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Intelligent Kluge: »You should be able to put the book in the shopping cart at Lidl's cash register as a whiskey«
SPIEGEL:
Mr. Kluge, what does it mean when two people talk to each other?
Kluge:
Music is created when one asks and another answers.
SPIEGEL:
You wrote the book »Nevertheless« together with Ferdinand von Schirach - as a dialogue between two voices.
Kluge:
That is the magic of orality.
I just like to talk to Ferdinand von Schirach.
He is a literary rebel within jurisprudence.
SPIEGEL:
What exactly is the magic of orality?
Kluge:
Nobody grows up in writing.
A child, before going to school, lives on orality.
All relationships of trust go through the ear.
Even in the mother's womb, as embryos, we constantly hear sounds.
The music of the bowels and the rustling in the veins.
That is, I suspect, also the origin of the music.
SPIEGEL:
Why did you seek an exchange with Schirach?
Kluge:
It was the other way around.
He called me on the fourth day of the first lockdown in April.
We should skype.
He said, “We are both sentenced to quarantine now.
Do we want to record the conversation that we didn't finish over the Christmas break? 'And then everything happened very quickly.
However, he is very strict when it comes to texts.
He distilled our Skype calls into a slim condensate.
I don't necessarily apply this rigor to my own texts.
I like to leave more of the raw material than he does.
We then initially followed up on our previous book together: "The Heartfulness of Reason".
It was about the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 and Voltaire's indignation at this "arbitrariness of nature".
Voltaire then called on Europe to declare war on an unjust nature.
In some ways, the pandemic holding up a mirror to our civilization reminded us of the shock with which Europe reacted to the Lisbon disaster 265 years ago.
At that time the Marquis de Pombal was the first advisor to the King of Portugal.
He was not a philosopher, but a practitioner of reason: the day after the earthquake, during the flood and while the houses were burning, he set up a scientific institute to research earthquakes.
Then he had the ruins of the old town of Lisbon rebuilt using an earthquake-proof construction method, a district that is now a World Heritage Site.
As we sat in isolation in our work rooms in Munich and Berlin, we were impressed by this practical sense.
Ferdinand von Schirach likes stories like that of the Marquis de Pombal as much as I do.
So we don't just talk to each other, but a rhythm of thoughts and texts emerges precisely because we are different.
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