The collective silence of Dr. dr Goetz
Among ghosts: Rainald Goetz at the Wissenschaftskolleg
Source: ©Maurice Weiss/Ostkreuz
Haven’t heard from Rainald Goetz for a long time! Now the writer is trying to get right to the heart of the present – with an appearance at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, a look at the German media landscape and a report on a “ambush” by the police.
What does Rainald Goetz actually do? The writer’s fans, who draw on his words and deeds like philological disciples, have long been haunted by the question that refers to a column in “Stern” for celebrities who have gone into hiding. It has been ten years since Goetz presented his last novel “Johann Holtrop” in the Berlin offices of the Suhrkamp publishing house – initially hidden under a blanket in the corner of the room. In the same year, 2012, he gave an imaginative lecture at Humboldt University and a crowd-besieged poetry lecture at Freie Universität that almost resembled a Sermon on the Mount.
And then? Then came a long silence, broken only in 2015 by the sudden limelight of the Büchner Prize. At the acceptance speech in Darmstadt, a homage to the youth, Goetz sang Wanda’s hit “Amore”. The group of disciples, exposed to the passage of time, had to be content with exchanging paparazzi reports of sightings of the poet in Berlin: always on bicycles, often with children, sometimes violating traffic regulations.
Trump, Twitter, Corona, war da was?
But even these anecdotes, which illustrated the disappearance of the author of “Irre” (1983) and “Rave” (1998), became rarer. The anticipation of what comes next threatened to turn into disappointment according to the ambivalent logic of literary authority. dr Rainald Goetz (doctorate in history and medicine) prepared: Trump, Twitter, Corona, Ukraine, was there something?
As if he had felt these clouds on the reception horizon, Goetz, 68 years old, reappeared just in time – no longer at the university or in the publishing house, but at an even more remote place of research, the Wissenschaftskolleg “zu” Berlin, like it is called in proud own spelling. In a public “unboxing” – as influencers call it when they unpack new products on YouTube – Goetz presented the new issue of the “Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte” to the capital’s intellectual elite in a light green bomber jacket, with a bright white parting and familiar, nervous facial expressions. He himself contributed an essay with the big title “Absolute Idealism”: In it he describes, as if he knew the anecdotes circulating about him, how he was “ambushed” by bicycle police officers at a Berlin crossroads, “it was really two women”. .
At the moment of transgression, thoughts about the present and its grasp shoot up in the author’s head “like a flash”, whereby the traffic light system stands for the “compulsion to be subjected to the power of a regime, no matter how reasonable”, and thus for the compromise-heavy legislature of the “traffic light coalition”. stands. At the allegorical crossroads, opposing social currents flow together, as do the streams of news from the media.
The world spirit to bike
So what is Rainald Goetz doing now? He cruises, a world spirit on a bicycle, anarchically through our time – and, as an observer of the observers, reads along with everything that appears, from the “Frankfurter Allgemeine”, which formed the backdrop for his appearance in hugely enlarged tears, about the WELT, whose According to Goetz, articles “are often much more interesting than snobbish prejudice would like to know”, to the “Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte”, in which he in turn sticks his article like a jack-in-the-box, hinting at the “infinite cosmos of the mind”. “Ah, aha, ja!” is the standard comment of the astonished contemporaries open to all perspectives, and “Hallelujah” is the final word, as a metaphysical like thumb under the wonderfully precise, Bavarian-colored lecture.
Is this a new work? Or just a fleeting Emmaus experience, a communion celebration at which, after the “experiment forced by Corona” of virtuality, “talks loose” “until the words have become flesh”, as Rainald Goetz called it in his speech? In any case, by the time the last beers were fetched from the canteen of the Wissenschaftskolleg, he himself had long since disappeared.