Among the reporting trips In defeated, liberated, destroyed Germany from 1945, the one by Stig Dagerman from autumn 1946 stands out in particular. On the one hand with the view from halfway neutral Sweden, on the other hand as a 23-year-old but already highly praised writer, not a journalist. And he speaks very good German because his wife is German.
What makes these reports so special is Dagerman’s ability to listen to people, determined to respond to people’s suffering, whether through or through no fault of their own, not the Nazi crowd, but “a variety of hungry and freezing individuals”.
Hamburg, Ruhr area, Munich, Berlin. “This freezing, starving, secretly bargaining, dirty and immoral Berlin can still make jokes.” He writes about the now abandoned cellars, the black market, but also about the theaters that are now playing again. And of the denazification tribunals, before which only innocent resisters seem to stand. He speaks to the surviving victims. And he’s always irritated to get sarcastic. When a doctor raves about the fine skiing in Norway, he writes: “If you hear him talk like that, you could almost get the impression that the Germans occupied Norway because of winter sports.” And most pointedly, he sums up with Peter Suhrkamp What characterizes the German peers: “At eighteen you had conquered the world and at twenty-two lost everything again.”
Sigismund v. Radecki (1891 – 1970) was once a humor favorite of the fifties because he had been since his thirties. He was conservative, but stayed away from ingratiating himself against the Nazis, even if he ended up working for Goebbels’ renowned newspaper The Empire was allowed to write. Victor Auburtin and Alfred Polgar were also conservative, but their writing was more pointed and more resistant, while Radecki carefully kept within the conventional framework of education. He was most likely at home in the anecdotal, where one docks with the approbates and canonical in order to frivolize it mildly.
Most of his texts are actually mini-essays, rather painstakingly deliberate. Quite sympathetic, clever anyway, mild corrective of bourgeois certainties. While he carefully avoided all controversy before 1945, he then just as carefully added one or the other courageous remark ex post. Carefully put together and annotated, they are a worthwhile journey through time with a few amazingly topical stations.
You could say cynical: Yes, that’s still real life in harmony with nature! Well, well, something damaged. The Aral Sea is as good as silted up, which makes life even more difficult for the fishermen. And if there is nothing else to sell elsewhere, it is stolen sand. It is needed everywhere. For example on the tourist beaches of Cape Verde, but mainly for building. China is said to have built more sand in three years than the USA in the entire twentieth century. And where does it come from? The fact that the forest robbers roast their sausages on felled tropical wood is less of a problem in view of the legions in this country when grilling sausages that are spoiled with tropical wood. And because the lion’s share of the flowers grown worldwide is produced in Kenya, the water level rises, causing the hippos to rise ashore and biting off the odd tourist – even in hotel complexes. Since the jungle in Indonesia has to give way drastically to the oil palm plantations, the orangutans are on the verge of extinction. Well, there are rescue projects for them, such as in Kenya for elephants, whose ivory poachers hunt down quasi-industrially. And the cell phones, which are useful there and here, are screwed together in a piece by gray wandering ants in China. Jan Stremmel’s reports lead into the worldwide “engine room” of our insatiable life. It has seldom been seen what globalization means so vividly, so impressively.
Rainer Hermann, studied Islamic studies and has been the Middle East correspondent of the DOES, has summarized his perceptions, experiences and insights in this book, along the lines of the states that failed in the past decade or delayed their crises through dictatorship or gangster rule. He looks at the external actors USA, Russia, China and Turkey. As in real life, all of this gives little cause for hope – between increasing migration pressure and short-term maneuvering to secure resources, which cares little about human rights. It is worthwhile to use the reading to check your worldview for this region and its effects on ours.
German autumn Stig Dagerman From the Swedish, with a selection of letters and an afterword by Paul Berf, Guggolz 2021, 190 p., 22 €
Reading book Sigismund von Radecki Compiled by Gerd Herholz, Aisthesis 2021, 160 p., € 8.50
Dirty work. Stories from the engine room of our comfortable life Jan Stremmel Knesebeck 2021, 192 S., 22 €
The axis of failure. How the Arab states are ruining themselves Rainer Hermann Klett-Cotta 2021, 304 S., 18 €
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