2023-10-17 10:25:53
Opinion Literary Quartet
What people don’t talk about in the Literary Quartet
As of: 10:25 a.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes
Thea Dorn wants to cancel Louis Ferdinand Céline. WELT author Hannah Lühmann doesn’t quite understand that
Source: ZDF and Svea Pietschmann; Claudius Plow
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Is it right to celebrate the World War II memoirs of a burning anti-Semite as great literature shortly after the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians? In the “Literary Quartet”, presenter Thea Dorn finds herself in a quandary – and is left alone with her concerns.
The “Literary Quartet” in its six-year-old new edition with Thea Dorn is not exactly known for providing material for debate. Dorn, who, as a journalist, represents her positions courageously and cleverly, regularly moderates the entertaining program in a cheerful, matter-of-fact manner. It is all the more interesting to observe how the pre-recorded format deals with current political events, especially when they are as shocking as the massacre of Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023.
The “Literary Quartet” from October 13, 2023 was after the horrific cut – which is interesting because you don’t notice it for large parts of the show. Dorn could have included it in her introduction, as she did after the assassination attempt on Salman Rushdie in August 2022. At that time, Dorn gave a short speech about the “fundamentalistically blinded seeds” of the Ayatollahs, WELT author and then newly appointed PEN Berlin chairman Deniz Yücel presented the “Satanic Verses”. Interesting, disturbing and completely appropriate.
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Why not with Israel? Dorn comes to the massacres exactly halfway through the broadcast time – after two enthusiastic book presentations (Daniel Kehlmann’s “Lichtspiel” and “Gittersee” by Charlotte Gneuss) and a very general intro.
Now, says Thea Dorn, her mood suddenly slightly darkened, she comes to a book with which – she wants to say it up front – she has a problem that she has never had in six years of the “Literary Quartet”. You now have to decide whether you want to talk about a book that was selected for this program months ago. But it was also disgusting for her to simply decide that this book would be canceled from the show.
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Fascist author Céline
The corpus delicti is “War”, a book by the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who was a manic anti-Semite and collaborator with the Vichy regime, in many ways a person of the worst kind, but unfortunately also a gifted one Writer.
The rediscovery of the long-lost “War,” points out Jakob Augstein, who brought Céline into the show, is a literary sensation that is not so easy to avoid. It just doesn’t happen that often that “a piece of world literature is discovered 80 years after it was written.” Furthermore, as an involuntary anti-war novel, it is “hotly relevant especially in our time” because it shows “war for what it actually is: an obscene abomination”.
Thea Dorn, however, remains tight-lipped, only pointing out that she is always the first to complain about the separation of author and work, but there is also something like a “momentum” in book selection. She was left alone with this feeling.
But what would it have been like with sensitive words for Israel – right at the beginning of the program?
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