Thilo Sarrazin and Uwe Tellkamp: exchange of blows with intersections

At the end of this memorable event, which began with the “laudation for an uncomfortable person”, a strange question arose: Did the writer Uwe Tellkamp, ​​who had come to Berlin from Dresden for the purpose of the eulogy, demanded in the rooms of the federal press conference that his Saxon hometown will be built a wall? Had he played with this thought ironically or considered it fatalistically in view of the German situation, which made him, in Tellkamp, ​​feel angry? The answer leads right to the heart of a German-German fraternization halfway between Tellkamp and Thilo Sarrazin, the occasion and object of a poetically meandering eulogy.

The non-fiction and novel authors, the West and East Germans each have a clearly seven-figure readership. A higher total circulation does not currently fit at a conference table, apart from certain bestselling youth books and fantasy books. In this respect, they lack neither encouragement nor interest. Nevertheless, it can be risky to publicly jump in too boldly with the authors of “Germany Abolishes Itself”, “Hostile Takeover” and now “Reason and Its Enemies”. Especially after his expulsion from the SPD, the West German Justemilieu kept a hermeneutic safety distance from critics of the euro, migration and Islam.

Not so Tellkamp. The Saxon distinguished between the “recognition, even admiration of his readers” and a distorted image that circulated in public. Sarrazin is an enlightener. There is a “grotesque distance between the public and private image of a person created by stupidity, blindness, herd instinct, attention-getting greed and constraints”.

From Baerbocken,Habecken and Scholzen

The readiness for self-reflection, for soberness, for subjective withdrawal contradicts the “image that certain media cobble together of Sarrazin”. At this point, after 8 of 18 monological minutes, Tellkamp for the first time raised the voice that had slipped quietly, shyly, almost tenderly into the room on Schiffbauerdamm: “Cobble together!”. The tone was set, the temperament established.

From then on, Tellkamp confirmed the image of the Knispelsachsen that was circulating about him – of the man who is downright serious because he takes everything seriously and sees the world in storms. Admittedly, as a novelist, who in his most recent work, “The Sleep in the Clocks”, balances between fantastic, satirical and realistic language, he packed seriousness into grim wit and corrupted the actions of the leading political personnel into adjectives of his own kind: It will be in Germany baerbockt, hacked, chopped, slaughtered, Lauterbacht and melted.

The worst thing is the Baerbocken, named after the Green Foreign Minister, it means, among other things, “to punish the wind turbines for turning when and how they want, and to see the solution to their insubordination in building more wind turbines. Then the role model of the other wind turbines would have an effect on the wind turbines that are still in the defiance phase.” Neither Tellkamp nor Sarrazin are friends of German energy policy.

At that moment, Sarrazin may have been thinking of the sixth and final chapter of his new book, “On the ideological characterization of the traffic light government”, in which he criticized “the logical breaks and obvious inconsistencies of the German energy and climate change” as unreasonable. But the former Berlin finance senator, who was born in Gera in Thuringia and grew up in Recklinghausen in North Rhine-Westphalia, cultivated a role profile between Theo Lingen and Serenus Zeitblom this afternoon.

No idiots in the Erzgebirge

The penchant for the dry punchline was reminiscent of the comic artists from the black-and-white cinematic era: it was a “crazy idea” to try to force friendly behavior from all other states through friendly foreign policy behavior. On the other hand, the cumbersome derivation of moral imperturbability was reminiscent of Thomas Mann’s narrator from Doctor Faustus.

Sarrazin wants to demonstrate “correct thinking” and preserve his “intellectual accessibility to rational arguments”. Hidden in between are clever insights, such as that the Enlightenment tends to continually abolish its own presuppositions. In the book, he illustrates this trend using the headscarf judgment of the German Federal Constitutional Court.

Tellkamp would not be Tellkamp if he allowed sharp contradiction in detail to be forbidden by a basic ideological inclination. He and Sarrazin share the criticism of gender language and cancel culture, of the left-wing ideology of equality and ethnic-national arrogance, of the naivety of pacifism and the betrayal of the “little man” by the SPD. When Tellkamp explains that whoever switches off two of the three base load energies is then dependent on the third – gas – he is certain that Sarrazin nods. The same is true of Tellkamp’s one-sentence summary of Sarrazin’s book: “When the state begins to seek meaning, it becomes dangerous.”

Things are different when it comes to Corona and street protests. Sarrazin, who describes himself as a “loyal student of Karl Popper”, trusts the expertise of the virologists and does not understand why people refuse the Covid 19 vaccination. It is definitely less bad than infection and illness. Tellkamp, ​​a doctor by training, counters: “I’m not opposed to vaccination, but a corona vaccine skeptic.” The funds did not prevent infection, now there is a risk of a vaccination subscription. He also couldn’t stand it when Sarrazin said about the low vaccination rate in the East that there were “not even 30 percent idiots in the Eastern Ore Mountains”.

How do you feel about the state?

Sarrazin had come across the wrong person at Tellkamp. “That,” the poet insisted, “is what drives people into the streets: when their children are being targeted by the state,” they should be vaccinated. The people in the East were just making up their minds, “and I would ask you to take note of that too”. Tellkamp scowled out the window, resting his chin on his interlaced fingers.

The German-German reconciliation got stuck halfway because a fundamental rift opened up here. Sarrazin was a civil servant, in a thoroughly emphatic sense. Nothing, he writes in his new book, has given him more satisfaction than the “first budget statement in the history of the state without net new debt” in 2008 during his time as Berlin Senator for Finance. The “improvement of the state’s efficiency” had been his concern for 35 years, in Berlin he had succeeded “brilliantly” – this too was a word that Theo Lingen would have easily dropped from his lips.

Uwe Tellkamp remained what he was in GDR times, a critic of the state. For Sarrazin, the state is “the agent of those in power,” and the longtime official finds nothing wrong with that. For Tellkamp, ​​the state is the opposite of freedom, the power that tends to be hostile to the individual, to be read from the “tower” as well as from the “sleep in the clocks”. Tellkamp feels – as was evident in the federal press conference – physical agony at the idea that a German state could once again reward partisan sentiments and punish speeches.

The right thinking

This is where the final punchline has its place. It is due to the quarreling poet in the face of an increasingly peaceful non-fiction author. Should the social crises come to a head, Tellkamp predicts, “the state system will become superfluous for itself and local reorganization will begin”.

Then there would be civil movements from below that would undertake a reorganization of political operations, in health and education, in the city administration, and in the supply of food, water and petrol. Successful municipalities would grow, unsuccessful ones would shrink – “up to the absurd idea that Dresden would go together with a district and build a wall around it”. These considerations existed.

So an event that began in agreement ended with the controversial prospect of a dystopia that shimmered as a promise. Tomorrow will show whether the poet has the correct thinking on his side that the non-fiction author has claimed.