#buddenbrooks energy

[leninqrad]

I am completely enamoured with this book cover, admire it!

[langernameohnebedeutung]

have you ever read a classic book that you disliked or found boring?

Sure have! - I don’t hold classics to a particular standard anyway. If I don’t like a classic, I will put it aside same as a ‘modern’ book. I like to read them, because I enjoy the stories and if I don’t - yeet, book. There are some things I enjoy about them being classics, like getting an insight into the way a person at that time thought or constructed reality or interpreted the actions of their fellow people, but it also has serious downsides (usually that the way a person at that time thought about reality could be very dehumanising to women, people of colour, Jewish people, etc.). But I also think they get a bad rep for being boring (I blame school). Some of the most boring books I (didn’t) read where modern writers going through the motions to tick all the trope boxes for a modern crime-thriller or fantasy-novel.

That said my biggest: -.- moment with a classic was: I read the Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann in school, which is one of those books people tell you every German has to read. I found it absolutely boring and dull and uninteresting. 

Skip forward, I’m out of school and decide it’s finally time to read Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane (held up to a similar degree). I hated it, hated the characters, hated the pacing, hated that this male author clearly has very little insight into the way a young woman thinks and I realised I hated it for a lot of the same underlying reasons that I didn’t like the Buddenbrooks for. Also the chinese ghost sub-plot and also where did the child constantly go.  I actually felt guilty, because the author was critical about the way society treats young women and asks them to put their own ambitions and hopes aside in order to be a good wife, but I just didn’t vibe with it,

I thought the similarities existed strictly because Buddenbrooks and Briest were both written in the same time period. So I read on and suddenly a guy named ‘Buddenbrook’ makes an appearance. I really wanted to punch a wall when I realised that it all wasn’t a coincidence. Thomas Mann had written the Buddenbrooks based on a character from Effi Briest because he liked that novel so much. Dude really compressed the entire boring energy of Effi Briest. his dislike for the colour yellow and his fear of dentists into a novel and was like: “This is a literary experience the world needs!”

[justforbooks]

Dreamers by Volker Weidermann — all power to the creatives

Is this not miraculous? We have staged a revolution without spilling a drop of blood! There has never been such a thing in history.” So allegedly proclaimed Kurt Eisner, theatre critic and journalist, once jailed for treason, now the self-appointed prime minister of the Free State of Bavaria. In the early hours of November 7-8 1918, Eisner and fellow revolutionaries had taken advantage of a general strike and spreading mutiny by the German navy to stage a popularly supported coup in Munich to overthrow the old order and replace it with a democratic parliamentary republic.

This short lived German revolution would not remain bloodless for long. Violence meted out by the new Communist rulers was eventually quelled by equally savage methods undertaken by the rightwing as it sought to reinstate order. Only a few months later, on February 21 1919, the 51-year-old bohemian Eisner, a “mystic revolutionary”, “a socialist fairytale king” with a beard to rival that of Karl Marx, was assassinated — shot in the back by a German nationalist. His revolution would last until that August, when it would be ended by the adoption of the Weimar Constitution.

Volker Weidermann’s blend of engrossing, urgent reportage and gentle, dissociative musing will be familiar to readers of his previous work, the bestselling Summer Before the Dark, which portrayed, with melancholy and menace, the final summer of frantic friendship between writers Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig in 1936 in the Belgian seaside resort of Ostend, their options decreasing, their lives soon to be destroyed by exile.

Dreamers moves along similar lines: it is both a prequel to and a foreshadowing of the previous work. Weidermann, using a larger cast of characters in a narrative crammed with activity, concentrates on the artists and intellectuals who participated in the revolution and its chaotic aftermath.

They included Expressionist playwright Ernst Toller, president for six days in April 1919, for which he would serve a five-year prison sentence, later committing suicide in exile in New York in 1939, and his close associate Max Weber, the political economist. Weber advised the drafters of the Weimar Constitution shortly before falling victim to the Spanish flu pandemic, dying in 1920.

The movement’s prominent observers included the “silent” “slender, almost transparent” poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and novelist Thomas Mann. Rilke’s most famous work, The Duino Elegies, was still undergoing a long, agonising gestation; his undistinguished war service had been curtailed by the intervention of influential friends. Mann, already author of Buddenbrooks and Death in Venice, not yet the author of The Magic Mountain and Nobel laureate, had supported the Kaiser during the first world war and opposed liberalism. His views shifted gradually but dramatically as a result of the revolution — he encouraged fellow intellectuals to support the fledgling Weimar Republic, later becoming an important critic of Nazism, for which, in limbo in Switzerland, he was stripped of German citizenship by 1936.

The clear intention behind this deceptively extravagant and endlessly interesting book, unerringly translated by Ruth Martin, is to draw a parallel with the surge of populism in a steadily destabilising Europe of 2018. Much as his compatriot and fellow literary editor Florian Illies did with his acclaimed 1913: The Year Before the Storm, Weidermann uses a free, impressionistic style, mixing fact with supposition and actual historical incident with a hint of possibility, a style that is the perfect prose foil for Eisner’s neophyte socialist state.

Eisner’s failed gamble would lead to another Munich-centred coup, the commonly known Beer Hall Putsch of March 1923. Initially unsuccessful, its ultimate outcome would be the national championing and astonishing rise of its principal instigator, Adolf Hitler. But let us not leave the last word to him. Instead, here is an exiled Ernst Toller, visionary of the nascent “writers’ republic”, speaking with energy and conviction nearly 20 years later in London in 1936: “We’ve learnt that ‘fate’ is an excuse. We make fate! We want to be true, we want to be courageous, we want to be human.”

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[nunc2020]

Die Weltunterbrechung

Von Armin Nassehi

Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft hat Weihnachten als große Familieninszenierung erfunden.

Es geschieht etwas mit den Menschen an Weihnachten, dessen sie sich nicht bewusst sind und das daher umso revolutionärer ist. Jenseits von Kommerz und Rausch werden alle auf die Familie zurückgeworfen. Ob das gut geht?

„Wenn die stille Zeit vorbei ist, wird es auch wieder ruhiger“, schrieb der große bayerische Philosoph und Anarchist Karl Valentin. In diesem Satz ist mehr Wahrheit als nur die ironische Aussicht auf etwas Ruhe nach jener stressigen Zeit des Advents, die im kulturellen Gedächtnis eher als stille Zeit gilt – es aber nicht ist. Nun wäre es wohlfeil, in den Kanon derer einzustimmen, denen an Weihnachten vor allem die Hektik auffällt, mit der das 13. Monatsgehalt in die Binnennachfrage zurückgespült wird und mit der ein familiäres Aufrüsten verbunden ist, noch eine Lücke zwischen Fondue und Zimtstern, Glühwein und Lebkuchen oder Gans und Teilchen ausfindig zu machen, um sie möglichst schnell zu schließen.

Die Hektik vor Weihnachten, den Kauf- und Konsumrausch, den Stress von Weihnachtsfeiern, die niemand will, aber fast alle besuchen müssen, kann man kritisieren – als das Uneigentliche, als Ablenkung, als falsches Leben im Falschen. Man wird dafür viel Zustimmung bekommen, als Kopfnicken zwischen zwei Weihnachtseinkäufen oder als solidarischen Seufzer zwischen Hauptgang, Dessert und Kapitalismuskritik bei der Weihnachtsfeier.

Aber wie gesagt, das ist so wohlfeil und erwartbar, dass es schon dazugehört und ja auch keinen wirklichen Leidensdruck erzeugt. Man muss Weihnachten aber viel dialektischer denken. Wäre die stille Zeit, der Advent, wirklich ruhig, würde das Entscheidende an Weihnachten gar nicht auffallen, dass es nämlich tatsächlich ruhiger wird. Karl Otto Hondrich, der unvergessene Frankfurter Soziologe, schrieb zu Weihnachten 2006, kurz vor seinem Tod: „Die Aura der Ruhe schafft es sich durch die Unruhe, mit der es sich umgibt und die es noch steigert – bis es alles zur Ruhe zwingt: die Politik, Wirtschaft, Vergnügen, Sport, sogar die Autos. Am 24. Dezember, zwischen 18 und 20 Uhr, findet eine ganze Gesellschaft ihren absoluten Ruhepunkt.“

In der Tat – alle Systeme außer den absolut lebenswichtigen wie Energie- und Krankenversorgung oder andere Notdienste werden heruntergefahren. Wenigstens das öffentliche Leben wird bis an seine Grenze bradykard. Der Gesellschaftskreislauf wird so weit wie möglich reduziert, und es gelingt tatsächlich für kurze Zeit, dass alles langsamer und ereignisloser wird – zumindest in den öffentlichen Räumen.

Zurückgeworfen, das war die Pointe von Hondrich, wird die Gesellschaft letztlich auf ihre Familien und, so muss man hinzufügen, diejenigen, die keine Familie haben, merken es spätestens jetzt. Hondrich fragt: „Wird da nicht das Falsche gefeiert?“ Nun – wenn alles andere wegfällt, dann bleibt nur die Familie, wie immer sie sei, das ist ihre Funktion: Sie mutet uns eine Nähe zu, die in allen anderen Bereichen der Gesellschaft störend wäre. Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft jedenfalls hat Weihnachten als große Familieninszenierung erfunden. Das Weihnachtskapitel in Thomas Manns „Buddenbrooks“ kann als das Lukasevangelium der familialen Weihnachtsliturgie gelesen werden.

[tilde44]

Typhus runs the following course:      As he lies in remote, feverish dreams, lost in their heat, the patient is called back to life by an unmistakable, cheering voice.  That clear, fresh voice reaches his spirit wandering along strange, hot paths and leads it back to cooling shade and peace.  The patient listens to that bright, cheering voice, hears its slightly derisive admonishment to turn back, to return to the regions from which it calls, to places that the patient has left so far behind and has already forgotten.  And then, if there wells up within him something like a sense of duties neglected, a sense of shame, of renewed energy, of courage, joy, and love, a feeling that he still belongs to that curious, colorful, and brutal hubbub that he has left behind -- then, however far he may have strayed down that strange, hot path, he will turn back and live.  But if he hears the voice of life and shies from it, fearful and reticent, if the memories awakened by its lusty challenge only make him shake his head and stretch out his hand to ward them off, if he flees farther down the path that opens before him now as a route of escape -- no, it is clear, he will die.

Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (John E. Woods, Trans.)