Cherrypicker | Literature
Between mama and mother

For a long time, Franz Dobler didn’t want to write a book about his life as an adoptee. Fortunately for readers, he changed his mind.

Franz Dobler has authored books – novels, short stories, and non-fiction – for decades. His love of country music, for example, led him to write a biography of Johnny Cash. His most recent success has been with crime novels. In 2015, Dobler was awarded the German Crime Thriller Prize for Ein Bulle im Zug (2014), while its follow-up Ein Schlag ins Gesicht (2016) came third in 2017. Now the Augsburg-based writer has turned his attention to the topic of adoption with his novel Ein Sohn von zwei Müttern (A Son of Two Mothers).

Adoption is a theme in Dobler’s personal life. He long hesitated about writing a book about growing up an adoptee, but he collected notes. The feeling that he had to “get the subject out of the way” finally prompted him to write this novel based on his own life. He’s channelled his experiences into the character of a German-Iranian adopted son. In Ein Sohn von zwei Müttern (A Son of Two Mothers), Dobler can’t resist a dig at autofiction, which is currently all the rage:

A maze of mother issues

The story begins in an aeroplane. The central character flies with his wife to New York to visit his biological mother, whom he has not seen for 30 years. He’s not sure whether he really wants to get there. He fantasises about a possible plane crash and lights what he thinks is his last cigarette, which leads to an argument with another passenger. He then muses about the importance of a mother in a person’s life. It’s a twofold problem for him, as he had a “mama” who adopted him in addition to the mother who gave birth to him. His mama was 20 years older than his mother and already dead. For him, the world is “a maze of mother issues,” which makes him wonder how there can still be so many people in it.

Dobler’s literary alter ego grows up in the railway settlement of a small Upper Bavarian town in the 1960s. The boy has an average childhood, with parents who are there for him. The fact that the teenager gets into trouble with them, especially his father, because of his long hair or his penchant for punk, jazz and literature is nothing special. When he tells an older friend that he’s adopted to make himself more interesting, the latter simply replies, “Who cares; all parents are shit.” The protagonist embraces this laconic approach. When, out of curiosity, he attends a self-help group for adoptees during his student days in Munich in the 1980s, he finds the “affectedness crap totally annoying, I don’t want to roll around in it, there must be something else in life.”

Nevertheless, it takes a while for him to come to the realisation that origin doesn’t play a decisive role in life; that one can – to some extent – free oneself from it. Dobler also addresses the issue of identity. In the eyes of the main character, now a writer himself, identity is neither singular nor definitive.  

Predisposition to serial killing?

The novel is written in the form of a literary montage and contains – besides the narrative passages – numerous reflections, memories, and quotes. The narrator appropriately describes his “curious endeavour” as “fragments, splinters, scraps.” At the end of the novel is a bibliography of “sources and inspirations.” One of these is Peter Wawerzinek’s novel Rabenliebe (2010), to which Dobler pays tribute, saying it is “the most unbearable and also the greatest piece of literature about problematic mother-home-adoption memories.” A brasher inspiration comes from the US sitcom Seinfeld. In one episode, it is claimed that adoptees are more likely than average to become serial killers. Even if the statistical basis of this theory is somewhat obscure, Dobler is happy to pick up on this lurid cliché, in keeping with the motto: “Assault every association.”

The character’s biological father is only mentioned in passing. He and the mother had a one-night stand, his name is not known; he may have been named Ali. One day, when the protagonist is back in his birthplace for a reading after many years, he sees an ironic notice on a poster: “Finally, rock ‘n’ roll all night long again with DJ Ali!”

Although the usual father-son conflicts are portrayed with the adoptive father, known as papa, they nevertheless share a basic trust:

Gruff but empathetic

Dobler creates distance from the story through his perspective; an authorial narrator who tells the story of the adopted son in the third person. Throughout the novel there are also square brackets in which this narrator comments on his text or, even more often, criticises or admonishes himself: “[don’t overload it with quotes],” “[simpler would be better].”

Dobler’s main character in Ein Sohn von zwei Müttern resembles the seemingly hard-boiled investigators in his crime novels; as gruff as he is empathetic. And just as the protagonist is on an aeroplane at the beginning but doesn’t quite want to reach his destination, so it is with this intellectually stimulating but emotionally profound novel in which the narrator knows that he “would find no closure, no end and would never be finished.” Adoptees often find themselves on a lifelong quest; unable to arrive anywhere because a journey into the past is inevitably without a destination.