“We will have to forgive each other a lot,” said the then Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn at the beginning of the pandemic. It’s slowly becoming clear what he might have meant by that: Friendships that have become petrified in bitter arguments about vaccination or not are now being patched up with a great deal of generosity. Those left alone by politics have to turn a blind eye to the state in order not to despair. And the artists? Well, you have to treat them with leniency too, if their Corona products are now coming onto the market in droves. In other words: works that show the shock of the pandemic, a certain fascination with the new and the absolute will to wrest something creative from the situation.
Ruth Herzberg’s new book “The Current Situation” is one of those. She really only does that: wrest something of the misery. Which is a shame, because the Berlin author is actually original and self-deprecating. Her novel was published in 2021 “How to become unhappy with a man”, in which a woman constantly has great sex with hip Berliners who strangely don’t want to commit. It was direct and funny, although I’m sure you’ve read it before, but she told it in such a way that you didn’t notice. “The Current Situation” is supposed to be the sequel to that.
However, it is more than one Corona diary because it has become a novel, designed not to lose reason and humor in just that “current situation”. “I’m starting to write again now,” says the first sentence of the book, “yes, from now on I’ll write everything down every day. That’s all I have left.” Sounds like a threat, and that’s pretty much what it comes down to. Without a goal or an idea for action, Ruth Herzberg roams through the days in Berlin and through familiar territory, only now with a virus: As a single parent of two daughters, the first-person narrator Ruth juggles with the new challenges of having children, the AHA rules (who remembers?) and the question of when she still pushes the lover in the lockdown. That leaves the old question of how not to become overly dependent on him: “There must be something between fuck and mindfuck”. But there is no danger of love for Herzberg, she serves up “Mr X” right at the beginning and replaces him with a “great artist” and one with the promising name “the bad guy”, all of them just useless shadow figures. She still has sex, but at some point she finds it “overrated.”
Sentences that everyone thought profound two years ago no longer want to be heard
A short trip to Paris, where Eric Blanc, one of the few people with a full name in the book and father of her daughters, lives, doesn’t bring any variety either. But the mood doesn’t change there either. Just now walks in Paris. In between, sentences that everyone felt two years ago and that are still very true: “I hope all that consumerism and culture and consumer culture crap will never be allowed again, so I don’t have to put myself under any more pressure.” But even more analogies, which everyone found profound two years ago, but now they’re just not so much: “Social is a muscle that goes slack quickly.”
Ruth Herzberg: The current situation. Microtext, Berlin 2022. 243 pages, 20 euros.
The problem of the novel is that the author and publisher rely too much on the effectiveness of the once new phenomenon of the pandemic, which everyone is now fed up with. No one is enthusiastic about thinking about long-distance walks and the word “vaccinate”, which, strictly speaking, was never cool, only tolerated in the heat of the vaccination euphoria. In addition, the editors generously overlooked the fact that Ruth Herzberg has no story at all to tell apart from her undoubtedly often pointed observations in “The Current Situation”. You should be able to write smarter about Corona.
As much as it is part of the self-image of literature, of art in general, to always deal with the world as it is – when have we ever witnessed something historical like this pandemic? – everything is obviously still too close, the longing for a breather is too great. There may be a time for books like “The Current Situation”, but this is definitely not the case.