Bodo Kirchhoff on his utopia in the crisis: a shock

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Author Kirchhoff

Photo: Arne Dedert / picture alliance / Arne Dedert / dpa

Corona crisis, climate crisis, democracy crisis: the times could hardly be better to escape from reality into fantasy.

DER SPIEGEL asked writers to create little utopias for dystopian times.

The main idea: Dreaming against the crisis.

What Bodo Kirchhoff wrote down for us follows.

What should one answer to questions about where the imagination strives in times of crises and bad circumstances in order to evade both, if one neither feels comfortable in one's here nor believes in a there of utopias?

In between alone, spaces or rather crevices open up for me, but with unexpected flourishing (like a fig shoot can sprout from every crack in the wall on my Italian piece of ground), enough to make my way through time with work on novels.

Opinion as such is in a crisis because far too many people can express their own opinion on any event without thinking, only stimulated by the chance to express themselves.

As a writer and contemporary in one, I couldn't say that I would like to flee somewhere else from desperation over the crises mentioned in the question, how much the world too - in the brave new days of Clouds, who pretend to perpetuate everything that we have up to now makes immortal for the long term - seems to stagger towards a temporary demise, plagued by a plague that was no longer thought possible, and inundated by flash floods for which there is no lack of explanation and yet language; or how those occasionally give me the language that people like ventriloquist puppets in front of the camera babble their opinions without changing anything more than the reputation of those who smile at the word.

That is, the opinion as such is in a crisis because far too many people about any event without thinking, only stimulated by the chance to express themselves, can express their own opinion: as opinion jumping jacks and jumping women, who at most in the Play a role at the moment of their occurrence. And all of that leaves the interviewee here - who has made it his business to only express his opinion on issues that really concern him (for example, that there will soon be more writers than serious readers, or last summer the wind was one of his Cypresses, which already includes a lot) are not looking for little last paradise - wherever, when the world is a village, viruses and opinions follow you everywhere.

No, I throw myself into fiction, neither as a political author nor as a dreamer, only as a narrator with a silent contempt for all sloppy thinking, speaking and writing, for all inaccurate, dishonest remembering and looking; So what I mean here is not the sheer (or lateral thinking) contempt, but the one with a dream on the back, in my case the dream of having written something that does not help anyone to get through crises better, but can accompany some in their own little conflict that lacks the big bell, often even the simplest words to say how you feel. Instead, you take selfies with a process that can basically only capture outlines and colors, but no shading and no light, which even fails because of the mystery of an everyday sunset,let alone have an algorithm ready for the signs of melancholy.

For me, literature has always been the way to tell something, instead of an expressed opinion about God and the world, that reflects my position in the world, or rather that between heaven and earth.

As someone who has been offering writing seminars with his wife for twenty years (where summer storms meanwhile bend cypress trees), I know from hundreds of stories that none of them was about the general crises, but almost each one about a language and a form of what has left you speechless in life and what you want to tell in order to regain confidence and to feel part of your surroundings and thus the world, in other words: how to express your own darkness. Often the place where they emerge over the course of a week flows into these stories and always as a beautiful place, never as an example of a crisis with its new buildings on an old olive slope, ecologically flawless including a lake view, but the sight of it a disaster, as if that had supposedly political,Climate-friendly everything aesthetic replaced. But the stories that arise there tell of what is closer to the writer: his own, holey shirt; it is a turning of the shortage into a piece of fiction, which, by the way, prevents one from spitting out big opinions (the former comment on the television news is now even called opinion).

For me, literature was always the way to tell something, instead of an expressed opinion about God and the world, that reflects my position in the world, or rather that between heaven and earth, so also a way to defend metaphysics - that with the digital revolution seems to be finally liquidated. And even if the number of female and final male readers of novels who cannot be skimmed over in a deck chair is dwindling (not the number of buyers because no other smaller gift has more prestige), narration remains as the discreet telling of truths, especially the one unpleasant ones, as they may still apply in future crises and were already valid two thousand years ago, a way for writers and readers not to seek refuge in sheer contempt.

