2023-09-01 15:51:01
Hamburg perished, northern Poland and the Netherlands drowned, Switzerland disintegrated into tiny cantons. But the rest of Europe is still standing. So that the rising sea level cannot harm it, it was raised in several stages with a 35 meter thick layer of concrete and completely sealed, the new cliffs and speedboats of the border police keep the boat people from England, Scotland, Denmark outside who want to save themselves on dry land, on the seabed “Drowned, some hardly seem to have decomposed, others can only be guessed at in outline.”
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For the sedentary indoors, the location is quite comfortable. You can have fun in underground clubs with jokes and unicorn showers. And if they have the money, hire Vorweiner, foreign professionals who will one day mourn heartbreakingly at their dispersal party (there are no more funerals). The closer the bond they can form with them in life, the more contagious the sobs will be when they pass away. The job has to be done by guest workers – it is said that the best would be “men who grew up directly on the Gulf of Guinea” – because excessive expressions of emotion are frowned upon among the cultivated rest of Europe.
Only those who belong to the lower class “have a movable upper lip, can really laugh and smile. In normal people, the upper lip is artificially stiffened during puberty. A tiny procedure, outpatient. You simply pull a narrow strip of hard plastic through the arch of the upper lip, and the child is then considered an adult and can maintain composure until the end of life.”
Vorweiner is a job
For social prestige and the feeling of not having been alone, it is nevertheless important to be mourned in an exalted manner. So Anna, a 70-year-old with the body of a 20-year-old, chooses a Vorweiner in the Neuschwanstein welcome camp, a Dutchman from Groningen, which has almost completely disappeared. His name is Jan and he is extremely nice. To make him feel at home and develop the gratitude that will enable him to howl like a lapdog for Anna one day, she has mashed potatoes and kale cooked for him once a week. But the plan doesn’t work out, Vorweiner dies before her.
This is the story in Bov Bjerg’s post-apocalyptic novel The Vorweiner. He has her tell about Anna’s daughter Berta, a woman who has a “master in Modern Journalism / Modern Writing for Listening” and works as a “popular clicker”: She invents “news” in which someone suffers a horrible death and, “not at all self-evident, there is a kernel of truth. Or at least some true detail.”
A novel like without anesthesia
That’s understatement: “Der Vorweiner” is full of unrestrainedly invented but blindingly true details. It’s a book as hallucinatory as if written by an artificial intelligence fed with training material from our present, then unleashed on a prognosis of the future. Clear, short sentences that spiral further and further into a madness in which our world begins to look like our world, only without the whitewashing with which we fool ourselves that we should still have hope.
In Bjerg’s furious text, the stun filters are off. That’s why everything seems insanely strange. All you see is what really is: a fortress Europe without mercy and deeper connections (“every man was a business partner, and when he died, he was a former business partner”), in which the lower classes grumble but do not rebel , the climate is becoming more and more unpleasant, wanting to be loved leads to the greatest atrocities, refugees are harpooned without hesitation, and for some inexplicable reason everyone wants to live forever, even though life sucks.
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It is the furiest, darkest, most relentless and desolate novel imaginable about our world. But the craziest thing about him is how happy he makes you to read. Every few pages you want to laugh out loud at the hilarious ideas and neologisms that Berg knocks out, cheering over how artistically and virtuoso he tells. But you have learned to keep your composure under all circumstances. It’s scary.
Bov Bjerg: „The Vorweiner.“ Claasen, 240 pages, 24 euros
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