Marzahn, a Kiez of Berlin, one of the city’s twenty unofficial boroughs, is known for its massive, prefab apartment blocks built from the gray GDR-era concrete. In Marzahn, Mon Amour, the English-language debut of German writer Katja Oskamp, the district becomes a kaleidoscope of quotidian experience, collective history, and unexpected intimacy.

The novel opens with a narrator coming to terms with having just turned forty-five: “The middle years, when you’re neither young nor old, are the fuzzy years. You can no longer see the shore you started from, but you can’t yet get a clear enough view of the shore you’re headed for.” Her children have grown and her husband is ill. An erstwhile writer, she pursues a course in chiropody, the para-medical treatment of the feet. After she receives a certification to practice, she chronicles her encounters with a hilarious, heartrending, and misfit cast of coworkers and clients.

Oskamp’s narrator is reflective yet practical; unembellished and uncluttered, her sentences nevertheless carry the specific weight of candid care and generosity. Hers is a story of the invisibility of middle-aged women. When the narrator begins chiropody classes, she speaks for the collective of women alongside her: “We had arrived humble, modest, and subdued, ready to forget our previous lives, erase our accomplishments and start again with clean slates.” The teacher fails to note their names, a prelude to being “relegated to the footnotes of our own lives.” But the narrator’s story soon becomes one of invisibility transformed. After days spent studying foot bones and deformities, nail structure and thrombosis symptoms, after practicing on fellow students’ feet and offering up her own, she has a revelation: “When you’ve become invisible you can do terrible things, wonderful things, peculiar things.” She begins a newly liberated chapter of her life, declaring that it “wouldn’t be an easy start, but it would be glorious, like all beginnings.”

Each weekday, Oskamp’s narrator takes a twenty-one-minute tram ride to her salon in Marzahn and waits for her clients to arrive. Frau Guse is as polite as she is mischievous, even as she is steadily worn down. Fritz, a retired plastics technician and the son of traveling circus performers, has classically beautiful feet: sturdy, firm, elegantly curved. Ticklish and charming, he tries not to laugh as he relays anecdotes about his grandchildren and his garden plot. The story of Frau Bunkat, a refugee forced from East Prussia as a child, plays out in the imperfections of her toes, heel, and instep. For the narrator, trimming nails and scrubbing dead skin becomes joyful work that fosters intimate human connection. Her clients’ swollen, scaly feet, “etched with a thousand lacy periwinkle-blue veins,” remind her of “weathered pebbles.”

The story becomes a flickering reel of the everyday sporadically interrupted by tragedy and spectacle; these moments disrupt the novel’s steady rhythm, introducing themes of loneliness, aging, loss, and grief. Between the lines, Oskamp explores the before-and-after of Germany’s reunification. Frau Jutta Janisch, one of the narrator’s fifteen or so clients, grapples with the loss of her terminally ill husband. Oskamp unfolds a major motif through Janisch’s story: the building and dismantling of our personal and collective lives at certain ages and certain times in history.

On a rare day off, the narrator and her two co-workers — ex-fitness instructor Tiffy and techno club enthusiast Flocke — travel by train to a Brandenburg spa. Immersed in hot springs and ice-cold fresh air, the narrator contemplates the furious flailing of middle age, the struggle to stay afloat, the exhaustion of determining one’s direction — to which shore should she swim? She exclaims, “Our work is priceless! Our clients are the best! Marzahn, mon amour!” Flocke responds, “Oh, God, the writer in her is coming out!” The narrator replies: “And so it must… man shall not live by feet alone.”

Man shall not live by feet alone but rather by writing, by remembering, by recording and sharing small intimacies that grow into intricate mosaics of human connection. Through her connected vignettes, Oskamp offers a rich reflection on the passage of time and the nature of community in a neighborhood that has long been invisible.

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