2023-09-09 06:47:17
The central feature of storytelling is the ease with which narratives can take hold of us. On the one hand, this affects their emotional effectiveness, and on the other hand, it also affects their ability to set thoughts in motion in our heads without any effort. We learn from nothing more easily than from stories, and nothing can win us over more easily than a good story.
Storytelling is one of our unique human characteristics, an activity that no other living being practices. It has accompanied us as humanity since we began to speak and at the same time has significantly promoted the development of our linguistic skills. From the beginning, it served several purposes: to inform one another, to entertain one another, to influence one another, and to infuse meaning into social action. Stories interpret our activities, they assign roles to those involved, they indicate what is good and evil, they provide us with material to believe in.
Anyone who talks about telling must not be silent about listening. Both belong together like yin and yang, because without listening, telling could not develop and without telling, listening could not develop. With writing, reading has replaced listening, but here too, texts need addressees. Listening and reading only appear to be passive. In reality, listening means dedicating time to a person, paying attention and being interested in their point of view. Listening connects people by making other people’s worlds of experience accessible and placing them alongside their own. Contrast is what enriches listening.
Storytelling salon of timeless magic
Listening is the prerequisite for telling. To be heard is the need behind telling. Having a listener is healing, as we know from more than a hundred years of psychotherapy, a profession that thrives on telling stories like no other.
Advertisement | Scroll to continue reading
Tell us! Katrin Rohnstock at the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the General Director’s Salon. General directors of large GDR combines and other GDR experts meet regularly to tell their stories.Volkmar Otto
The Berlin company Rohnstock Biographien has managed to revive the timeless magic of oral storytelling by its founder Katrin Rohnstock developing a format like the narrative salon. Unlike psychotherapy with its duty of confidentiality, the biography expert once again practices telling stories as a public event. Ritualization is necessary to steer it into constructive channels: common topic, equal time for everyone to tell the story, no criticism, no interpretations.
Collective storytelling is also suitable for addressing the major rifts of our time, such as those between East and West, man and woman, city and country, those who have settled in and those who have arrived, winners and losers. They all embody different ways of suffering from time. Through storytelling, Rohnstock Biographies has created an approach to these ruptures that is unobtrusive, does not proselytize and, above all, takes sides for those who have no forum for their stories.
Telling is life
Telling shapes relationships and identities; through my stories I can represent who I am or how I want to be seen. You arrive in a community when you can tell your stories – and you belong to it as long as you appear in the stories of others.
Through storytelling we get to know each other, create connection and trust. When two people fall in love, they sit together with wine or cola, look deeply into each other’s eyes and tell stories from their lives. They make sure that they come away well, but they also create openness by telling about their worries.
Information that we learn through storytelling has the character of a personal and important message. We believe them when we value the person telling the story. Through storytelling we also construct the past, history, origins, identity and hopes for societies, communities and families. Today, storytelling is used by companies to build corporate identity or branding, as well as in politics to underpin trust and belonging.
The multiplication of storytelling
Originally, storytelling was a natural form of communication. All we need is our voice, facial expressions and gestures. Then came the music: stories as songs. With theater, storytelling became visible and with writing it became fixable. Modern storytelling begins with the printing press, the availability of novels in portable form. With film it became visually reproducible, combined in the digital age with an unheard of commercialization and further development of narrative techniques.
Rohnstock Biographies is the counter-model to the industrialized narrative culture, which tends to produce off-the-shelf stories, plastered into marketable and seductive genres and formats. The story salon preserves personal things and promotes deceleration. His method gives people the skills they need to communicate in an individually meaningful and social way. It leads back to the roots of storytelling, back to the campfires, tables, salons and conversations during breaks where you can still look into the eyes of the narrators.
Narration as a means of politics
Narration is also a means of politically interpreting and influencing reality. Lyotard spoke of “big stories” or “metanarratives” that shape entire epochs and give societies legitimacy for their actions. For him, the Enlightenment was not a historical fact, but a narrative meta-construction whose credibility was destroyed by the wars and colonies of the enlightened nations. He recommended dissolving such large stories in favor of smaller, local stories. For a long time, political narratives ran along the lines of the East-West conflict – with narrative self-interpretations on both sides. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Francis Fukuyama brought up the story of the end of history; The absurd story of a major population exchange is currently coming from populist circles.
Social media has created new conditions – we call them echo chambers – that encourage the telling of such stories and insulate them from reality testing. Unfortunately, we never know for sure whether we ourselves are caught in such an echo chamber and to what extent we ignore the stories of others in order to better believe our own.
So storytelling is not an entirely innocent field that remains untouched by political conflicts. Narratives can also serve to influence politics, manipulate and maintain power. The best corrective to stories is telling more stories that showcase other perspectives.
Stroke of luck Rohnstock biographies
It is a stroke of luck that personal storytelling found a home at Rohnstock. With the storytelling salon she established the right to claim time to tell one’s own stories, accompanied by the obligation to listen to the stories of others. Fortunately, there is a great need for unscripted, uncensored and uncommented narratives.
The sense of authenticity has sharpened in the hypermedia society and there is an audience for it. For a long time we just listened in silence when the talk shows were on TV in the evenings. Today, everyone seems to just want to tell stories by posting their messages in snippets on social media channels. In the storytelling salon, telling is brought back together with listening.
I am convinced that, more broadly, there needs to be a whole movement to get us all talking again. We have to defend ourselves against the dominance of media and industrial narratives. We need a diversity of perspectives that place individual experiences in the context of historical events without patronizing or lumping everyone together.
I would like to acknowledge that among the stories that are discussed and preserved in Rohnstock, many are dedicated to the collapsed GDR and what happened to its residents before and after reunification. Authentic stories are the best way to preserve the GDR narratively without deforming memory in ideological disputes. There are an infinite number of controversial narrative truths about the GDR, all of which can and must be told in parallel alongside each other. Rohnstock Biographies shows us how this can happen.
Prof. Dr. Otto Kruse is a German psychologist and writing researcher. He became known with the book “Don’t be afraid of the blank page. Studying without writer’s block.”
This is a post submitted as part of our open source initiative. With Open Source The Berlin publishing house gives freelance authors and anyone interested the opportunity to offer texts with relevant content and professional quality standards. Selected contributions will be published and honored.
This article is subject to the Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). It may be freely used by the general public for non-commercial purposes provided the author and the Berliner Zeitung are named and any editing is excluded.
Do you have any feedback? Write us! briefe@berliner-zeitung.de
#GDR #lives #stories #ideological #conflict