Between 2000 and 2006, nine men, nearly all of Turkish origin, were killed across Germany, shot with a silenced Česká CZ 83 pistol. Among the victims were a locksmith, a flower seller, and two greengrocers. Twenty-five-year-old Mehmet Turgut was shot while opening a friend’s döner-kebab shop. İsmail Yaşar, aged fifty, had a kebab stand of his own, which is where his body was discovered. For a time, the killings were referred to by the German press as die Dönermorde, or the kebab murders. The police assumed they had been carried out by the Turkish mafia, despite concerns that these were hate crimes, and in defiance of eyewitnesses who insisted they had seen white people fleeing the scene on bicycles. When asked why the police didn’t make the connection that the cyclists were the perpetrators, the former head of the Munich homicide squad, Josef Wilfling, was incredulous: “Have you ever seen a Nazi on a bike?”
These crimes supply the backdrop to Aria Aber’s début novel, “Good Girl,” a coming-of-age story about a teen-age girl born—like Aber herself—in Germany to an Afghan refugee couple. Eventually, the book reveals what the reader may or may not have known all along: that the murders were indeed committed by members of the terrorist group National Socialist Underground. The disclosure is almost beside the point. What matters is the resurgent white nationalism whose menace hangs over Aber’s story, the inevitable upshot (or so Aber suggests) of Germany’s refusal to reckon thoroughly with its fascist past, in which the roots of present-day anti-immigrant feeling and policy are buried.
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Nilab (Nila) Haddadi, Aber’s heroine, has no illusions about the country of her birth. “I took my first steps exactly three months after the Rostock riots, where neo-Nazis threw Molotov cocktails at asylum blocks,” she says. The elevator in her apartment building is tagged with swastika graffiti. Despite the inhospitable circumstances, she has managed to find a place for herself among a group of Berliners largely in their late teens and twenties. Like Nila—a budding photographer who paints a quote from Goethe above her desk—these kids are sensitive and artsy, with a proud distrust of mainstream German society. Unlike Nila, they are mostly white. Rather than risk their rejection, she conceals her background by passing herself off, variously, as Greek, Israeli, Spanish, Italian, or Colombian. Her hope is to sneak into a milieu that, countercultural and inclusive as it may seem, still nurtures a broad hostility toward immigrants—a hostility that feels like Nila’s biggest barrier to living an artist’s life, or any kind of life at all.
“Good Girl” is a bildungsroman, a novel about personal development or, if you like, growing up. It shares unexpected and gratifying parallels with various classics of the genre, including Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship,” about a young man who falls in with a troupe of circus performers, and Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre.” Like these novels, Aber’s book is episodic and capacious, brimming with secondary characters who each contribute, in their small way, to the main character’s evolution. And, like them, it is about an outsider who wants in. The hero of a bildungsroman often begins as an outcast of some kind, a condition that is romanticized even as it must be overcome. Pip (of “Great Expectations”) will become a gentleman and Harry Potter a wizard; like Jane, they will leave their coarse or unsympathetic families behind to gain acceptance among a better class of people. Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield’s antisocial tendencies will find positive expression in a tenderness for those whom polite society brutalizes or neglects. The arc of the bildungsroman bends toward adaptation, if not always assimilation, as the protagonist’s rough edges are smoothed by experience and she acquires an instinct for who can and cannot be trusted, who should and should not be loved.
The bildungsroman takes for granted the idea that a person ought to want to belong, even to a tiny platoon of fellow-exiles or weirdos. Aber offers a decidedly contemporary twist on this assumption by asking: What does it mean to want to belong to a society that not only doesn’t accept you but might actively wish you harm? “You can’t trust anyone in this country,” Nila’s father says at one point. “Look what they did to the Jews.” Throughout “Good Girl,” news of die Dönermorde crackles on the TV and the radio, underscoring that the threat Nila faces is not that Europe will snub or forcibly “sivilize” her, as the Phelps family threatens Huck Finn, but that it will leave her for dead.
Aber, a poet whose first collection, “Hard Damage,” came out in 2019, is good with details, particularly the seemingly extraneous details that are essential to literary realism. The world she gives us is fully realized and well stocked, rich in intricate and precise description. The cash that Nila’s mother set aside for her “culture fund”—it pays for piano lessons—is “a careful curl of bills amid her nylons in a drawer.” Nila’s father makes her tea with “three vermilion saffron hairs” resting at the bottom of Nila’s “glass mug, the kind of mug somehow every Afghan family owns, no matter if they raise mujahideen in Helmand or reside on a flowering estate in Perth, Australia.”
Family life is a source of strain for Nila, who lives alone with her father. Her mother died when she was sixteen, and her father, sunk in depression, can barely clean their apartment. When he speaks to Nila, it is usually to ruminate on German perfidy or admonish her for her escapades. “My parents,” Nila explains, “wanted women to wear their hair uncovered, to have political opinions and a taste in music, and to go to college,” but the rules are still the rules: “You had to be a dokhtare khub, a good girl, in order not to turn into a dokhtare kharab, a broken, bad, ruined girl.” The club is Nila’s sanctuary. With her friends, she spends night after night dancing—and taking a staggering amount of drugs—at a place Nila calls the Bunker, a thinly veiled stand-in for Berlin’s legendary Berghain. Aber’s portrait of Berlin night life is one of her book’s great pleasures; here, Nila’s hypervigilance relaxes enough to admit a sensual delight in her surroundings, something Aber conveys through lush, often surprising images. In one early scene, Nila and her friends are “draped around” a drug dealer “like petals on a flower, looking up”:
Aber’s poems are lyrical and meditative—“Today, in the lemony light by your grave, / I recited Merrill.” In “Good Girl,” her descriptions serve the fast-paced plot. Only a moment later, Doreen, a den-motherish girl who dresses in “ode[s] to old Chanel looks” and calls herself a Marxist-Leninist, declares Nila “one of us”—a nod, as Nila observes, to the cult Tod Browning film “Freaks” (1932), about a group of carnival sideshow performers. “When I was thirteen or fourteen,” Nila muses, “I would close my eyes at night and imagine exactly this: not necessarily a bacterial bathroom stall in a dingy club, where it smelled like sex and fecal matter, but a group of artists who accepted me.”
