For years, writer Wladimir Kaminer explained the Russian soul to Germans. Now he hardly recognizes his motherland.
Herr Kaminer, your new book “Breakfast on the Brink of the Apocalypse is far more serious than any of your other books. Is it for you in times of war impossible to write a funny book?
I find the book quite funny. I also see one in the tragedy of warbig joke. Life is a tragedy that we ignore and pretend we’re going to live forever and that everything is fine. But of course a tragedy is a dead end. But if we were always aware of this, we would just cry and not get any further. A tragedy is also ridiculous, and this war and the Russian President are also ridiculous.
For the Ukrainian and Russian people, this war is not only a tragedy, but a catastrophe.
The Russian state media is trying to maintain the illusion that this is not a war, just a special operation. Many Russians therefore do not see the war as a war, but as a kind of natural phenomenon. Recently, a 13-kilometer traffic jam formed in front of the bridge to Crimea because the Russians want to vacation in an area that was only recently occupied and that what is now the strongest army in Europe now wants to recapture. These people want to let their children bathe in the Black Sea, where animal carcasses, among other things, have been floating since the explosion of the Kachowka dam. There is hardly any clean drinking water on the peninsula, everything is in a catastrophic state, there is war, but a holiday in the Crimea is a must!