With Marzahn Mon Amour Katja Oskamp aims for a double re-evaluation: of her own writing, seemingly derailed after two novels and a story collection are followed by publishers’ rejections of the novellas that followed, and of the district of Marzahn in the northeastern corner of Berlin, far from the city’s hip party places or its political center. Along with the apparent end of her literary career, at age 44 she was facing other common crises of middle age — her child was moving out, her husband was seriously ill — plus the social invisibility that many women report experiencing as they age. “Ich tauchte ab,” she writes at the end of the book’s second paragraph. “I dove down,” most directly, but it carries connotations of disappearing, of choosing to leave things behind, of cutting communications.

She dives into a new profession — foot care specialist — and through a social connection she sets up practice in an unloved quarter of Berlin, Marzahn. The tram that she takes to her new job, the M6, begins in the center near the city’s cathedral and the famed art and archeology exhibits of Museum Island. The M6 wends its way slowly northward and eastward through Alexanderplatz and the nearby parts of East Berlin that have become fashionable since reunification out toward the high-rise blocks built by the communist regime to house vast numbers of Berliners. Marzahn, as Oskamp relates, began as a village, and its old core can still be found among the accumulation of later eras. And while a brief look on Google Maps will show that the district has large swathes of low-rise housing, the pre-fab high-rises from the late 1970s and early 1980s undoubtedly shape its image. Oskamp’s book plays on this as well, with a cover photo that shows balcony after almost identical balcony of an anonymous tower block.

On the ground floor of one of those blocks, Oskamp takes up work in a cosmetics salon. She’s the foot specialist; the owner does beauty and makeup; Flocke, the other colleague, does nails. The German word for Oskamp’s role, Fusspflegerin, is sometimes translated as podiatrist, but that title usually implies a medical degree, which Oskamp does not have. She’s more of a practical care specialist, doing hands-on care, and more importantly she’s someone who has more time for patients than doctors do. She talks with them, judges their moods and what they need, practicing psychology as much as providing physical care. The word appears in the book’s subtitle as well, Geschichten einer Fusspflegerin. A Foot Care Specialist’s Stories, but whether they are stories that the specialist tells or stories of the specialist is left open, because of course they are both.

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