Handke debate: The moral is magnificent

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Breathless poets

Have you already commented on the case Handke? Has everything really been said? Or, to quote a serious question from an online SPIEGEL debate: "Does it bother you if I continue to read Handke?"

Supplementary question: Do you know who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 because he created "the most exquisite in an idealistic direction", as the price-taker prescribed it? And if so, what did award winner Pinter say about the trial of Slobodan Milosevic? About Tony Blair? About the struggle of the German Bundeswehr accompanied by Joseph Fischer's good wishes in the Kosovo War or, led by Scharping, Struck, Jung, zu Guttenberg, de Maizière and von der Leyen, in the Afghanistan war?

Unfortunately, in the first case, there was no time to get a UN mandate, which is why the humanitarian operation of the Luftwaffe just had to go without it. The second war was based on the fact that the NATO alliance had occurred because the assassins of New York were supported by Afghanistan-ruling "Taliban". In this respect, it was a legal flaw that the Commander-in-Chief ordered in February 2002 to consider the Taliban not as combatants but as bandits. Therefore, the international law of war did not apply, which allows the operation of the exterritorial prison Guantanamo. This is, as we know, "controversial" for 18 years, so it keeps stable in the fog area of ​​the unlimited.

We can leave details behind. Harold Pinter is just an English Nobel laureate, in contrast to the German or practically German, for example, Peter Handke from Carinthia, about which and his German fathers who defend Germany at the Alps find some touching biographical notes on Wikipedia, including an "im Dawn by train "journey from Berlin home to Carinthia anno domini 1948. A journey that, as you know, many more were to follow, all the way to the rivers Danube, Drina and so on.

By the way, in Carinthia, Grasl is as far away from Munich as Düsseldorf is from the Hague, where those in charge ruled that 350 Bosnian boys and men were once handed over by Dutch soldiers to Serbian civil war forces, who then forcibly massacred them. The German holiday urge for Zeeland has done no harm. However, Dutch-Westphalian boys may prefer to go to Tibet instead of camping in Middelburg, who knows?

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What is addressed here is the German in the poet and the poetic in German, not least in German-speaking . The German-speaking - Denis check and the "FAZ" would say: the writer of German tongue - is closer to the German than someone who writes German only because he lives here. For example, the winner of the German Book Prize 2019, which, it is said, the German tongue acquired only at the age of 14 years. So while the German-speaking Nobel laureate is rather classified by the right Germans, so we say at Hauptmann, Mann, Boll, Grass, already on grounds of the presumption of innocence honorable men of German tongue, as in the nervous to tense poet Jelinek, the English Lord Pinter do not care about the german writing moral. In the case of Hauptmann, of course, any possible columnistic revelations on the alleged traumatization of the very young actress Ida Orloff could make a moral disqualification necessary.

We ended up with the difficult question of whether the Handke question is about literary criticism, price committee criticism, criticism of the Swedes or Paul Church criticism. In any case, the Swedish critique could be sourced from two sources: the cheeky non-awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to a female sailor and the problematic relationship between Swedish literature and South Seas kings. As the prize committee's criticism suggests, as a columnist here reminded us recently, "once he was accused of harassing and raping the husband of one of his former members". Paulskirchenkritik is cheap in view of the oily speech bubbles that are emitted there over the year; In the current case, she can even rely on a media count of gossip on the occasion of the award speech of an award-winning Hamburg poet. The most unlikely variant would be literary criticism. It confronts the world-elitist elite with the difficult task of reading several printed books in classes 11 and 12.

Good literature

Therefore, at this point, the substance of the literature must be discussed. Right now, after this book fair with a plus of 13 percent in the nonfiction sector! It was, as already mentioned, recently "the Swedish Academy with various scandals busy." This is extremely questionable from Kreuzberg's point of view; especially since the committee has not apologized for the awarding of the prize in 1954 to a certain Hemingway. Did we mention how high the prize money is? Is there actually a survey on what citizens would like to buy if they won the prize?

Big excitement! Denis Scheck heard a "slap in the face for political correctness". As you can see that before really significant events, even the correct political imagery goes into the linguistic knee: Actually, something called banging slap . On the other hand, all foreign defeats that are mentioned are considered crashing . A little bit of order should already be.

