Third “welfare state novel” by Egon Christian Leitner. Review. – Culture

Such a thick book always makes you skeptical at first. It makes claims to our time and therefore, before you open it, you have to put up with the question of whether it is worth it. Especially when it bears the rather impatient title “I’ll count to 3 now and then there will be peace”. The reader, on the other hand, counts to 1043, because that’s how many pages it has. Wouldn’t that have been shorter too?

In the case of Egon Christian Leitner’s book, after you have finished you have to be fair to say: No, it wouldn’t be. This book grows as you read it; which is another way of saying that the reader grows with the book. It sees itself as a “welfare state novel” as its third part. Actually, however, it is a diary (without exact dates, however). In addition, in the first part there are a number of “interventions”, essentially a series of lectures on the subject of a social order that is based on the primary benevolence of people among one another, but considers the institutional framework to be essential. The speaker demands a second chance for the popular initiative, which has just failed, to anchor the welfare state as a constitutional goal. Lengths and repetitions can hardly be avoided. So the book starts its way on the left foot, so to speak. Patience is recommended for further progress – a patience that will ultimately be rewarded.

Despite its unwieldy shape, the book and its author met with great success. It seems to satisfy a need that few have paid attention to so far, namely that for a calm, personally grounded and responsible humanism. A scene in the tram where an inspector reprimands a foreign passenger who does not understand the situation and the audience takes a stand (incidentally different than expected) interests him far more than Austrian domestic politics as such.

“People” he says when he means what they are, “the people” in view of their regrettable behavior

In a certain sense, Leitner, without really changing the procedure, reverses the uncovered, hateful opinion, assertion and agitation in the blogs and social media into the opposite, by assuming the good in people just as uncovered. Leitner is, so to speak, an upside down conspiracy theorist. He firmly believes that wherever there is even the slightest opportunity, people spontaneously conspire for the better and help one another. For example, he says quite simply: “What people talk to each other must be such that it protects them.” Is that true? However. It is so true that no one dares to say it in this way for fear that they would be ridiculed as a noble fool. But Leitner says so, and there is merit in that. “People” he says when he means what they are, “the people”, however, in view of their often regrettable behavior. But he does not become a “do-gooder” in the frowned upon sense: Because when he thinks of good he really thinks of goodness and not of what one is certain to have while the other is blameworthy about it.

There is little private information in the narrower sense, hardly even names, even his wife is simply “my wife”. Nevertheless, with her clever and humorous manner she represents a gratefully accepted corrective for the author, where he tends to exaggerate and be quirky. It is more on the sidelines that one learns that he has heart problems and that he is in serious financial difficulties because of an apparently poorly managed farm in the country. But also that there are at least two people, the shy lonely Vietnamese and the screwed-up homeless (one of the kind that you can’t help, because they can’t be helped) whom he regards as his own and who he cares about cares as unobtrusively as persistently.

“Thinking without a railing” – he likes this formula by Hannah Arendt. And it also has something for itself, even though reading it sometimes gives you the impression that in view of so many steep edges and strong gusts, something to hold on to would not be wrong. This is how crashes occur. “‘I know that I know nothing’, Socrates never said. He would have been stupid!” Instead of looking it up and taking the opportunity to explore the context of the famous dictum, he lets himself be carried away by his impulse.

Leitner also likes to formulate into the unsettled because what looks like monological self-righteousness actually means an offer for dialogue: the other person, the interlocutor who happened to meet on the street, should be encouraged to counter-speech. Leitner has something very Socratic about it, but he does without the Socratic irony, which secretly knows everything better in advance than the surprised counterpart, which makes him more likeable than the ancient Greeks. “Why do all civil society now say instead of APO? Everything annoys me with them anyway, but still! Why that too!” That is by no means enough; but it shouldn’t either.

Dear Mr. Leitner, I would like to reply to him because, despite all the courtesy, he does not believe in using you with strangers, you say it because you have secretly defected from the APO to civil society, which only pretends to be the same. The so-called civil society with its much-invoked civil courage really embodies the power it claims to oppose and does not attack the center, but rather blatant outsiders. At least that is the case nine out of ten cases. Leitner did not get to this point, at least not here, because he got different distances in different places. But until about then he brings the wondering or angry reader by implicitly pointing the energies that he kindles in him in the direction in which they could become fruitful. Leitner demands two things from us that are far too seldom asked for: contradiction and thinking ahead.

He deals with many things that don’t seem to have much to do with each other, but which he books as his experiences without prejudice. It is a wild form of education that he cultivates, christened himself with the name of “pataphysics”, which he borrows from the French proto-surrealist Alfred Jarry. Its almost hundred-page register, which releases the alphabet from an organizing, chaotic force, already reads itself like a pataphysical work of art: It is followed here in rapid succession “broken in the brain”, “cathedral of Chartre” (that he writes wrongly and just so attests to it that his work comes from mental presence and not from files of reference), “cat”, “kebab shop”, “nobody should starve, nobody should freeze” https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/ there is only one reference, “doctor, doctor” on the other hand, immediately afterwards, to 74 – the grumbling is far outweighed by the emphasis on systematic welfare state aid. For “violence”, “God”, “love”, “self” and “Austria, – he * in” it says “passim”, everywhere, because these five words are the basic bass to which all other topics are played alternately.

Open detailed view

Dear Mr. Leitner, you don’t know how to make a book, you want to call out to him straight away. But the further one delves into it, the more one realizes that something else is held together by two covers than what is conventionally considered a book. Leitner refuses to bring it up, knowing full well that this has to kill the matter because it is so easy to pick and stick as a flower in the buttonhole of the Sunday speeches.

The active humanity that he means, so that it remains what it is and does not get lost in the non-committal sky blue, can only be communicated as a process and in conversation and thus indirectly, and that is why it never comes to an end. One can confidently wait for the continuation. She will not lack material and opinion. And Leitner will definitely know how to give them a strong, anarchic form again.