Stefan Schütz

You all. And no ‘buts’. Not ‘them there’, no ‘we’.
And yet: Who amongst you is meant?
The man, the woman? In the face of death, the roles are reversed: he, weak, she, strong? Suddenly energetic?
Or perhaps Hieronymus and Habermass? They are both showmasters, the incarnation of what you call the Third World. They are both black, swearing revenge on imperialists, and suddenly, the roles are reversed: it ought to be eaten up, the First World.
No, maybe it is those who no longer recognise themselves as subjects of history – figures of the antithesis: smooth objects that rebel, dancing, against the paradigm and its guardians. Finally luddites, for don’t they swap one illusion for another?
Perhaps the chorus of the dead, your ensemble, finally named, whom you don’t dare talk about? Who still does not claim to cultivate his garden, like Voltaire hopes, knowing how rigid traditional patterns have been internalised.
So, who amongst you! Is it the son after all, who must realise – despite the death of the father there is no escape, no way out of the slipstream of the old master? Him, then?
Maybe it is indeed the woman, the dead one, whose memory wants to sweep away the wasted life as a wife and mother?
Wer von euch presents, without any illusion, an exact, sometimes depressing, sometimes funny inventory of German reality and society under the changed conditions of the fall of the Berlin Wall.