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Elke Heidenreich, author and book critic
This is world literature: Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, wrote this little story "Bartleby the Scribe" and Bartleby's sentence is: "I'd rather not." He's an unhappy, self-conscious man, works on Wall Street in a law firm and if he has to copy something or post something, he always says: "I'd rather not." He refuses completely.
The lawyer is quite desperate.
Then he finds out that Bartleby obviously spends the night and sleeps in the office because he no longer has an apartment.
And he doesn't have the heart to throw this deranged, quiet guy out.
He just changes offices and leaves him there like a piece of furniture.
However, the next tenants are not so friendly and Bartleby has to leave and ends up quite miserably.
This means that if you completely reject your life, at some point you won't have anything anymore.
What is the story trying to tell us?
That the freedom not to act is ultimately utopian?
Do you have the right to refuse everything if you bear the consequences yourself?
Or does a society not work with these refusers, be it vaccination or military service or office work?
It's a great little piece of literature by Melville and well worth reading again and again.
So, and now this here, completely new: It's also about refusal, but very specifically about the refusal of eternal happiness, the happiness dictatorship, the need to be happy, everything is supposed to optimize us, encourage us, bring us forward.
And this book tells why positive thinking doesn't get us anywhere.
But already scold.
Art comes from pain and change comes from anger.
And that is what the political scientist Juliane Marie Schreiber describes here in her »Rebellion against the Terror of the Positive«.
And she borrows Melville's "I'd rather not" line.
And she grumbles, it's a book after my own heart, against feel-good teas and we-are-worthy shampoos and all that nonsense that's supposed to make us happy all the time.
... She calls it a happy dictatorship. And we know that it was never the lucky ones
Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish Nobel Prize winner in 1996, wrote a poem about it: "What use is happy love to us," she says.
»The happy lovers turn their backs on the world, they are only occupied with themselves.
We need the unfortunate, the permeable, the sensitive.” And that's how it is in this book.
"Should I," asks Schreiber, "actually be happy that Venice's canals are now clean again?
Or should I think about what that cost?
Namely 100,000 corona deaths?
You can't always repress everything just to be happy.
Christian Lindner calls problems “thorny opportunities”.
Yes hello?
Are you crazy?
Are we all nice now?
Yes of course.
Recently, wars of annihilation have also only become military operations.
And it's just not true that we're the architects of our own fortune
that we can do anything we want.
Circumstances are often not there.
And if we don't reconcile ourselves with the feasibility and non-feasibility of our destiny, then we go crazy and then we become even more unhappy.
But no, we should strive for happiness.
And Schreiber shows here that there are coaches who really do seminars where we learn how to optimize ourselves, with formulas like this one, I didn't make it up, I'll read it to you: »Have you ever wondered? why are you drowning in the sea?
But not a shark?
Because the shark sees the water as an opportunity, not a threat.” I mean, are you okay?
Can you get any crazier?
This great book asks what actually happens to a society in which everyone thinks they have to survive in the happiness market, rotating in their own orbit, so to speak.
"The main thing is that I'm happy." But whether there is lasting happiness or whether it only leads to digital influencer narcissism and whether it's good for a society is still very much a question.
The book advocates not falling for this economy and its monstrous feel-good industry with products based on cosmetics, food, or clothes.
»The search for happiness«, she says, »makes you unhappy«.
Don't get caught up in it.
Read this smart book.
And if someone comes along and says you need to improve and that optimism boosts the immune system, tell them, 'Eat some oranges and go for a walk every day.
This also strengthens the immune system.
« I don't want to take part in this stupid bliss.
I just want to sit here like the man in Loriot's sketch and not get any better.
But I would like to know what is currently on the SPIEGEL bestseller list.
I want that.
And that makes me happy too.
With »Serge«, Yasmina Reza has been on the bestseller list for months.
Namely with the story of the Popper siblings, who, after the death of their mother, travel to Auschwitz on a kind of »identity-finding trip«.
Tragedy comedy from France - this week on the ten.
Bestselling author Jan Weiler made a huge jump from twenty places to nine.
He, too, is about what we know about our parents.
Conclusion: not much.
In »Marquee Man«, fifteen-year-old Kim meets her biological father after 13 years of radio silence.
The book is said to have pleased Weiler's daughter very much.
A teenager is also the main character in this book: in Christian Huber's »Man does not forget how to swim«, fifteen-year-old Pascal meets Jacky, the girl from the circus.
It's the summer of 1999 and Pascal really doesn't want to fall in love under any circumstances.
But it comes as it must.
Podcast star Huber with a new bestseller on the number eight.
An old acquaintance, on the other hand, is on the seven.
On the list for a whopping 65 weeks: »Der Buchspazier« by Carsten Henn, the feel-good novel for all book lovers.
Columnist and prolific writer Axel Hacke climbed ten places to six this week.
His new work is called »A house for many summers«.
Here you can find out what the bestselling author has experienced in his holiday home on Elba over the past thirty years and what he has learned about the place.
Actress and director Laetitia Colombani moves down one spot to the top five this week.
In »The Girl with the Dragon«, the Frenchwoman tells the story of the Indian girl Lalita, who appeared in her bestselling novel »The Braid«.
And from the two it goes down to the four for Wolf Haas – with »garbage«.
After eight years of Brenner abstinence, there is a reunion with the Graz detective Simon Brenner.
In the meantime, he actually works at the garbage dump – and finds a human knee there.
It must be determined.
The lawyer and bestselling author Bernhard Schlink remains in third place.
His novel »The Granddaughter« tells an East-West story.
Again it's about family secrets - abysses included.
The number two is also about family: actor Edgar Selge convinces the readers with the autofictional work »Have you finally found us«.
A twelve-year-old tells his story between prison walls and classical music.
And - surprise!
- there is a new entry on the one: The American Elizabeth George offers with "What is hidden rests" the 21st case for Inspector Thomas Lynley.
This time he investigates far from his British-bourgeois comfort zone, in the Nigerian community of north London - and uncovers cases of female genital mutilation.
