Katja Eichinger: “Love and Other Neuroses”. Review. – Culture

Writing essays about the eternal big themes – friendship, family, death or love – is as obvious as it is darn difficult. And it takes some courage. At least. Two or three people have already tried it in the past two or three millennia. To write about the big topics but also based on experiences from one’s own little life is – strictly speaking – a completely crazy idea, also slightly megalomaniac. Or the journalistic feat par excellence. In Anglo-Saxon essay writing, the approach has a long, respected tradition; in this country, saying I in intellectual contexts is usually met with deep distrust. Acute risk of wrong conclusions, from the individual to the general. Forbidden.

It’s a good thing that Katja Eichinger wasn’t put off by that. “Love and Other Neuroses” is the name of her new book and it consists of ten very personal essays on some of the eternal big themes: friendship, family, death, lust, desire, passion, marriage, falling in love, togetherness and self-love. On almost every single page it is an enchanting mixture of memoir, search for clues and diagnosis of the times, whereby Katja Eichinger has a double interest that is particularly rare for a German essayist: She is not only circumspect in literary and cultural history, i.e. on the search for the inevitable classics, but also also sure-footed in pop culture, pop savvy, so don’t be shy about ambushing findings where the German canon TÜV does not dare to go: in the eternal shallows of contemporary popular culture.

You stand with her – very similar to your 2020 published and just as famous essay “Fashion and Other Neuroses” – in this book you always have one foot on the ideas and punchlines of Plato, Shakespeare, Freud or Foucault – and with the other in any pop song, a film, a trash series, while she talks about her own (love) life, about pool experiences in Cannes or about Niederaula, her home village deep in the Hessian province, from which she once fled to London to become a film journalist and cosmopolitan (and the last wife of the legendary German blockbuster film producer Bernd Eichinger, who died in 2011 at the age of 63, which is why, funnily enough, she is something like the first and only German essayist to write the brightly colored is a term, unfortunately for the wrong reasons).

Unusual by German standards: cultural pessimism is not important to her

As she writes in the foreword, the book was planned as a collection of “extreme interpersonal situations caused by the global pandemic”. The fact that it starts with a reflection on desire, and not just on something desired, is the first point. With philosophers like Deleuze and Girard, desire as a condition becomes the elementary force of our postmodern social media capitalism. The social media have managed to decode “the dynamics of our desire”: “They have translated our desire into algorithms that are able to make it usable for their commercial interests.” What is unusual about this not entirely new diagnosis, especially by German standards, is that the cultural pessimism about it is not the most important thing. One has to imagine Katja Eichinger more as a tall, medial omnivore astonished woman who, even in personal conversations, tends to share impressions, approaches observations and seeks interpretations, rather than juggling apodictic announcements and steep theses.

Her point then goes like this: the decoding of our desire does not mean “that we have to build an anti-fascist protective wall around us in order to withdraw”. The protection lies “simply” in “accepting that sometimes there is no solution, no explanation, no goal, no blame for our longing”. According to Eichinger, the real magic of every human being arises from the fact that the origin of our desire is unfathomable.

The playful postmodernity that sounds here is anything but “simple”, in everyday life it is even a very sophisticated concept. And not particularly fashionable in polarized times like these. The friendly humanism that is at the core of it is of course needed more than ever at the moment.

When the dark continent of sexuality was colonized in Manolo Blahniks

Finally, in the chapter on lust, she ends up with the series “Sex and the City” and the observation that the actual intimacy in the series never really takes place with the sexual partners. The sex is only “means of verbal pleasure” afterwards. “Sex and the City,” says Eichinger, has undoubtedly changed “conversations among women about sex and lust”: “Suddenly it was normal for black suspenders and lace bras to hang on the hangers in the underwear department at the Karstadt around the corner .”

However, it still moves that far in the established interpretation of the phenomenon. But it’s only just getting started, because the question follows: “How radical was that really?” Did something like the liberation of women’s lust really happen here?

Eichinger is skeptical because “in a way, the conversations in ‘Sex and the City’ are a continuation of the culture of sexual confession that has long dominated Western discourse on sex.” Ever since Sigmund Freud, we’ve been paying psychoanalytic experts to listen to us tell them our sexual secrets. But what exactly is “lust” or the “art of eroticism” here? It’s more about “the analysis and production of truth about sex”.

The only difference between Freud and “Sex and the City” is how they approached the “dark continent” (Freud) of female sexuality. Freud’s relevant work always seemed to her as if he had just cruised up and down the coast on a steamer with his “phallic telescope”, whereas the series is more an example of how to colonize the continent with Manolo Blahnik’s high heels .

This is how the amazing feat of telling intimate stories (the biographical red thread of the lust chapter is an Eichinger pandemic affair) succeeds without being indiscreet. One’s own experiences are the starting point and dramaturgical anchor of the associations. What it’s actually about is getting to the bottom of the nature of the respective major topic. In other words, there’s something that might be called critical elegance floating through this book that’s simultaneously entertaining and instructive.

Apropos: In this sense, one can also imagine Katja Eichinger as a virtuoso hostess who – one almost suspected it – has the rare and underestimated gift of being able to have a witty chat in the most unpretentious way, both relaxed and concentrated. Things never seem easier afterwards, but miraculously seem easier nonetheless.

In a recent interview with Deutschlandfunk, Katja Eichinger said that people in love “become augurs and fortune tellers” and are constantly looking for confirmation “that what we experience is significant and that the universe perceives us”. She personally thinks that is very nice, “but of course life per se is absurd”. There are probably very, very few people who can make this devastating punchline sound as deeply soothing and heartbreakingly comforting as Katja Eichinger at that moment.