What makes “Good Girl” so powerful as a novel of development or bildungsroman is that it respects self-destruction as an effective tool of self-discovery. Nila thinks of herself as emotionally fragile—she once jumped out a window, she tells us, in a fit of preteen despair—but by exposing herself to a wide variety of abuses (drugs, rough sex, domestic violence) she learns that she is tougher than she feels. Her worst decisions give her a sense, however fleeting or delusory, of being in charge of her own life. More to the point, by recklessly pursuing the path of the broken, bad, and ruined girl, she becomes increasingly comfortable with the possibility of social rejection, of being scorned by the people whose love she wants most. In one harrowing scene, she swallows “a whole blue Nike”—a pill containing MDMA—“and wash[es] it down with an absinthe cocktail.” Her nose starts to bleed and she blacks out, but when she comes to she admits, finally, “I am Afghan.”
The person who receives this confession is Marlowe Woods, Nila’s boyfriend and the principal instrument of her self-destruction. Marlowe, a thirty-six-year-old has-been writer from Northern California, is in Berlin nominally writing an architectural monograph; his actual job is drug dealer. Aber makes us understand that Nila sees Marlowe exactly for what he is—sleazy and pretentious, a washed-up courtier who takes the liberties of a prince—and falls for him hard, not so much overlooking his faults as allowing herself to be pummelled by them, as if conducting an experiment in personal endurance. How much can Nila take, and for how long will she take it? One piece of self-knowledge Nila wrestles from this experience is that she is intensely vulnerable to the desire of others, perhaps because of her own conviction that she is not beautiful. “I had a different quality,” she thinks, when Marlowe tells her how lovely she is. “I emanated something darker, something uglier. Like a fraught hunger for life, like a voice that said I would do anything.”
Marlowe hits Nila, and he insists she accommodate his desire to have a threesome. (“Don’t cry,” he tells her. “You can choose the girl.”) But being mistreated seems to electrify her. By choosing to remain with Marlowe she gains an indirect power over her own suffering; pain is no longer something life doles out to her but something she opts into, even if the consequences are ugly. There is a diagnostic term for someone who insists on exteriorizing their internal anguish through romance or other kinds of emotional performance. That term is “hysteric,” and if the patients at Salpêtrière, with their facial contortions and exaggerated postures, were, in some oblique sense, protesting the impossible conditions imposed on them by fin-de-siècle standards of femininity, then Nila parties across Europe in order to assert her presence within its borders. In her wild behavior, her pursuit of chaotic situations and turbulent relationships, there is exhilaration with a purpose. She is cutting ties with safety to fling herself into life.
Importantly, it’s while tagging along with Marlowe, among “intellectuals and their friends,” that Nila gets to see just how pervasive European racism is. In a wonderfully rendered scene, she attends a fund-raising dinner in a lavish apartment that was once “an anarchist gallery space” and is now packed with party guests in “casual chic,” their brandless clothes “conveying an aura of exclusivity based merely on material and cuts that other rich people could decode.” Here, the anti-corporate ethos of far-left politics has returned as a status signifier. The party, as Nila is informed, is “raising funds for Afghanistan”—not its people but its stray dogs. (“They really have no infrastructure for the animals there.”) Asked about her heritage, Nila lies. “My parents are Greek,” she says, and then: “The group started cooing like a bunch of birds, and I was happy they wouldn’t know my real heritage—they would’ve probably asked me to give a toast to these Afghan dogs.”
Aber sounds Nila’s late-adolescent psyche with sympathy but not indulgence. The guests at the benefit are fools, but the prose artfully registers their contemptibility without overstating it, allowing Nila’s account of the scene to be at once wry and deeply pained. Later in the novel, the background hum of hate crimes on the news unexpectedly bursts forward during an encounter with neo-Nazis in Marlowe’s apartment. (At this point in the story, Marlowe knows that his girlfriend is Afghan, and whether he brings these “two burly creatures in combat boots” home with him out of gullibility or malice is an open question.) The scene rhymes boldly with the earlier one at the fund-raiser. The neo-Nazis, like Marlowe’s liberal friends, question Nila about her ethnic background. Unlike those friends, they are not inclined to be fooled by Nila’s customary feints. One taunts her for having a “Judennase”—a Jew-nose—while the other insists her nose looks “Muslim.” Perhaps because they are out of place themselves, boys from the countryside who resent these “city kids” with their club clothes and loft apartments, these characters are able to see Nila for what she is: a person who is used to hearing that she doesn’t belong.
Aber wants us to recognize the disavowed affinity between the bourgeois art scene and the white-supremacist underground, between polite and vulgar forms of racism. Although Marlowe’s friends would shudder to think of themselves in the same category as thugs who throw around racial slurs and insist that “the Holocaust wasn’t real,” the truth is that their genteel disdain for non-white, non-European people launders hatred in the more acceptable language of philanthropy. The Germany in which Nila must carve out a life for herself offers neither refuge nor welcome—which is why, by the book’s end, she has decided to leave it, striking out for another city in another country that will, no doubt, present problems of its own. Still, if “the world,” as Nila’s dead mother says in a flashback, “breaks girls everywhere,” it is nonetheless a kind of dark triumph to decide where you will be broken, and how, and by whom. ♦