“We’re all in Catholic school now, man,” Toto laments, referring to the cultish behaviors of the German bourgeois pyramid. He himself is the apex of that pyramid, an ageing zine-publisher living out his midlife in Berlin. In his forlorn opinion, the moral fabric of the city is now based purely on performance and signalling moral virtue.
But in this Freudian foreshadowing, Toto doesn’t quite realize that he’s far from Catholic school, with its rules and fall-in-line rigidity. If there’s one thing all the cast of Sister Europe (Knopf, March 2025) truly desire, it’s some whip-crack Catholic discipline. Unfortunately for them, they’re actually in whatever the opposite of Catholic school is—Berlin, probably.
Straddling the course of one manic night, we follow Toto alongside a cast of Berliner culturati—art/architecture critic Demian; his transitioning daughter, Nicole; Radi, an Arab prince visiting from Switzerland; and Livia, the descendent of a literal Nazi (don’t worry, she feels terrible about it).
Sister Europe doesn’t ‘take aim at identity politics,’ as is the wont of so many (bad) contemporary novels. It’s much smarter and funnier than that. Sister Europe is more a plea to simply think beyond one’s own will.
Too much will—that’s what these characters are suffering from. The European project at large is based on the assumption that, “if life is composed of violence, culture could offer an alternative.” And in Sister Europe, culture has most certainly won. Our cast of characters have ample freedom while—like most Western European yuppies—almost no experience of daily violence. All will and no violence? Sounds suspiciously utopian to me.
But these endless options seem to terrorize them, in more and more comic ways. They’re quite unsure what to do with their freedom except feel bad about it. It dissipates into that particularly fraught brand of self-loathing and aimlessness reserved for the wealthy. Prince Radi, for instance, wishes to be creative and receptive but quickly comes up against that distinctly modern problem—“in what direction?” Each Berliner is outwardly quick to cover their back lest they be accused of privilege or apoliticism.
And for the zoomers it’s even worse. Nicole, our transitioning teenager, can’t get a rise out of her parents, whose tepid acceptance of everything dissipates into a flattening affect. Nicole laments that her mother “was the opposite of a TERF…she accepted their shared femaleness on its face, with the bored shrug of the unfazed.” Nothing is radical in Berlin, no way to be countercultural or start a real conversation—everything is cool, man, and everyone is suffering for it.
Nell Zink, an American writer living in Bad Belzig, clearly has a distinct ability to vividly render the madness of social hierarchy—her 2016 novel, Nicotine, had a similar satirical bent, thinking through American anarchy and class politics. In a 2014 interview with The Paris Review, Zink hailed the wonder of German society, the “typically German lack of financial desperation” and the “beautiful public spaces and bike paths and frequent buses and trains.” An understandable reaction for any American confronted with European social infrastructure, and it’s easy to imagine Sister Europe being born from the horror upon meeting the Berlin bourgeoisie with their haughty cynicism.
And so we get Sister Europe, this wonderful depiction of the sad ingratitude of utopia. Masud, an esteemed Arabic-language poet, is one of the few characters who acts as a knowing benefactor of such class-shame. He knows well this particular type of European self-loathing and how to market his writing to such a demographic; appeal to a little bit of guilt, but not too much. “For progressive readers inclined to worry,” it’s noted, “he conveyed a soothing sense of closure.” The last thing the bourgeois want is ‘ethnic literature’ that makes them have to actually think.
Indeed, the true enemy in Sister Europe is not the class system at large, the tragedy of Europe’s refugee crisis, or any other, y’know, deeply important social issues. It’s other bourgeois foreigners; “terse girls who spoke not one word of German” taking over their nice cafes. All the energy generated by hatred and hostility is a circular economy—as Zink notes, no one gets “more upset about high rents than the yuppies who drove them higher.”
And yet through all of this, there is a tender reverence of the humanist bent. Nicole, our fifteen year old going through a tough transition, has a sexual fantasy about simply sleeping, a place where she is required to have no will at all. Or, in my favorite example, when Livia is confronted with the distinctly modern imperative to ‘change one’s life.’ No, she thinks, horrified. She is adamant—“Life should change me.” The exhaustion and doubt of all this moral performance weighs heavy on our Berliners, and they try in their small way, to push back.
Ultimately, Sister Europe is starkly European. Not the kind of omni-culture Americans mean when they say they’re ‘visiting Europe’ but the regional, dare-I-say provincial kind, where rabid, comic bourgeois infighting abides. Speaking of his love interest, Toto says, “She exists by fiat and consensus.” Such is true of Berlin’s upper strata—a place where the shared dictate of moral purity and performance generates its own elite subculture. A shared guilt complex of just how good they have it and the commensurate self-loathing that acts as price of admission. Perhaps they really are in Catholic school after all.