Anyway, we were virtually pope with this hand German tongue, so to speak. On the one hand this is very nice, on the other hand difficult again, because in this country morality is generally seen among alpine poet princes and duchesses as a subordinate bias to the typical abyss (see Bachmann, Bernhard, Kraus, Musil), but it is held by genuinely German writers for the native source of any legitimate artistic language. As Carinthian to be appointed Francophile Deutschzüngler with two German fathers, so is one - we remain in Scheck's metaphoric - split sword: morality, morality, morality!

Did the compatriot beat his girlfriend 30 years ago? The question leads us with a Kreuzberg columnist in heavy seas: "How to deal with films whose main actor has beaten his partner, or with music, where you can assume that the singer has abused children?" Cruel questions that press the iron-hearted mask of kindness on the face of the thoughtless moral-free art lover! In the end: how should one even "deal with films"? Has Isabel Huppert already apologized for "Coup de Torchon"? Did Rosel Zech and Jane Mansfield once sexually offend a gay man? And how do you recognize music that "lets you assume" that the fifths are poisoned, the triplets are infected, the riffs are racist or even the rhythm is anti-feminist? How does it work if you assume music?

"Should someone who sympathizes with war criminals get a Nobel Prize?" Asks the columnist. Of course she does not mean the relationship between the winner Kipling and the Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, not even between the award winner Churchill and the Marshal of the Royal Airforce Arthur Harris. Both are not our concern. This refers to the sympathy of Handke for Slobodan Milosevic. That's a good question, of course, especially in a country where so many artists have escaped 50 years of golden amnesia. On the other hand, one might argue that one might first have to worry about the prices of war criminals rather than the prices of those who have to start from the crime of sympathy.

The small differentiation between war criminals and those who "sympathize" (with them) should be morally straightforward for a short pause. Do we know anyone in our area who once sympathized with war criminals or other criminals, civil war leaders, massacre officials? Are there current or past Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Rommel, Ludendorff sympathies in the extended family circle or perhaps in your own dear diary? Sympathizing, as one learns in the course of time, and at 66 simply knows better than at 36, is a dangerous thing, and it takes a lot of sticky morality to come out of all the sympathy marshes of life retrospectively to light. The easiest way to do this is to not deal too much with the material problems of the world right from the beginning and concentrate on the essentials, ie a solvent-free moral. Do not worry, of course I do not want to commit the terrible thought crime of "relativizing" or incite you to do so! I just want to be careful to remember that there is a certain difference between a criminal and a sympathizer in the real world.

Right morale

You may argue that the above, contrary to the announcement, has almost nothing to do with literature. That is perfectly true and must be so. It is the hallmark of any decent German debate that it avoids content that could lead to concrete efforts and concentrates as quickly as possible on secondary and tertiary debates about forms and styles: linguistic styles, thinking styles, metaphors, lifestyles. Imagine a normal intellectual, or a graduate of a cultural theory program. Such a person has no time at all to seriously and perseveringly deal with the contents of reality! The days are filled with optimizing the feeling of what it would be like to do it. Therefore, the political criticism must be consistently reduced to the core of the lifestyle.

This has disadvantages on the one hand. The most important thing is that styles and feelings do not solve any of the problems that they are supposed to deal with, and that often can not even be formulated in a meaningful way. Three examples briefly mentioned: Migration, Climate, East Germany.

The current war situation in northern Syria not only reveals the lack of substantial German foreign policy except for the usual sales trips. It also shows that it is not far from the allegedly important migration and refugee discussion for years. It has evaporated into meaningless moral discussions. There is no sign of the empty-handed "fight against flight causes", and the good conscience that the irrational problem-rejection provides to the bettered in this country at the expense of the losers is paid for by paying for Mr. Erdogan and the militias in Libya, To keep 95 percent of the problems out of the good people of Berlin, at any price of man and material.

The global climate, Greenland and the rainforest are currently rescuing the Germans by the firm conviction that everyone wants to do something. In addition, everyone must swear to deny climate change, and buy an aluminum bicycle with lithium-ion battery. If all this is done by people all over the world, it could work out with the beautiful world for the "following generations" that are close to our hearts. However, it is extremely reluctant that it is unlikely that five out of seven or eight out of ten billion people will decide in the next 100 years that they would rather have flat screens, 35-hour weeks, e-automobiles, high-speed trains, air conditioners and Wanting to have convenience food products so that poor people in Western Europe can manage to keep Hamburg and Amsterdam free from flooding in 200 years time. At least equally unlikely is that the powerful players of the hugely successful capitalist economic system will decide it is time to divide the riches of the world justly among all the good people so that there is a balance between heaven and earth, man and beast, rich and very rich. Rather, looking at the past history of civilization, it seems natural to assume that the rich 10 percent will still not survive on the survival of the poor 90 percent in doubt. This problem will not be solved by abandoning second car and palm oil.

