For Eckhard Henscheid’s 80th birthday

by time news

When in 1988 and 1989 the students in Berlin were not studying but were on strike, Messrs. Winter, Böttcher, Hansen and I sat around the FU’s German studies office and drove us away in an extremely amusing way Zeit: We drank a large amount of beer and read each other in turn from Eckhard Henscheid’s “Trilogy of ongoing nonsense” – a title, incidentally, that later didn’t really suit the master.

Each of us owned this iconic orange slipcase from two thousand and one. What fascinated us so much about it was the exact reproduction of everyday unreasonableness, as it is triggered, sometimes by being furiously in love, sometimes by excessive drinking and whipping the entire environment into a relaxed chaos. – Neither love nor alcohol were alien to us. Henscheid describes the possible consequences of both in extremely comical episodes. Even then it is still funny when in the first novel the lovesick Mr. Jackopp disappears without a trace at the end and in the second Alfred Leobold, who is marked by alcohol, shoots himself. That didn’t scare us. We were young

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