Now he is sitting in the car (rented—what else?). He’s driving and the clock is ticking along. The finish line is always in sight, a detour to Rome, but a real breakout doesn’t happen this time either. This conversation, too, will stay clear of decisive turns. We had wanted to search for something that would shake up our lives, something worth fighting for. But now he tells me about his best friend’s wedding. He was the best man. He wrote a long speech for him, even practiced it a few times in front of a mirror. And then, on the night of the wedding, at the dinner when he wanted to deliver it, the couple was caught up with the kids, constantly going off into the adjacent room to play Playmobil and count paper streamers. After dessert he made a last effort, but then the lights went out and the guests danced under the moonlight, accompanied by Britney Spears. The speech, the manuscript, he ended up leaving at the coat check, with a post-it: All best and till soon.
Having children is not enough. You have to make up a life along with it. Otherwise the child remains a golden calf around which the parents are dancing as if mad. He says and sighs loudly.
I listen. I concur. We can always agree on a counter position. But we keep postponing our own blueprint. Maybe there is no longer a need for utopias. Maybe a life without longing for a future is possible. Maybe it’s not just possible but expedient? Finally grab the lid and take the pot off the stove. It has been boiling long enough, the old ideological soup… As he is talking like this, forming sentences as if they could also mean something entirely different, as if they were just exchangeable and without a deeper meaning, I feel doubt creeping up again. My doubt of him. And of myself. Because over time he has become my mirror. I saw in him what counts. Or rather: what I thought counted.
Once on a summer evening on the balcony at the goodbye party for a mutual friend, a young man from Syria joined us. Electrical engineer with certificates. In Germany for a year and already he had a real joke up his sleeve: “The road to hell is paved with government forms.” The institutions didn’t want to recognize his qualifications, and so he—former CEO of his own company in Syria—had to start over as an apprentice. On the night of his escape he had to leave behind his parents and wife, his family shredded by bullets. No last look into their faces, no goodbye, no chance for revenge. Just away, off into strange lands. And there he was and couldn’t help it, he had to tell us, awful stories but in a soft voice. He read a poem to us, first in Arabic, then in German. And we drank beer, stood alongside and didn’t know what to do.
Searched for reassurance in each other’s eyes. I admired and loved my friend for this, that in this moment he wasn’t too quick to offer his condolences, didn’t make random pitying statements toward him, whose tale made us swallow our jokes. All he did was pull his hands out of his pockets, as if to spring to attention in front of this man, who bears his fate proudly, as others do their medals.
These were always only isolated moments. The times in which I felt trust in him. Respect even. I liked his way of speaking, always a little too fast, always a little rough, as if to show that he didn’t have to prove anything. He never showed off with his language. Never used words that were too big for him, or seemed borrowed. He rented cars, but the words he wanted to own. I liked him, because he boasted with things that had long lost their importance for others. With sports, for example. His successes as a boxer, his tough right-handers. He proudly told of often getting unbidden invites to competitions, like an editor who might brag about how many unsolicited manuscripts they receive every day.
And with his passion for women. Whenever I met him, he had just had a fight with his Russian girlfriend, who suspected him of cheating, threw his things out the window or simply left. It often happened that she called him and yelled at him loud enough for everyone to hear. Then sometimes I would take the phone from him and talk her down like a little child that had just woken up in the house alone.
I’m sure he cheated on her. But I always held a protective hand over him. Because I knew that he didn’t mean to cheat on her, but that he just wanted to see himself as an adventurer. I took this Catholic shortcut with him. Others might have called it Machismo, but I thought of Last Tango in Paris. There was one thing we agreed on: The world as it was could use a little more magic. Enchantment was to be one of our keywords, should ideally appear in the first paragraph. Marinetti had written “a roaring car that seems to run on grapeshot is more beautiful than The Victory of Samothrace.” Instead I had hoped we would be writing of the beauty of the glowing meadow. Of the necessity to step out of the gloomy data thicket, where you can no longer even find the starting point.
But eventually, my hope was lost. After a final dinner with him, in which there was a lot of big talk, as usual, my doubts grew about whether he was the right one to get the ball rolling.
And now we are sitting in the car and he’s talking about how much he had to drink the night before, how high his blood alcohol might still be. And somehow our conversation lands on the big question. And suddenly he makes a dismissive remark about my attempts to put the dissatisfaction into words, says something like: “It’s always just about the revolution—you repeat yourself and there are no consequences. You need to keep your nose to the grindstone, otherwise nothing will ever come of it.” He says this with such clarity, with so much venom that I would love to tear off the windshield wipers and stuff them down his throat. My head is spinning and I ask him to stop the car.
Sometimes a wrong word, a wrong sentence is all it takes to forever lose trust. A night, half asleep at half past two, can set the course for your life. A careless confession, a wrong name at the wrong place at the wrong time, and suddenly the path that just seemed wide open is blocked forever. The wrath that attacks, that sneaks out from the core and digs into every perceptible fiber. And when the wrath is there, when it has been called, it’s hard to get under control.
Wrath seems to be an emotion from a different time. It makes you think of comic strips or family fathers in the fifties. It has been a long time since anyone mentioned the wrath of God.
The New Testament was a better fit for our time, a Protestant minister recently said. As if you could just subsume the inscrutable into the state of shallow contentment, in which the flags forever fly at half-mast, without anyone being able to say what is being mourned.
Wrath has become a pathology. The angry person is a radical endangering the comfortable emotional state of the masses. Never was consensus valued as highly as it is today.
In the wide squares of Athens and Rome the anger of the young orator was the litmus test of his character. Those who weren’t at least once shaken by anger, who didn’t tear their clothes and stomp their heels sharply into the ground, were viewed with suspicion by Greeks and Romans. Seen as vain dazzlers, good-for-nothings. Today the opposite is true: Those who are angry are regarded as nuts. Those who speak of wrath are placed under suspicion, labeled anti-democrat. We doubt the status quo so little, are so addicted to harmony, that every impulsive thought seems dangerous to us. The ideal of opposition has deteriorated to a flimsy gesture.
When Stefan Zweig—1940 in Brazil at a writers convention—was pressed by the journalists to speak out, to draft a pamphlet against Hitler, he refused. He, the Jew, who had been displaced and humiliated, exiled and betrayed, replied: “Gentlemen, I cannot write against something, I can only write for something.” Zweig spoke about the futility of resistance when surrounded by those who all think like you. In a situation in which everyone is of the same opinion from the start, the call for resistance is meaningless, since it doesn’t bear any consequence. Only where you’re in a minority, where the rallying cry of the others sound louder, only here is resistance a heroic deed.