop to Beate Teresa Hanika’s second novel with the title Erzähl mir von der Liebe. This is a book about a dream, the dream of a young woman who wants to get out of the business at all cost. At only 22, Leni is a model for an international agency but feels like she has reached the end of her career. Hanika herself spent several years modelling, which shines through above all in her unpretentious descriptions of the working conditions and her narrator’s emotions.
The novel is simply credible, particularly because of the many sober observations contrasted with emotional associations and mental leaps. As if a young woman was just working out how to make her exit from the superficial world of facades, overcome by contradictory feelings culminating in a dream of leaving the business with the help of the perfect love. The lover she dreams up is called Levi, and is a model himself.
Hanika’s facade and backdrop is a party at an elegant villa in Berlin’s wealthy area of Dahlem. As Leni wanders through the rooms, we are confronted by anything but sentimental memories – of her childhood on a farm, of her first boyfriend, reflections on her life today, thoughts on her friends and not least dream sequences all about the chance of escaping by means of “true love”.
The palatial setting belongs to a dubious Bulgarian businessman, who gathers the international model scene around him at opulent parties and seems to have a particularly intimate relationship with Levi, a fellow Bulgarian. Leni roams around the party with her two flatmates, a Bulgarian girl and a young woman from East Berlin’s working-class Marzahn district, only a couple of years older but already bearing the scars of her modelling career.
Narrating in clear, sober, almost distant-sounding language, Leni describes the events and encounters in these few hours: “You kiss. You hug. But you don’t shake hands.” In between, the first-person narrator scatters reflections, recollections and dream-like visions – like sudden thoughts occurring as she tells her story. These sequences come across as so realistic because Hanika formulates Leni’s thoughts more gently, closely and emotionally than her insights into the modelling world. She beds her story on beautiful, poetic images, for example a comment on promises of love: “I’ve heard these words so often that they now weigh less than a grain of sand or the soft down of a bird’s plumage.”
At times, it feels as if reality and fantasy are just as intertwined in this novel for the reader as for the young woman swaying so drastically between absolute disillusionment and romantic, sometimes kitsch ideals of love. And all that with no attempt whatsoever to force a moral message upon the reader. The world in which Hanika places Leni is a one-to-one depiction of the lives we can imagine behind the superficial facades of Heidi Klum & co.
Siggi Seuß
June 2011
[Translated by Katy Derbyshire]
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