Sibylle Berg makes up her biography as she pleases

Sibylle Berg’s books confront us with the worst of capitalism, the collapse of democracy, a two-class society, right-wing nationalism, surveillance, machoism, climate change and manipulative technocracy. But all this evil shocks us less than the finding now revealed by the NZZ that the German-Swiss author apparently doesn’t take the information about her life that seriously.

At first we think: what does that mean? Isn’t it the most natural and banal quality of a writer that she lies and the desire to fictionalize does not stop at her own biography? Marguerite Duras has fabricated a market-driven evil legend about the saint. She was constantly reinventing her life, making the most intimate but unfortunately inaccurate or false confessions.

Max Frisch, who hates Sibylle Berg according to her own (but perhaps incorrect) information, even ventured the proposition that everyone makes up a story that he or she thinks is part of his or her life at some point. You can hardly find out who someone really is by reconstructing his life. It is more likely to be revealed in the inventions. Behind this is a true experience that we have all had: if we listen to a person give out their wildest stories, fantasies and dreams, we will get to know them better afterwards than if they told us the stages of their life as accurately and accurately as possible . possible.

Why is it still troubling to us how brazenly Sibylle Berg obfuscates her own CV and frankly admits that she “told a lot of nonsense that is now on Wikipedia”. In dealing with journalists, she learned to “fake and tell lies”. Even her date of birth 1962 or 1968 is not certain. Did she grow up in the GDR or in Romania? Did the mother’s suicide happen as claimed by her and the media? Did she really personally address her request to leave the country to Comrade State Council Chairman Erich Honecker? And what exactly happened in that terrible car accident in 1991 or 1992 that left her seriously injured?

Everywhere the NZZ digs into Berg’s biographical soufflé in its investigation, it comes crashing down. There are hardly any verified facts, but some things sound almost too cohesive to be true. And we wonder why the author refuses to distribute only safe data about himself. No doubt she is a staunch defender of privacy, but that alone cannot be the reason.

What is it? Is the left-eccentric Sibylle Berg the NZZ just too right? Does the review of her biography seem to the author a throwback to the Cold War era, when the NZZ almost systematically scrutinized and ideologically scrutinized intellectuals who had been in the GDR? But even that is not enough reason to immediately call in her lawyer if a journalist insults her.

The effective brutality for Berg is probably another: NZZ journalist Lucien Scherrer dared to rummage in her biography, so in her personal pastures, in which she wants to graze all alone and which she clearly considers her private property.

Berg and more and more colleagues no longer want to be dictated to when managing their own life data. It used to be said: “My belly is mine” when women stood up for their rights and self-determination. Today it says: “My biography is mine!” In contemporary literature, people like the reset button to tell the world and their own life in a whole new way. No stranger is allowed to interfere, and certainly not a journalist.

Berg’s lawyer already assesses questions from the NZZ journalist about his client’s biography as a “disturbing violation of the most intimate parts of a person” and threatens legal consequences. The protection of privacy is given higher priority than critical research into the writer’s life. We must accept unchecked what Berg says about himself.

But this is a simple confusion between biography and autobiography. The latter is a subjective ego description. A biography, on the other hand, approaches a person from the outside. The writing subject is not simply identical to the object described. A biography not only says what fits the person portrayed.

Perhaps that is why autobiography is so on the rise these days. She is closer to the influencer generation. More and more people mistakenly regard pure self-portraits as particularly authentic. In this genre, however, the actual and the imagined or dreamed blur – thus the term “autofiction” was born.

Sibylle Berg, however, is a special case: she doesn’t just buck when it comes to her biography. Nor does it belong to the autobiographical or autofiction action. There is no ego reflected in her. We always come across a haunted narrator who thinks he’s about to end the world and therefore spews out dystopian bulletins under high pressure and also sends in the preservation recipes for the future.

The author has as little time and patience for her own navel-gazing as for history. This is the Sibylle Berg syndrome: almost obscenely she throws herself into the future while finding the ‘past not so interesting’.

This lack of interest in her own history is especially vexing for a German intellectual born just 20 years after the Nazi dictatorship, especially since she grew up at a time when certain chapters of Germany’s past were still notoriously suppressed. As a former political science student, she should know that you cannot understand the present or the future without an accurate knowledge of the past.

In her blog “Sibylle Berg arranges das” she responds at least indirectly to research into her biography and even tries to tell the story. She writes with some irritation: «… what surprising turn can we write down? Have we ambushed the family enough? Let’s look at those since the 15th century. renegotiating the well-known perfectly correct separation of artist and work…»

While the post is more about Rammstein and the abuse of women, Berg also recalls the need to honor her artistic work apart from her behavior as a person. She is right. In particular, the history of Swiss literature shows us how easy it is in this country to trace the author of a morally incorrect work and vice versa.

Personally, however, Sibylle Berg cannot complain about this kind of short circuit. She is considered the most famous playwright and novelist living in Switzerland. She received the most important prizes for her work: the Swiss Book Prize and the Grand Prix Literature. She is also an internationally sought-after columnist who assesses current socio-political events with moral frenzy.

Precisely because she writes about real grievances in her novels, plays, columns and tweets, she would gain even more credibility if she not only campaigned for the separation of artist and work, but also boldly distinguished between verified facts and fake news . Also with regard to her own biography. (aargauerzeitung.ch)