A little clearer: After weeks of emotional orgies on the topic "Thirty Years 40th Anniversary of the GDR" you are exhausted. At the moment, I can not think of a feeling that the Ossi was not interviewed, interviewed and portrayed in all of us. Miserable are the miseries of lamenting, lamenting complaints, worries about worries. Allotment gardeners from Oschatz have been unemployed for 30 years because the Wessi refuses to continue operating the once flourishing local VEB Brotfabrik; and deeply disappointed privateers from Bad Homburg, who cry the vainly sacrificed special AfA. The words of the talk went to the 40-year-old presenters, the turn-of-the-mill memories, from dark corners came Wolf Biermann and the young Angela, and Mrs. Thalbach spoke to us. Ossis of the heart again had very strong feelings, but absolutely no plan. And no president walked on the Rennsteig and waved from the height down. So the revolts and the morals and the emotions drift through the German world. Nothing is solved, nothing is limited.

Nice advantage

Where in the long run so obvious disadvantages are tolerated, also an advantage must be hidden. He is not difficult to find in this case: it is the historically almost unique, decades-long opportunity, completely at the expense of morality to keep completely irresponsible. Apart from a few really very small mistakes in Kunduz, Wolfsburg and Wandlitz, Germany has for 70 years actually done nothing that could be described as "doing". How it looks with the omission, let's stand by. There is no people in the wide world who so often, so much, and so confident on the right side. We were for Kennedy and for Gorbachev, for Lumumba and Che Guevara, in any case for peace, and against every war except our own. We carried out the world revolution of 1968 alone, freeing Chileans, Afghan girls and People of Color, the woman anyway, abolishing apartheid, honoring the Dalai Lama, scrapping nuclear power plants and medium-range missiles. We defeated the Stasi with the power of our hearts, coped with the terrible refugee crisis all by ourselves, and from 1989 we rebuilt the poorest and most backward country in the entire Eastern bloc. And since we did it all voluntarily, for free and out of good faith, we are not responsible for anything caused by the mistakes of any moral failure. We know everything and like to be asked when asked. But we do not crowd. We are huge, but modest. Whenever a really big problem arises in the world, one asks first at the Schöppenstuhl in Berlin: Your high gentlemen, tell us bad ones / How do we hold it in accordance with the right? Our capital is like us: unclear, assembled, pumped up with a small sorting. Highest moral expertise from the highest possible cowardice: great art.

Good art is the art of good people. Can you sing when you have grabbed a soprano's breast? Can you be a Federal President or Chancellor if you were a member of the NSDAP? Can you eat turkey meat? Is it allowed to be a federal minister if you are not convicted of being guilty of perjury? May one consider Arabian rappers to be complete idiots? It's a shame, and this Handke has no sympathy for us, but throw us out, gives terrible interviews in the "Friday" and lets point out that Kreuzberg could lick his ass.

Donald Trump, a moral giant, recently told the jubilant people that the sole responsibility of the former vice president was to "kiss Obama's ass." Shortly thereafter, the cabaret artist Becker from Cologne called him on a talk show as an "asshole" because he betrayed the Kurds. This innocent scene was described in the German press as "complete disengagement"; the bad word could only be quoted as "A ...". It is doubtful that it was too terrible for the rap-stared ears of sensitive German people. It is more likely that these drove a terrible fear in the keyboards: Will Ambassador Grenell in the end impose punitive tariffs on lye pretzels?

A dispute arose over the adequate Maischberger measure of speech morality; This solved the Syria problem appropriately. In the end, a columnist will write that it's all a question of digitization; the second will write, the first he has always found ridiculous; and a Handke expert will add that from a moral point of view, it is very worrying that the poet-keeper has not yet voiced the sexism suspicions against the husband of a former Nobel committee. Dear literary friends, we stay tuned!