Journalistic care can certainly not hurt this story. The colleagues from picture-Zeitung categorized Max Goldt as “socially absolutely unacceptable” at the turn of the millennium: “It’s bad people who do wrong things.” Even if the musician, columnist and writer probably doesn’t like the Starnberger SZ picture would classify as an “organ of perfidy”, every caution is called for as a reviewer of a reading. “I’m also considered a language critic,” Goldt said on Tuesday evening at the Evangelical Academy in Tutzing, even if his relevant works could at most “fill a small Reclam booklet.”
Goldt ruthlessly exposes the well-worn phrases, nonsensical clichés and hollow speech bubbles that circulate in the media. In the music hall of the castle, for example, he dissects “everyday madness”, where as an “unclouded chronicler” one has to certify “far from madness and poverty in catastrophe”. Or the “top banality of the German news system: the number of unreported cases is likely to be much higher.”
The author has effortlessly filled the large halls with readings for decades
Goldt provided the satirical news magazine for 22 years titanic ravishingly funny columns, which in the combination of everyday observations and precise handling of the German language was a novelty – above all because of the breathtaking and diaphragm-shaking volts that struck the content of his reflections. What began in 1989 as a monthly “Uncle Max’s culture diary” has matured into “information for adults”. The 108 texts that were created in this way proved to be long sellers in bound form and as an audio book, and the author has effortlessly filled the large halls of the cities with readings for decades.
Even if the house is almost sold out, the brightly lit academy room allows authors and listeners to meet much more closely. A rare experience for Goldt, who otherwise often wears sunglasses at readings, because he “does not normally see the audience” in the dark of the halls and is therefore dependent on purely acoustic confirmation. Anyone who expected the columnist to present tried-and-tested laughter successes on countless reading trips was wrong, each of the topics discussed has current references. The texts “Strichjungentochter” or “Is gender justice first cream or whisked quark” celebrate their premiere in Tutzing in this form. As a two-page picture story are parts of this plot titanic-Already known to readers. The comic duo has been working since 1996 Katz&Goldt together; They design the scenarios together, Stephan Katz draws, Goldt writes. He also expands some comic strips into small stories, some of which he will present in Tutzing. The female equivalent of the son of a bitch leads via detours to the “Noble Gas Experience Center Kötzschenbroda”, where visitors are threatened with visions after inhaling, but the listeners in the hall with fits of laughter.
The reportage for which Goldt takes a press trip to Qatar alongside a journalist is also very funny. In the clutches of a “madame” of the Qatar tourism authority, the author spends agonizing hours in luxury hotels and on sightseeing tours. During a visit to an operating room for hunting falcons, the thought of “spitting into the 100,000-euro stomach that has been cut open” briefly arises in his mind. In vain, however, Goldt ponders how German tourist families could be won over to the desert state: with a landscape “where everything that is good and wonderful in the world is missing” and a youth whose greatest pleasure is in the desert dune bashingi.e. “the rape of sandhills”?
As a simple local reporter, you don’t want to dare to evaluate Goldt’s art of writing. You can leave it to Daniel Kehlmann, who summed it up when he received the Kleist Prize in 2010: “His works are clever and clear, unobtrusively moral – and above all the funniest thing German literature has to offer.” This also and especially applies to Goldt’s guest appearance in Tutzing.