"Berlin Tierra del Fuego" by Titus Müller Review

“The good old days!” Only colorblind nostalgic or grouchy eternal Yesterday can sigh like that. In truth applies (analogous to “Each bread has its emergency”). Every era has their suffering.  In some times it simmers certainly violent, if too long ertragenes bitter suffering and the image of a better future come together for an opportunity to shake the states.

Whether then immediately followed by a coup or not (yet) – from such events, the timeline adds together that we give moderns live in freedom, peace and prosperity – circumstances such as no “good old  time previously ever granted the author Titus Müller, born in Leipzig in 1977, studied literature and history scholars, proves with his twelfth novel that he fortunately not just in faraway middle ages, but also in the recent German track history phases knows where it simmered.

He found what he was in the short-lived “March Revolution” in Berlin in 1848.

Interestingly, we are some of the things he talks about that time, remember to current concerns and suffering of which, of course, our time is by no means free.

But the parallels should not obscure the fact that compared the living conditions of the masses incredibly miserable and their political influence was nil. How nice that the story in the long term but a success story is …

The company is in transition. The onset of industrialization demands of unskilled farm workers as of honest craftsmen and factory owners flexibility and reorientation. Some, manage to take a chance, but most are simply swept away by the development to be able to control without their destiny.

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Times are tough. More and more foreigners flock, for a better life hoping to cities. Around 1820, Berlin has about two hundred thousand inhabitants, in 1848, twice as many. Urban Housing is scarce and overpriced of miserable quality.

The rapid advancement of technology produces increasingly sophisticated, powerful machines that take away many people in town and country toil and relocate in huge production halls. There, create new jobs, but they are undemanding, miserably paid and harm health and the environment. But because there are no other, the desperate job seekers beat it, otherwise they would remain just begging and impoverished, disabled and stranded> lumpenproletariat

Although decline by mass production, prices, as for clothes, but not as deep as the starvation wages of factory workers. For survival parents are forced even to hire her six-year-old and even younger children against a little reward. Education is a luxury for the offspring of wealthy.

What the economy dominates, is the naked greed of the owners. Laws they hardly curb because the government is in the hands of an elite who wants to prefer things as they are, that they give none of its privileges must. Thus, the reform backlog is growing, while the developments accelerate. From abroad spill revolutionary thoughts over and fall on sympathetic ears …

“Tierra del Fuego” in the vernacular of the district before the Oranienburg Gate. A century before, Frederick had to settle from the Vogtland the Great here craftsmen. Now encounter countless chimneys day and night fire and smoke from the snarling, dangerous machines never stand still. Cranes, axes, tools, all trains are manufactured in Wöhlerts iron foundry or Borsig factory. The workers who toil six days of the week up to sixteen hours live, crammed into dark, stinking tenements with thirty apartments on each floor or in makeshift nailed together wooden huts

Macabre, but true. The misery in ” Tierra del Fuego “attracts curious tourists. Energetic starvelings as Hannes Böhm offer to escort through the “purulent pock just outside Berlin” to a few pence as local and technical experts to fine citizens daughters Alice Gauer. Sent soufflierend, exaggerating or verschweigend he plays with their feelings. At home in the salon they exchange then the tea party of their impressions between fascination, pity and disgust. Several families in a chamber! Potato skins for dinner! A toilet shed fifty inhabitants! Dirty hands begging on my dress! A trump card held in the hand, who was stolen a few coins or a silver bracelet.

Alice, daughter of the royal steward, lives with her middle-class parents in the City Palace. Your daily work – besides the servants – noble gentlemen. You think you know Berlin. After their trip to the “Tierra del Fuego” but who touches deeper than her friends, she doubts. Was what she has seen, not much more real than her world of “high gilded doors” and “exotic plants” in “bath large clay pots”?

Alice and Hannes (for sensitive lady a cheat who from the suffering of the poorest shops suggests) are the antipodal protagonist of the novel. How do they find each other, which is a delicate narrative thread, which a favorable outcome can hardly be granted, especially since Alice is already promised to the nobles of Victor Stassenberg. It serves as a lieutenant (and manager of her brother Louis) in the Guards of the King. These fictional characters are the discuss for us questions of freedom and popular sovereignty and comment on the daily politics, pull us through the historical events of March 1848 caught in the crossfire.

In the city seething. Always vocal Berlin in large gatherings and an “address to the king” express their – not anti-monarchist or even subversive – demands for greater freedoms (such as the press), a constitution and national unity. The fickle Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Adopt conciliatory, but is unable to control the development. On March 18, thousands gather at City Palace, to read a proclamation. advance when suddenly soldiers and shots are fired, escalating the situation: citizens arm themselves and erect barricades, attempts at appeasement from the palace remain ineffective, rumors heat up aggression and violence, there is on both sides of numerous wounded and dead from all backgrounds.

Only fourteen hours later the Berlin vacate their positions after the king withdrew the military. In the coming days he is making remarkable formal concessions to “my dear Berliners”, “My people and to the German Nation” and vows not to face “at the head of the whole people”. Already the end of June but it has retuned his conservative advisors again, the promises are, if not already faked, forget the citizens prefer powerless and frustrated back. In December 1848 Friedrich Wilhelm IV issues. Autocratically, without the participation of his people, a Prussian constitution that respects at least some basic demands of citizens.

“Berlin Tierra del Fuego” is the best in entertainment, bulging of vivid scenes and authentic period atmosphere seasoned with vocabulary ( “Flitzpiepen”, “Trulla”) and the vernacular of the street. Until prominent today players from the cultural scene (Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Theodor Fontane, Rudolf Virchow, “father of gymnastics” Friedrich Jahn) and everyday details such as the coveted by the ladies perfume of Monsieur Guerlain or financial transactions of the Royal Prussian bank reading them interesting the “March revolution” improved not alter the general grievances caused rather that the reactionary forces recollected and consolidated. But she was one of the paid with expensive blood small steps that lead-free basic law in our present. Titus Müller descriptive treatment ensures that power and suffering of these champions will not forget.