Can’t we just do anything anymore? Do we always have to protect ourselves first? Preferably with a manual for life and all its sub-areas, even with one for the beach?
A striped towel, sunglasses on it and the shadows cast by palm fronds like on the cover of Stella Bettermann’s “Instructions for use for the beach”: That really says it all. Why are there so many pages behind the cover? Because if there’s something you definitely don’t want on a beach, it’s getting instructions.
Fortunately, Bettermann is not too rigorous. She’s neither the whistle lifeguard type nor a etépetete etiquette governess. So lets a lot apply and go through on the beach. Only in the chapter on beach fashion does she make a rant about Crocs, which she finds so “absurdly hideously colourful” that they should be “banned for aesthetic reasons”. Well, most people have probably seen worse on beaches, but assessments of aesthetic matters are very different. Who would want to point out Stella Bettermann’s special disgust at squeaky, squeaky green and yellow shoes?
In most of the other points, the author has a sometimes more, sometimes less dedicated view of how she likes to keep things herself. However, it does not derive any demands for generally applicable rules of conduct from this. As soon as you flip through her book, the author has you ensnared in one of the most common holiday fantasies: sex on the beach. Bettermann is happily keeping a low profile, but you can still read it clearly: It’s not really her thing. At least the real implementation of the thought film. Too much sand where you don’t want it, and the danger of being discovered probably doesn’t hold any additional attraction for them. But: If you’re having fun – just take off your swimming trunks.
Appearance and reality not only diverge when it comes to intimacy on the beach. “It is one of the paradoxes of German sensibilities,” writes Bettermann quite aptly, “that millions and millions of citizens travel enthusiastically to the sea and seacoasts year after year and pay a lot of money for hotels near the beach, then sometimes even get up at midnight to see the best reserving sun loungers with your towel – and yet a pure beach holiday is considered dull and deadly boring.”
In this respect, despite all the paradise analogies, the beach definitely deserves a defence. At this point, however, Stella Bettermann always makes things too easy for herself. This is particularly noticeable in the chapter on the beach in Arts and Culture. In literature and music, in films and series, in painting, the beach is often the subject and setting, metaphor and catalyst of clever and sensual descriptions of human existence. What Bettermann writes about it, however, appears to have been read and googled, is more a dutiful listing than a discussion and chain of associations that sparks ideas.
At the very end of this chapter, however, when she comes to the subject of the little mermaid, which has taken shape both in literature and in the visual arts, Bettermann formulates a charming thought: she points out that the mermaid in fairy tales only appears in transformed into a human and then into an air spirit. “So she’s an intermediate being, so she can also be seen as a symbol of the beach, which isn’t really land because the waves wash over it, and it’s not really water either, and it never stays the same but is constantly changing as if it were magic at play.”
As a reader, one is also subject to such changes. In places, the book offers nothing special, is to be expected like a sunny day on the beach in a calm sea. But again and again waves roll in and fresh winds wake up and awaken the senses.
Stella Betterman: User guide for the beach. Piper Verlag, Munich 2023. 208 pages, 16 euros.