Svealena Kutschke

**Invited to the Heidelberg Stückemarkt 2023**

Luca, Carla, Linn - they met in the engine room of the psyche/power centre of the crisis, well, let's put it this way: in the clinic. They had serious neuroses, they envied each other's diagnoses, the buffet was good, the air Alpine or Maritime, but the towels of the private patients always seemed a little fluffier than theirs.
There's a lot that sets them apart. What unites them, however, is elementary: growing up in the always slightly drunk FRG, a society that finds it difficult to recognise pain. The WOUND, it only encourages new violence. Now the three women sit in a snack bar and await their happy ending. The work is done, the wound treated, they are sitting just a few metres from the clinic at a rainy traffic light junction in a rainy suburb, or is it the Baltic Sea? Is it just a deer grazing between the parked cars at the junction, or is it a Nazi?
Carla, Linn and Luca eat currywurst and fries and wonder what's so great about the so-called outside. After all, isn't depression the only appropriate reaction to the crappiness of things? They talk about the body and the attributions it is subject to, they ask themselves: why is pain always pathologised and violence rarely? And when will the bus arrive that will finally take them away from the clinic?
Quite regularly, says the snack vendor, at least in the 90s. Recently now? She doesn't know exactly. She has more important things to do, such as dealing with the flood of letters that are carried through history and eventually end up in the snack bar. And just when the three women think they've done their work on the wound, the snack vendor asks how the trivialisation of violence is connected to the history of National Socialism? To what extent does the myth of collective innocence still influence the way we deal with violence and guilt today?
Because the special shittiness of things, according to the snack vendor, is typically German. The inability to recognise pain without reacting with aggression. She must know, because she stood behind the counter 90 years ago and doesn't look a day over 30 today.
The snack vendor seems to have been lifted out of time, history is gathered in her sharp gaze, she distrusts most narratives, but especially the deer at the crossroads and its permanent assertion of innocence. And the view through the windows of the snack bar remains unreliable: Sometimes you seem to see the Alps, most of the time it's just empty tower blocks at a rainy crossroads. Sometimes the backdrop is bathed in shades of grey, as if it were not the world outside but a documentary in poor picture quality, then suddenly everything is bathed in the pastel colours of the economic miracle. It is nothing less than history passing them by, and they gradually understand how much their personal narratives interact with the political and historical ones.
Four women in a snack bar. The fries are not really crispy, and the ketchup is constantly running out, and the so-called outside is becoming less and less desirable.