Get to work! New non-fiction books: why bullies hate beauty

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The construction site in my area is called Erz in German and, as with open-pit mining, there is a huge quarry expected. Because on this site there now stands a nice hundred-year-old three-family house with a mansard roof and a large lawn. In the process of compaction, it falls prey to one of the usual and unpleasant multi-lot condominium boxes that are now universally used for land development. This is not good.

“How can it be that people build such soulless environments in which one can hardly find anything that can console with beauty,” writes Gabriele von Arnim (76) in her new book, looking at such block buildings. An architect who designs such human containers hostile to the senses should be prohibited from building a house under tall beech trees next to a babbling stream, and should be forced to move into a dungeon himself or just across the road so that he can look at it every day.

“The Consolation of Beauty” is the title of a poetry book by a German journalist and writer; from 1998 to 2009 she was a member of the critics of the “Literary Club” on Swiss television. Following her bestselling book Life is a Temporary State (2021), in which she described ten years of caring for her husband after a stroke until his death, she wants to use the architectural example of the new bestseller to show: “Beauty, whether deceptive or true, is also transient and changeable, just like we humans.”

In view of the ugliness on earth – not only from block buildings, but also from crises, wars and climate change – von Arnim writes: “I need beauty. Comfort of beauty. Because when I see, hear, read, feel beauty, then I believe in possibilities, in paths, spaces, flips.” Beauty comes in many forms: in the soul, in paintings, in the sounds of the violin and the songs of the blackbird, in love and friendship, in words and sentences, thoughts and poems.

Beauty is not a luxury, we need it. Neuroscientist Semir Zeki (82), founder and director of the world’s first chair of neuroaesthetics at University College London, explored this using human brain waves. And in Canada, doctors prescribe museum visits to patients suffering from depression because beauty in art calms the mind, reduces levels of the stress hormone cortisol and increases levels of the so-called happiness hormone serotonin.

But not everyone is happy about human happiness: “This is why beauty becomes dangerous for a political system based on oppression,” writes von Arnim. “Tyrants must eradicate beauty.” And she quotes Nobel Prize winner in literature Herta Müller (70), who writes about her life in Romania during the Iron Curtain: “Ugly equality burdens the mind, makes one apathetic and undemanding, which is exactly what the state wanted.” Because the joy of life makes people spontaneous, unpredictable and dangerous.

Source: Blick