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Concrete blocks, crime, riots: the reputation of the Parisian banlieues couldn’t be worse. In “Bannmeilen” the author Anne Weber writes the banlieues out of their taboo.
The German author Anne Weber, who has won the highest literary prizes, wanders through the Parisian banlieues in her latest work “Bannmeilen”. Those urbanized outskirts of Paris. They are considered “places of darkness”: concrete deserts, hotbeds of drug trafficking and riots.
Caption: La Courneuve, north of Paris, is one of the municipalities in France with the lowest average income and the highest proportion of immigrants. IMAGO / PanoramiC
Nicolas Sarkozy’s verbal derailment after particularly violent riots in 2005 is ominously remembered: As the French Interior Minister at the time, he announced in La Courneuve that he would clean the banlieues with the high-pressure cleaner, the “Kärcher”, and remove the “pack”.
“I was shocked!”
Anne Weber, born in Offenbach am Main in 1964, has lived in Paris for four decades. In the inner and privileged part of the city. In all these years she – like most of her acquaintances – “hardly ever made it to the banlieues,” says the author in the interview.
Who is Anne Weber?
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Legends: KEYSTONE/Alessandro della Valle
The author Anne Weber has won several awards, including the German Book Prize and the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. She will receive this year’s Solothurn Literature Prize, which is worth 15,000 francs – for her “written work of formal and thematic versatility and joy of experimentation,” as the jury explains.
In her novel, the author describes how, at the invitation of a friend, a certain Thierry, who grew up in the banlieues, she begins to explore the unknown in the immediate vicinity. “I was shocked,” says Anne Weber. Of social misery. But also “how little curiosity I had had for these neighborhoods so close to me all these years.”
Listening so that stereotypes crumble
During her forays with Thierry, Anne Weber says, she received a new picture. The novel does name the misery: unemployed people, criminal youths, dreary housing estates on highways. At the same time, the two of them also come across ultra-modern buildings on their tours. The French National Archives, for example. Or the Banque de France. Or they visit a church that played a role in the Franco-German War of 1870/71.
Caption: The National Archives in Pierrefitte-sur-Seine: Did you think that such a futuristic building would be in the Parisian banlieues? IMAGO / Hans Lucas
None of this fits the cliché. “The forays helped me to break down prejudices,” says Anne Weber. This happens in particular in a café where the two of them regularly stop. Here you meet locals. And listen to their stories. And new questions also arise. For example, why many people in the banlieues support the far-right party Rassemblement National. Why? «I try to describe and ask questions. “I’m not a know-it-all,” says Anne Weber.
No looking through the glasses of the privileged
The description never seems arrogant because the narrator addresses her own prejudices in the book. For example, in view of the piles of bulky waste, she writes: “Why do I expect people who have to live in concrete boxes next to the highway to concern themselves with the cleanliness and order of their surroundings?”
Legend: Lots of concrete and little green in Aubervilliers: How does the living space affect the people who (have to) live in it? IMAGO / PanoramiC
One of the merits of this book is that it shines a light where comparatively privileged people usually look away. Out of indifference. Maybe also out of shame. She, too, “always had doubts,” explains Anne Weber. But she overcame it because she “doesn’t show people off.”
In fact: the author meets the people of the banlieues on an equal footing. And this gives rise to the feeling that permeates this book and makes it an exhilarating read: that of a general human connection with the supposedly foreign.
Book reference
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Anne Weber: “Bannmeilen: A novel in forays”. Matthes and Seitz, 2024.
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