“I emerge” is an anatomy of the self as a philistine, as the author himself once said.
Instead of going to the studio, he walks to the urologist. At home he scrubs the bathroom tiles naked with a hood on his head or watches the vacuum robot for hours. For the zoom meeting with the record company, he puts on an extra shirt and jacket with sweatpants and slippers. And with Ben-Hur on Arte, he first noticed the countless leprosy scenes. Clearly: The corona lockdown also caught Dirk von Lowtzow cold.
Surveying the immediate environment
The Tocotronic singer had long planned to keep a diary between his 49th and 50th birthday. Then came “Corona” and his day of honor on March 21, 2020 coincided with the first lockdown of all things. “What could have been a tour diary has inevitably become a survey of my immediate surroundings,” he writes in his book “I’m Dawning,” which he self-deprecatingly calls “an anatomy of the self as a philistine.” And he’s not entirely wrong about that. The recordings of the album “Nie wieder Krieg” are finished. The tour cancelled. In the apartment, thrown back on oneself, an emptiness remains, which in recent months many a normal citizen who could not work and was condemned to a bohemian life for the first time in his life had to get to know. Dirk von Lowtzow should actually know that and be able to deal with it.
Plagued by fears…
But that is not the case, as can be clearly heard from the song “Longing for Down”, which was released in time for the publication of the book and sounds like the self-composed requiem of a deeply unhappy artist. Already in his first book “Aus dem Dachsbau” it became clear that the musician, who was born in Offenburg in 1971, doesn’t have it easy, in fact he doesn’t make it easy for himself. It can now be read in his diary that he is terrified of any appropriation. At the same time, however, he fears loneliness and being abandoned. After Tocotronic’s “White Album” he went to see a Chinese doctor because of “chronic states of exhaustion” because “the public’s critical interest” in his music meant pure stress for him.
… and from pain
In general: the poor guy is constantly complaining about colic and back pain, running from one osteopath to the next. “Previously, people whispered the names of illegal bars or clubs, but today the secret knowledge about physiotherapists contributes to gaining distinction.” There may always be a self-ironic note, but the maudlin tone gets on your nerves at some point. Especially since there are too many poses. Even the cobblestones remind Dirk von Lowtzow of bones during the pandemic and he interprets them as symbols of death. He constantly writes about monsters and their demons, but never gets deep where it hurts. Where literature is allowed to leave blanks, the diary demands more. But his book never decides whether it wants to be a diary or literature.
Revolved around itself
There’s a reason for Dirk von Lowtzow to startle when he reads in an interview with Maxim Biller that writing a diary is a “crappy I’m playing a writer’s show”. hit. Here one turns solipsistically around oneself. “Nothing experienced at all. Also beautiful,” Mozart wrote in his diary in 1770. And Dirk von Lowtzow is very similar. He is plagued by the same worries and hardships during the corona crisis as everyone else. In the Volkspark Friedrichshain he avoids walkers like in a video game. He thinks about how many kilometers he covers every day in his apartment. But he doesn’t really have much to tell. At one point he writes about a “morbidly heightened form of self-referentiality”. That hits the nerve. Even when the Capitol in Washington is stormed, it doesn’t seem to get through to the singer. On January 21, he then noted: “Something is actually happening today: Jan Müller is sending our graphic artist’s drafts for the album cover.”
The book: Dirk von Lowtzow: “I show up”. KiWi-Verlag, 236 pages, 22 euros.