“Laber rhubarb,” Kurt Siebenstädter says to himself when he thinks about it. About himself, about the constant gossip around him that he himself helps to produce every day; about his function in the big business of opinions, in which he is considered or at least was considered a critical voice, whereby it was always clear to him that the system itself has always considered and absorbed the criticism. “Laber Rhubarber”, and this classic 1980s phrase that haunts Siebenstädter, also shows what kind of person he is – a man just over 50, shaped by the zeitgeist of a hedonistic era. A discontinued model that looks on without understanding how terms are reinterpreted, how a skeptic suddenly becomes suspicious, and how an ironically distanced attitude towards things is interpreted as the exhausted pose of a privileged, unreserved reactionary.

But Kurt Siebenschlafer is not yet in the center of power, but he is very close. His morning show on Germany’s most influential radio station has earned him a reputation as a merciless conversationalist; that of a man who knows no mercy, makes no distinctions and believes in nothing except that the media should not stand up, but be unpleasant. “The Sandbox” is Christoph Peter’s tenth novel. The writer, who was born on the Lower Rhine and lives in Berlin, has always found it palpable pleasure to break with genres. His repertoire ranges from adolescence novels to comic-like genre stories with the speed of Japanese action films. Peters has now written to the present and its political moods, no longer works retrospectively but directly, and since he is an extremely clever author, he knows the traps he could run into. That is why he has made these traps his subject with perfect sophistication.

A stream of news runs alongside the plot in a calculatedly annoying manner

“Der Sandkasten” takes place over two days in Berlin, November 9th and 10th, 2020, Corona time, lockdown, and is, among other things, a roman a clef. Christian Linder, Wolfgang Kubicki, Jens Spahn or Karl Lauterbach all have concise appearances, even if not under their real names, because Peters attaches great importance to leaving space for fiction: he is an excellent observer, who in a few lines describes what is characteristic of these public figures (“the prototype of an outdated generation of politicians, unscrupulous, greedy for power, sexist: the master joke incarnate”), but like the protagonist Kurt Siebenstädter, they only stand as ciphers for an idle company, a machine for maintaining power in the middle of an artificially shut down country .

First of all, this is not an original approach, but Christoph Peters is a writer who always knows exactly what he wants and also has the necessary literary means at his disposal. On the one hand, he uses Wolfgang Koeppen as a source and his 1953 novel “Das Treibhaus” as a backdrop to present analogies and uncover structures in the political establishment, which is surprisingly rarely described in contemporary German literature.

Ulf Erdmann Ziegler’s brilliant novel “Another Epoch”, published last year, is an exception in this regard. On the other hand, Peters stylistically refers back to classical modernism, to the big city novels of the early 20th century, jumps in perspectives, uses collage and montage techniques, creates a stream of news snippets, keywords, headlines; Donald Trump, the lateral thinkers, the accusers and the rabble-rousers – all of this runs constantly alongside in a calculated, annoying, italicized strand, while Kurt Siebenstädter, observed from the half-distance of the third person, looks at what lies behind him and fears that what could still come – his personal crash.

Peters turns Koeppen’s greenhouse in Bonn into a sandbox in Berlin. A city built on Brandenburg sand. Siebenstädter is a child of the Lower Rhine province; that matters because he never got rid of the petty bourgeois view of those up there. Siebenstädter is a sharp rhetorician who is suddenly accused of misusing his skills and letting people who are on the wrong side have their say on his show too often. Even his wife, who is 13 years his junior, and his pubescent daughter now consider him, who as a young man sympathized with the left-wing anarcho scene, to be an age-conservative sack who no longer fits into sensitive times.

Siebenstädter himself has the impression that “an obscure neomoralism is spreading, no less bigoted than the sour-pietistic inhibitions of the post-war years.” This feeling, the impression that the die-hard is celebrating a renaissance in the guise of progress, leads on the one hand directly to the front lines of the present, but at the same time forms the bridge to Koeppen’s “greenhouse”. Koeppen’s young Bonn Republic and Peters’ not yet very old Berlin Republic are equally in a state of excited exhaustion and free-wheeling intrigues and power games.

Christoph Peters achieves something in “Der Sandkasten” that cannot be valued highly enough: he shows this atmosphere in all its ambivalences, exhibits attitudes, looks at the world through the filter of Siebenstadter’s life experience and idiosyncrasies, without becoming denunciatory . Beyond that, Peters remains highly entertaining at the plot level, right down to an early-morning showdown in the form of an interview with the Minister of Health in which Siebenstadter becomes, to say the least, abusive even by his standards.

Anyone who wants to be malicious could dismiss Peter’s inventory of a functional elite, shaken by the pandemic and surrounded by discourse, as a larmoyant mid-life crisis novel. But Peters has impregnated his book against this accusation by constantly thinking about it. Like Wolfgang Koeppen, Peters prefaced his novel with a quote from the poet Novalis and the British diplomat Harold Nicolson, thus creating an echo chamber. “The process of history is a burning,” says Novalis. At the end of “The Greenhouse” MP Keetenheuve becomes “completely useless, he was a burden to himself”. He falls off a bridge. In “The Sandbox”, Siebenstädter also stands on the bridge in the final scene and looks into the water.