What is really important? What touches us today – and will not go away tomorrow? It’s the things that have moved us since human existence: happiness, love, family, partnership, time, stress, loneliness, farewell, grief.
BILD columnist Louis Hagen*, coming from a German-Jewish family, sought answers to the eternal questions of mankind from poets, thinkers and researchers. And found a few answers that are amazingly simple – and yet can enrich our lives.
★★★
We need another world because ours sometimes oppresses us.
That was the reality this week: On Amok driver in Berlin runs into a school class. A bloody war is raging in Ukraine. And in Bavaria people are still looking for the causes of the devastating train accident – how can one not despair?
And as if the real world wasn’t enough, let’s watch “Tatort”, millions are doing it.
▶︎ On Sunday evening we see a corpse. According to the detective story, she was washed by the perpetrator, who removed excrement and other traces.
Some of us are having dinner right now. Most of us can take that. There’s always an off button.
Entertainment is important, crime fiction too, they distract us. But there are also people who actually don’t want to see it (despite the high ratings). They think: Isn’t there anything else, does everything have to be so brutal?
Dear readers, don’t be unsettled by the inner voice that desires more harmony. Don’t we all want the world around us to be somehow “whole”? So what? What’s wrong with that?
BILD columnist Louis Hagen
That’s the success of hits, of Inga Lindström, of love series on TV, of celebrity wedding stories that many love to read. Millions love this so-called “perfect world”.
Whatever they say about it – please don’t be fooled if you like the beautiful, the loving, even the kitschy.
Nobody put it more aptly than the Austrian poet and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929):
There is a lot of sadness in the world and a lot of beauty. Sometimes the sad seems to have more power than one can bear, but then the beautiful quietly strengthens and touches our soul again.
*Louis Hagen (75) was a member of the BILD editor-in-chief for 13 years and is now a consultant at the communications agency WMP. His texts are available as a book at koehler-mittler-shop.de.