Scenery from "The Witcher": escapism and diversion
"Man only plays where he is, in the full sense of the word, and is only fully human where he plays."
Friedrich Schiller wrote this in his treatise "On the aesthetic education of man" in 1794.
And that was the first thing I had to think about when I saw the video in which Norbert Röttgen, forgetting himself, repeatedly dropped a ball against the ceiling and a window of his office.
Samira El Ouassil Right Arrow
Photo: Stefan Klüter
Born in Munich in 1984, is an actress and author.
In 2016 her book "The 100 most important things" (with Timon Kaleyta and Martin Schlesinger) was published by Hatje Cantz Verlag.
In 2009 she was the candidate for chancellor of the PARTY, which at that time was not admitted to the federal election.
She was recently awarded the Bert Donnepp Prize for media journalism for her media critical column "Wochenschau" (uebermedien.de).
He did so with a similar agility as Jack Nicholson once did, who threw a tennis ball against the walls of the lobby of the Overlook Hotel in the horror classic "Shining" (1980) just before he went mad with an ax.
Röttgen, of course, made a less murderous impression.
For this he created a kind of symbolic image for the next few weeks shutdown with his office joy, apparently secretly recorded from afar.
Because in these, in addition to work, home office, zoom, parenting or schoolwork, we will on the one hand increasingly deal with the reception of films, series or books - but we will also be thrown back more on our mere humanity and spend time sitting there, ourselves more or to employ less sensibly and perhaps to follow our play instinct.
Röttgen's ball games in the office seem like a necessary, almost therapeutic activity, especially in these times.
Work hard, play hard
- as they creepily say.
Playing allows you to try your hand at a free space in a free and informal way, in order to have new experiences in an inventive way and to test limits.
In the social waiting room in which we are right now and the childlike impotence into which we are thrown back, playing seems to be a particularly necessary activity.
When I saw the press conference on the tightened corona measures on Wednesday and it felt like we were being catapulted back into March, I felt like I was in a bad video game in which a level that you personally actually completed successfully suddenly had to repeat - only with half as many hearts, half as much perseverance and a dull sword of lack of ideas.
And the toughest bosses, which are supposedly lurking somewhere behind the next levels, are feelings such as agony, isolation or existential worries in addition to the virus.
The pause button of the present was pressed again.
Accordingly, after the press conference I sorted my old video games ("The Witcher", "Zelda", "Assasin's Creed" - all better level design than the real thing) to see if I am equipped with enough escapism and diversion for the next four weeks .
Because in addition to the gastronomy, the culture business was completely shut down again, which is why we will no longer be able to distract ourselves with the unmediated, sensual experience of other people's games in the near future;
with the acting, dancing or musical play of stage artists and screen protagonists.
"Maybe one should declare the cinema and the theater a religion"
Perhaps the cinema and the theater should not be demeaned as "recreational activities", but simply declared a religion.
We may need a cultural freedom anchored in the Basic Law if the churches are allowed to remain open, but the artistic sites and halls have to close again, although they can certainly demonstrate equally good hygiene concepts.
More than before, I am now again aware of how few public spaces are available for social games in the city when restaurants and cultural institutions have to close.
Where can you go when you have nowhere to go?
The virtual realities remain once you have gambled through the ball-to-window game, because digital gaming is the art of simulated interactivity.
Charlie Brooker, creator of the science fiction series "Black Mirror", published a documentary in 2013 entitled "How Videogames Changed the World".
He tries to find out which are the 25 socially most influential games in history and of course presents works such as "Pong", "Tetris", "Tomb Raider", "The Last of Us".
In the end, however, his film takes a surprising turn, ending up at number one in the world-changing games: Twitter.
Brooker's claim is that social networks have long been games themselves.
Interestingly, Röttgen unknowingly won one of the largest multiplayer games besides "Fortnite" with his solo game in private that day and at the same time showed that the parlor game and cultural spaces can - and must - enable human existence in the virtual world.
In the spirit of Schiller's sentence, "He is only completely human where he plays", I hope that in the next few weeks we will not only be back on the balconies to applaud important professions and humanity, but also behind the windows look to see those who are currently not living and cannot be human, but survive.
While other, apparently more important things were allowed to continue playing outside.
Icon: The mirror