Christian Schultz-Gerstein: “Raging followers” – culture

On occasion, the critic Hellmuth Karasek eloquently complained that Germany’s worst critic – he meant Marcel Reich-Ranicki – was also the best known. That’s when they both competed in the Literary Quartet to see who could put their thumb up or down faster over a book. Researchers will have to decide whether this was still literary criticism or already well on the way to Twitter.

This company was dominated by the equally ingenious and entrepreneurial packaging artist Siegfried Unseld, whose half-yearly Suhrkamp top titles were well-behaved by the FAZ, SZ, review and time were discussed. Only the mirror rarely had room for literature and was almost always too late, but sometimes there was a bang: “In no other production of the literary business do literary critics play their main and favorite role so unvarnished: the role of the pimp who lets the writers write poetry at his own expense, and who knows how to help if they don’t want to.”

Not just fail, but perish

Christian Schultz-Gerstein, who was a real critic and therefore not only failed, but perished, observed and wrote. At the mirror he was busy as a ripper and enjoyed the encouragement of the publisher Rudolf Augstein. He also stood by him when almost the entire company was outraged that Schultz-Gerstein called Reich-Ranicki a “terrible art judge” with a loan from Hochhuth.

Gerstein was his mother’s name, Gerstein was the name of the SS man who wanted to inform the religious authorities about the use of Zyklon B. The father would have almost become Senate President in Hamburg, if not for him star announced that some of the victims of his sentences died in concentration camps. This father, who was not a Nazi, talked his way out of “legal positivism”, for the son it was at best fabricated: what was legal back then can’t be wrong today. Exaggerated or not, Schultz-Gerstein recognized himself in Bernward Vesper: the son of a Nazi poet, from whom he could not get away when he plunged into the revolt of the 1960s and then ended up in a psychiatric ward on drugs and died in 1971.

The year before, the 25-year-old Schultz-Gerstein started at the time because, as he writes in a self-exploration, “I no longer knew how to go on with me”. The career path “teacher, pension, death” that was mapped out after the state examination was not very tempting. As expected, he was also at the time not happy, but soon believed himself in one prison and moved on to the next, to the mirror.

Schultz-Gerstein’s specialty was the blazing slating. The volume “Raging fellow travelers, critical opportunists”, which Klaus Bittermann has now expanded and re-released with his publishing house Edition Tiamat, goes back far into the seventies and eighties. It depicts the discussions from the early days of the Greens, the demonstrations against retrofitting, the dying forests, the women’s movement around Alice Schwarzers Emmawhile the conservatives are praying for a “turnaround” against the supposedly social-democratic zeitgeist.

The question of whether there are still a lot of cocks crowing after Peter Schneider’s “Lenz” or leafing through Hans Christoph Buch’s “Gorleben Diary” (“Top marks in critical zeitgeist”) is left to the research already mentioned. But it is astounding how exactly Schultz-Gerstein exposed Botho Strauss’ equestrianism 40 years ago, when he, to the applause of almost the entire feuilleton, lamented the “down-democratized, informal social consciousness” of the present, which he described as “fat car caretakers” and “apathetic TV citizens ” populated saw. In 1982, Schultz-Gerstein scolded Strauss for a “spiritually nouveau riche cultural philistine” whose “dried stuff from Hans Carossa’s humanistic herbarium is just as good to have in every morning prayer.” The goods have not become fresher since then.

Grass seemed to him “almost as human as Marika Rökk”.

Schultz-Gerstein was one-sided and coarse, and at the same time clairvoyant like no other, when he observed the “raging follower” in the child prodigy Rainald Goetz in 1983. Some of the pieces in this thick volume, which enlightened parents will put next to the keyboard for their children instead of a literary story, are completely lost cultural assets: the marketing of the word and book-spitting Marianne Fritz, the pity for the no less business-savvy marketed and even sadder Karin Struck, who later disappeared from the business, later Grass, who appears to the critic “almost as human as Marika Rökk”. But to recognize the “philosophizing bosom gripper” in Peter Sloterdijk as early as 1983, 33 years before his intellectual zotikon “The Schelling Project”, points to divinatory abilities.

