The waves that Birk Engmann describes in his volume of short stories are not the waves of Lake Störmthal this time. The story she conjures up is about a holiday with corona protection measures on the Baltic Sea. But it’s not just about our strange behavior during the Corona period. People behave strangely in other situations too.
And such situations are Birk Engmann’s field of work – in real life and as an author. Situations in which the apparent sovereignty of human action proves to be an error, a shock, or a confusion in the mess of their own making.
It can also be a bit fantastic when Engmann shows the end of a Mars expedition in detail, which the hero also embarked on out of sheer gullibility and overconfidence.
Overconfidence, which is already part of the idea with which some corporations are already recruiting volunteers for a flight to Mars, which will in all probability become a journey of no return. And while other people stare at such news in front of the television, one like Engmann is gripped by sheer terror.
Because he automatically imagines how such a journey can take a catastrophic turn on the flight to Mars. For purely human reasons. Because even astronauts who orbit the earth for months in the ISS space station can count on being brought back to earth in an emergency.
The crazy price of quick fame
Almost everyone knows someone who would be only too willing to go on a hopeless journey to the Red Planet for the sake of brief fame. This has to do with human thinking and our zeitgeist, which – in the drum of information – can hardly concentrate enough to think about the near future, even our own survival, even if the climate crisis only occasionally strays into Engmann’s stories.
Rather than a fate that could end in a future in which the people of Leipzig, who have become poor, dig up the coal under their own city and ultimately ensure that their own S-Bahn tunnel system collapses – and with it the entire city center.
You can call that dystopia, even if the dystopian impetus in this case does not come from an unsuccessful energy transition, but from a multiple failed reform of the health system, the fatal consequences of which are already visible today.
Because if all medical services are calculated on tight budgets, it is only a matter of time before hospitals are in the red, medical services “no longer pay off” and patients are happy if they can still afford to visit the doctor at all.
It’s a deeply sarcastic story. But behind it lies the reality of today and a thinking that is as wrong as it is fatal, such as the technocatical feasibility of Mars flights.
A thought that even makes Engmann stumped when walking in Leipzig’s parks, right in the first story, in which a storm warning appears on all switched-on smartphones of Leipzigers picnicking in the parks and causes the families to leave hastily.
And that somehow synchronized with the colorful and loud smartphone games of the children, so that it is not really clear what is reality and what is a programmed illusory world.
The alternative thinking of apparatuses
But there is always human action behind it, often obsessed with the ingenuity of one’s own actions and the inevitability of honorable decisions in seemingly democratic bodies. This is what the hero has to deal with in the second story, which is called “Dust” for a reason and in which the hero of the story is thrown back again and again to a time when, as a young man, he protested in vain against the blowing up of a church.
And now – as an old man – he uses the opportunity to work as an architect for the reconstruction of another church – and then has to be explained to him by a smart fellow, who has turned around very elegantly over time, that he has a lot to do again is too naive and blue-eyed.
These people always know how to get up in apparatuses and to just those switch points where they can control what happens. And what not. For those affected and those involved in the community, it often looks as if only fate reigned, which no one can influence.
As you can see, it’s always about people’s scope for decision-making. Which are often enough circumcised and restricted by others. But often the difficulties of making the right decisions are also in us.
Then we don’t listen when our loved ones warn us, believing that the world is good and that a war in Afghanistan is not as dangerous as grandfather’s war, which ended for him with a last field post letter that the hero in “Grandfather’s Letter “ takes with him to his mission in Afghanistan. A hero who bears a striking resemblance to the lonely Mars traveler in Journey of No Return.
And also the participants of the “class reunion”, which ends for the self-righteous main actor with his wife leaving him with the children. But he has become something, like everyone in the class, has gotten one of those jobs that are great for surviving and earning money in the new society.
But even during the party in the old train station, one suspects that the boasting isn’t real, that the successful are trying to outdo each other, although apparently nobody is really happy with their career choice and their life.
No more time for humanity…
This is also a topic “as if taken from real life”. Often we don’t even notice these irritations anymore. Or don’t they want to believe it, go over it and pretend it has to be like that – like the ultimately callous treatment of the old woman in the retirement home in “The Russians are Coming”.
Here, too, a doctor who actually knows that his patients actually need attention and listening, but he doesn’t have the time. The time is not given to him. In this way, those who are plagued by their age-old fears are simply calmed down. Just like most of the others in the retirement home.
Engmann is a person who cannot simply let the fears of our time drain away. In “The Island on the Edge of the City” it’s somehow about a group of men who don’t actually know each other, but meet regularly to drink in the outdoor seating area.
Except that this time one tells how he was convicted by the court because, as a train conductor, he ultimately triggered a riot in the train carriage simply by wanting to see the tickets from the hooligans, who were already rioting.
Whose fault is it? Or are many more people stuck in roles that they cannot leave without blaming some authority in our society? Left alone with unsolvable problems and ultimately defenseless because there are no longer any arguments for them in court?
The courage to say “no”.
People who – like the hero in “Binz” – even go on holiday feeling depressed because their boss shitted them up before they even started their holiday? And the nice holiday with your loved one almost goes to waste because the threat of being a “low performer” is already accompanied by dismissal.
What does that really do to a society when job cuts and ruthless use of “productive capital” lead to people only being afraid in their working lives and are willing to sacrifice their free time and life?
The story reads a little as if it were written in the 1990s, when this state of rude treatment of workers in the East was definitely a widespread phenomenon and it took a lot of courage to say in such a situation: not with me !
Even if this story ends with a quite surprising encouragement. Because you don’t write such stories if you don’t rebel inwardly against this overpowering and devaluation of people. If you don’t know how that not only shatters pride and self-confidence, but also trust in life.
And how does someone like this Steinert feel when it is made clear to him that his ideas for the reconstruction of the church are simply not wanted, that he may be part of it, but everything has long since been decided at a higher level? Does knowing that you tried it anyway, that you didn’t give up from the start and give in, help?
No, it doesn’t help. The story ends with a brilliant act of outrage.
The false promises of a virtual world
And it’s not the only story that needs to remain unsolved. