Nobody chooses to be born. You are born and then you have to learn everything with difficulty: who your parents are, who your siblings or friends are, and then who you are yourself. That takes the longest. That is why literature is full of books dealing with identity and the history of its creation. In talking and writing about one’s own history, there is an element of coping hidden, as well as some self-enlightenment and amazement: “If I don’t write things down,” writes Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux in her new novel “The Young Man,” “then they aren’t there completed, then I have only experienced it.” It could be the motto of the autobiography of the former editor-in-chief of the Picture-Zeitung Kai Diekmann, which is now published under the title “I was picture”. It’s as if the hustle and bustle of his previous job was so intense that the author has to grapple with what he actually did there. Who he was and, inseparably linked to that, who he is today or would like to become.
Kai Diekmann: “I was an image” – culture
