What about Rainald Goetz? What does the writer and Georg Büchner Prize winner of 2015 do? In recent years, these questions have been circulating in Mitte, Kreuzberg, Frankfurt and the associated cultural institutions, although Goetz had written a play for Karin Beier and the Hamburger Schauspielhaus in 2020 with “Reich des Todes”.
Passionate cyclist
But a novel? A crucial book, at least a little book like “Rave” or “Loslabern”? No, nothing announced. So he was mostly spotted in Mitte on a bike with one of his children on the back, usually in good spirits. A happy family man.
But now Goetz had a big appearance again, at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin, not far from Lake Halen, to read a new text here, a text that he wrote for the “Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte” on the subject of “The Small Print”.
In the spirit of Hegel and absolute idealism
Cycling, large intersections, traffic lights and the police are also topics in it, presumably this is not just everyday life for Goetz, but a new obsession that can best be linked to Hegel. Above all, however, the text also contains: Goetz’s old, well-known obsession for reading print products, magazines, newspapers, cutting out and keeping articles, celebrating the feeling of “all-encompassing participation in the world”.
Of course, you would like to cut out sentences from your text and put them up on posters, especially here in the Tagesspiegel offices, where a print newspaper is produced every day with a lot of passion and effort. Such as “the newspaper, the URSENATION of the daily newspaper, remains the collection point for everything that surpasses all these special interests.”
Here Hegel again, well aware that the small print is now primarily consumed digitally. The reference to a novel project “that I have been pursuing for many years under the title ‘The Executioner’” is also nice, which is reminiscent of his failed political novel from the noughties. Goetz hadn’t been heard from them for ages, until the day when Ulf Poschardt encouraged him to write contemporary notes again for “Vanity Fair”. Or, also quite nice, the confession, related to the latter, that one has always gotten lost, that one has overestimated oneself and that one cannot do many things.
The bashing of Maxim Biller and his text “Why I don’t want to be a writer anymore” after the Russian attack on Ukraine is initially amusing and not entirely wrong, “amazing article”, “incredible nonsense”.
Rather irritating, however, was Goetz’s own experience a year ago with regard to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which affected Biller in his self-image as a writer. Goetz writes that he is “finally (…) able to really relate to the historical moment of August 1914,” “the collective willingness to go to war, that’s how people experienced it at the time (…).”
Here in February and March 2022 he thinks he recognized a similar mood “indicatively”. Really? At this point, Rainald Goetz has taken it upon himself to say what nonsense it is – no matter how beautiful his declarations of love for the printed matter are, his enthusiasm, his spiritual inspiration.
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