Clean woman between asceticism and attack

Middle-aged Rosa Steininger lives alone in an old apartment in Vienna, works as a cleaning lady and is convinced that the climate catastrophe is inevitable. That’s why she largely withdraws from the world and tries to keep her ecological footprint as small as possible: she shops in health food stores, has neither electricity, nor a car, nor a mobile phone, sits at home by candlelight in the evenings and lives out her inner emigration. When she is forced to take an AMS course, the hope awakens in her that she can still have an influence on doing good things in terms of saving the climate and the world.

The cleaning lady becomes a clean lady, a degrowth influencer who, with the help of a friend, produces violent upheavals in the so-called social media. She clarifies the state of the climate crisis, names those responsible, analyzes aptly and opens up options for action. Eventually, the “environmental party” takes notice of them, harnesses them to their carts and uses them to generate added value in the small change circus of the political attention economy. Rosa joins in until the nomenklatura strikes back. Damaging deepfake videos are surfacing online showing them shopping for luxury dresses, drinking at a downtown bar, and engaging in sexually explicit scenes.

But Rosa isn’t giving up just yet. She manages to conquer the stage of the Salzburg Festival and, after the unctuous words of the opening speaker, read the riot act to the attending high society: “We don’t want any changes. We don’t care. We want to continue living the same way as before. Put it bluntly: We shit the future, we shit future generations. You don’t give a damn about your kids.”

After a few frightening minutes, the security takes Rosa off the stage, she ends up in a psychiatric ward, and yet her story leads to a halfway happy ending that won’t be revealed.

The Viennese writer Nadja Bucher once again delivers good reading material with her second Rosa novel (after “Rosa gegen den Dirt der Welt” and her grotesque “Die Doderer-Gasse oder Heimitos Menschwerdung”). A mixture of seriousness and bizarreness, enlightenment and entertainment. Almost sustainable.