The lateral thinker view - you will still be able to express your opinion here! (or shoot someone who asks you to wear mouth and nose protection at the checkout) - stands at the opposite end of what I have in mind as a writer: to create dense atmospheres in which readers become involved, even unwillingly; not to write after someone's mouth, instead, after his unspeakable, not as a political author (I would have to live in Belarus, China or Turkey), but as a contemporary who, for example, had concerns before the printing of his latest novel, that weren't your own: Whether everything in this book was linguistically correct, whereby it wasn't at all a matter of whether one or the other group could feel hurt by a formulation,but whether one or the other person from the field of criticism would be of this opinion from the outset and should not find anything on six hundred pages that would be suitable as evidence for it. That can be frightening, even if it doesn't lead to prison, but to an imprisonment in thinking, and in that case the only thing left would really be to flee into modest utopias, such as they serve as sleep aids instead of pills, and I am happy to give you a few examples of my own transitional daydreams to give specific answers to the questions asked.but to being imprisoned in thinking, and in that case the only thing that really remains is to flee into modest utopias, such as they serve as sleep aids instead of tablets, and I would like to give a few examples of my own transitional dreams to sleep about to answer the questions posed specifically.but to being imprisoned in thinking, and in that case the only thing that really remains is to flee into modest utopias, such as they serve as sleep aids instead of tablets, and I would like to give a few examples of my own transitional dreams to sleep about to answer the questions posed specifically.

Again and again there are fantasies about a sudden inexplicable failure of all smartphones, connected with the dissolution of all clouds and blockchains, that memory that we do not feel, that costs nothing more than electricity - thoughts about a break in our comfort, what a riddle gives up. But I also like to imagine how one morning, when our capital city comes to after a long hot weekend with a Love Parade or the like, a white polygonal stone the size of a house lies in front of the Reichstag, a polyhedron like in Dürer's famous engraving Melencolica I. , as compelling in appearance as inexplicable, physical and metaphysical at the same time. Furthermore, I dream of falling asleep - to bring here another example of adult protection, not suitable for young people,an almost extinct word - a return of the old photography as a result of the smartphone failure, that is, people with a camera around their necks, enthusiastic amateurs who, admittedly also in front of the large polygonal stone, put in a film while standing, not so much to capture it as a sensation, but to capture the associated atmosphere, the special light it creates and, with a bit of luck, even the shock that is reflected in the faces of those who are astonished in front of it (nobody would even think of taking a selfie to make in front of the stone).but rather to capture the atmosphere associated with it, the special light that it generates, and with a little luck even the shock that is reflected in the faces of those who are astonished in front of it (nobody would even think of taking a selfie in front of the stone).but rather to capture the atmosphere associated with it, the special light that it generates, and with a little luck even the shock that is reflected in the faces of those who are astonished in front of it (nobody would even think of taking a selfie in front of the stone).

And that's not all: I dream of white spots on the world map and travel there, to people who don't know the Internet and not even electricity, and who let me in on their secrets between heaven and earth and make me understand everything I've seen and heard for To keep me, who transform me in such a way that nobody recognizes me when I return home, although I have hardly changed on the outside - the dream of a new birth. But there is also, already rolled up for sleep, the little utopia of a subway full of commuters reading a book, a novel that cost a little more than two long drinks, let's say 34 euros; And of course, there is also the dream of a big lottery win and what could be done with it on the spot, this almost extreme means to find sleep,the only escape I believe in

And when I jump through the TV channels later in the evening as the very last resort to get ready for sleep (after reading and the thoughts in the dark that only led to further thoughts), there is also a reverie, the one with the house-sized polygonal stone has to do, namely not to encounter a discussion group about the so strange in front of the Reichstag, not to hear any experts, but at best to get a statue of the stone without comment.

It would be conceivable to pay attention to what is alien to us, which imperceptibly turns into affection or even love, and I dream that too: this silent being shaken by something inexplicable, which can even be a poem or lines in a novel - the latter is the utopia that touches the meaning of all writing in difficult, ametaphysical times like ours.