They are not petrified or lying around as corpses, no, the people are just gone. There has been no trace of them since two in the morning. But all of their legacies are still there. Their full fridges that they can no longer eat empty. Their fueled cars that they won’t go anywhere in the world. Airports where no one will arrive any more.
The Italian author Guido Morselli used this scene in his 1973 novel Dissipatio humani generis or loneliness described. This remarkable book about the blown away mankind, as one can translate the Latin part of the title, was re-published this summer by Suhrkamp; and the author and former Hanser publisher Michael Krüger immediately edited the narrow volume for the radio.
The machines are still running, but they no longer serve any purpose
In his radio play production for NDR and Deutschlandradio, the director Henri Hüster uses compositions by Florentin Berger-Monit and Johannes Wernicke to create the acoustic scenario of a dying civilization. As long as any electrical circuits are still intact and batteries are still charged, the devices created by mankind continue to produce noises – but these now run into nothing, disconnected from the purpose that the machines once served. It’s a bit like seeing suns in the night sky that have long been extinguished, but whose light is only now reaching the earth.
There is the one who survived. This man, 40 years old and portrayed in the radio play production by Thiemo Strutzenberger, member of the ensemble at the Munich Residenztheater, differs from all the other last survivors of dystopian literature in that he no longer saw himself as part of the human family. So who does not lose anything he could miss through the disappearance of human civilization.
The survivor brushes aside any thought of the human being as a social being
And so his story is far less an adventure tale about a struggle for survival. But a philosophical reflection on loneliness. While this person, who actually wanted to kill himself, listens to Alban Berg’s violin concerto “In memory of an angel” the night everyone else has disappeared, he brushes aside all thoughts of people as social beings.
“We only think in dependence on others, is a doctrine of sociology,” he scoffs: “It’s all nonsense. Just because I’m alone, I don’t stop forming concepts. I am, so I think. Thinking was almost always lonely, an end in itself, antisocial. ” This radical loner here becomes the sole representative of human existence.
Dissipatio humani generis or Die Einsamkeit, NDR Kultur, September 29, 2021, 8 p.m.