Get to work! New non-fiction books: Drawers are supposed to create order, but often cause chaos

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Do you know Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle? In simple terms, this means: If I poke around in the dark with a stick on the ground – under a bed, for example – and thereby touch and move the ball, it will be possible to determine where I touched it, but not where it rolled. after. It’s the same with drawers in your desk or kitchen: you push them carefully, but you can’t tell what they’ll look like the next time you pull them out.

“Simply by closing the box, you cause laboriously separated objects to begin to move again, forming unwanted coalitions with each other and sabotaging the entire effort,” writes Christian Begemann (68), a retired German professor of German studies, in his recently published, rather short book . book. No matter how you do it, the box too often ends up not being an element of order, but rather a driver of chaos in order.

The box and the cabinet-box (“armarium”) already existed in ancient times. “We know them from reliefs, for example, from the image of a knife dealer’s stall from the Lapidarium gallery in the Vatican,” writes Begemann. Or from Herculaneum near Naples (I), buried by Vesuvius, where a charred two-door box with a box was preserved. Ancient China and Japan also had cabinets with drawers.

“At first, boxes will begin their triumph not so much in private homes as in collections, libraries and pharmacies,” writes Begemann, boxes as “receptacles of cultural knowledge.” This is where the metaphor around the box takes on its negative connotations, especially in the form of classification. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) writes of “office clerks” who “arrange various materials (…) into drawers” ​​and “consider a problem (…) to be solved.”

Literary scholar Begemann focuses on what female characters in novels and plays in particular are often classified as: love letters. They are a central motif in such epochal works as Anna Karenina (1877) by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) or Effie Briest (1895) by the German writer Theodor Fontane (1819–1898). The books “Letters” testify to the marital infidelity of the main characters.

Eventually Begemann decides to take a funny excursion into the world of comics: in Uncle Scrooge’s Bed Story (1963), illustrator Carl Barks (1901–2000) shows how Scrooge, who later became extremely rich, had to sleep in a box as a child. When he has money, he buys bigger and more uncomfortable beds until he ends up in the chest of drawers again. “Here the box reveals a peculiar and completely individualistic little story of capitalism and its collapse,” says Begemann.

Source: Blick