Nina Kunz lacks eccentricity and pathos in Zurich. Everything was clean, aperitifs everywhere, no riot anywhere. But then there is this delicious tap water. And this view of the Alps. You can even see the mountains from the loo at the university. To judge one’s own hometown strictly is of course part of it, but the love for Zurich predominates in her column collection “I think, I think too much”. And when things get really bad, Nina Kunz simply drives to Berlin.
Kunz was born in 1993, grew up in Zurich-Aussersihl and is now a columnist for the magazine des Zürcher Day scoreboard. She likes impermanence and doubts the exaggerated individualism of her generation, both of which are very personable.
She raves about the university as it must have been before the Bologna reform, often citing Sartre, Camus, or even Falco, and worries about tiktok-addicted teenagers and Kylie Jenner. It then sometimes appears older than it is. But Nina Kunz also has her own voice, which may have something to do with Switzerland. She herself speaks of her “Chrüsimüsi” dialect, in which she sounds more distracted and everything does not sound as weighty as in High German.
Nina Kunz: I think I think too much. Non-fiction. No & But, Zurich 2021. 192 pages, 20 euros.
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Unlike too many other columnists, Nina Kunz’s columns are not just about herself. She writes about the work craze, about the fatal image of women Bravo Girl, and about why the Korean term “Dabdabhada” describes the Corona attitude to life well. She collects terms and approaches to better understand life and the world, occasionally reviews ten important feminist books from the past ten years – and then drives to Valais without a mobile phone.
The most beautiful passages in “I think, I think too much” deal with a search for her father without a punch line or an end of a relationship in Tirana, which is described in a few sentences so skillfully that it hurts just to read. And of a tattoo as a symbol for a phase of life in which you think you suddenly have to be wild and spontaneous. And pathetic. And eccentric. And what adorable, desperate consequences that can have. For example, that you immediately hate the tattoo that you just got done again.
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