Get to work! New non-fiction books: “We lose our keys, but also our hearts or our faith in the world”

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The first sentences of the story “Parents” by the German writer Michael Schulte (1941–2019) have accompanied me for many years. “My parents are dead,” it says. “Now I no longer have to fear that my parents will die.” Since my mother died three years ago, this fear has virtually disappeared. Because just as parents worry about their children, children’s worry about their parents increases with age. A feeling of sadness is replaced by a feeling of fear.

“I could trace it back to the day I was getting ready to go on stage in Heidelberg and called my mother, who never actually called that evening,” German writer Daniel Schreiber says of his current non-fiction bestseller (46). grief. “I knew what that call meant.” And that’s why he scared him. But Schreiber didn’t show it, he showed up. He then called his mother, who told him that his father had died.

Schreiber’s essay is called “A Time of Loss.” He made a name for himself on popular science topics, which he approaches personally: This is what he writes in the book “Sober. About Drinking and Happiness” (2014) tells its own story and talks about the German attitude towards alcohol; and at home. “Finding the Place We Want to Live” (2017) is about his childhood in the GDR and his homosexuality.

So now the losses. As always, the literary and theater scholar goes far beyond the personal and penetrates deeply into the sociology and philosophy of the topic. He cites Lost and Found (2022) by American Katherine Schultz (50), who argues that loss is a strange category. Schreiber confirms this when he lists, “We lose keys, phones, or our favorite items of clothing, but also our hearts, our minds, or our faith in the world.”

Coronavirus crisis, climate change, war in Ukraine: “My discomfort may also be due to the ubiquitous calls for the apocalypse that we have been experiencing everywhere for several years,” says Schreiber. In the wake of the pandemic, some people feel like they are witnessing some sort of end-times scenario becoming a reality. “But when this becomes a reality, it also becomes obvious that everything is happening completely differently, looks different and feels different than predicted,” Schreiber continued.

And how do we react to losses? Suppressing them. Schreiber: “That in itself shouldn’t be a bad thing.” And he cites the posthumously published “Diary of Mourning” (2010) by the French philosopher Roland Barthes (1915–1980). In it, he describes his efforts to “maintain composure.” He acquired “a kind of ease,” “a control that makes people believe I have less grief than they thought”—loss as a relief rather than a burden.

Source: Blick