In his calculated rage against opportunism, the critic came up with enviable formulations, for example when he reproached the by no means always holy Heiner Geißler for making statements “in the chest tone of ignorant alms tolerance” against squatters or Wolf Biermann, who was expelled from the GDR, for producing “ideal poetry to clap along with”. . He is a teacher-like “daredevil” who “takes on Strauss just as much as he does on naughty nuclear power, which he thoroughly spanks on the backside, or fascism, on which he stretches his ears”. In a reckoning with Wolfgang Koeppen, who has been living off the announcement of a new novel for decades, Reich-Ranicki takes on the challenge again: “This criterion, which derives the rank of a writer from the fact that he doesn’t write anything, isn’t what people think should have fallen prey to the laughter of the literary world, but is part of the fixed repertoire of Koeppen worship.”

Schultz-Gerstein had no talent for worship. With him, the big couldn’t stay big and the small couldn’t stay small. In this way he was able to play off the prolific writer Gerhard Zwerenz, who “considers it a respectable literary achievement to achieve an erection in the reader”, against the highly respected silent Koeppen.

He is considered by many to be unfinished, but he ended his life with a great text

Today there is no longer a Schultz-Gerstein, just as there is no longer a dispute about right and wrong in art judgeship. Botho Strauss can write whatever he wants, it no longer upsets anyone. Workshop visits and friendly interviews are simply closer to people than the review, a strict one if possible. The fact that mediocre seasonal sensations are celebrated is another matter.

SMuch less well known than Schultz-Gerstein’s joy in tearing is his talent for self-doubt. Under the term “double head” he reflects on his writing and has to admit that he adapts it to the newspaper, in this case the Time. To his own astonishment, he writes sentences that he didn’t want to write at all because, voluntarily or not, he adapts to the medium, which doesn’t immediately deliver the message, but preforms the language: “I can swear that before I for the time started to write, never used words like ‘of course’ and ‘however’, which I no longer feel today.”

Schultz-Gerstein also sought out the poets in their countries, watched football with Peter Handke and drank wine with Peter Schneider, but then criticized them like lost idols, his brothers. He looked up Jean Améry like an oracle who was supposed to help him, complained to him about his suffering as a critic and claimed to work as a tennis coach in the summer to compensate. “I couldn’t stand to write all year.” Of course that’s one too home story, Améry has written a book that he hopes will attract attention, but Schultz-Gerstein does not write for the sake of the author or the audience, admitting that at times during the interview he is more interested in the broadcast of the Wimbledon final than in the man told by the SS had been tortured. But because he doesn’t hide that either, he finds out in a free conversation with Améry “what it is like to have been in a concentration camp and ‘experienced’ the Third Reich, how fathers in Germany boasted about their sons”.

Christian Schultz-Gerstein had no interest in the daily production or in the literary scene, to which he belonged in his Roth-Händle-clouded way. After falling out with Augstein, he again didn’t know how to proceed with him. In Klagenfurt, where the art judge Reich-Ranicki administered the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, he dived in 1985 for the star gave up and, supported by Tilman Jens, who was otherwise unhappy, over the phone to the editors in Hamburg that nothing fateful was happening at the lectures. Who so boldly pointed to followers and opportunists had to submit to the last prison regime.

In a classic biography, the man would be considered unfinished. He completed this harried life with a large text that was passed around with reverential horror after his death, a letter of separation to the “human property owner” Rudolf Augstein. He doesn’t call him a pimp, but a “human property owner” because he’s in the mirror wanted to have full control of its dependent employees.

With all the blessings he bestowed upon his associates mirror offer, reign there the “atmosphere of permanent mockery of people”https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/.”You and your Karaseks simply cannot bear that there are possibly smarter, more resourceful, more cunning people on God’s soil than Mirror-Editors.” Schultz-Gerstein was able to write that because he had taken part, because for a while he even admired the man and his cynicism. Christian Schultz-Gerstein died in 1987, only 41 years old. It is said that he drank himself to death, Lovesickness is also said to have been part of it. Another fairy tale from ancient times, but unfortunately still true.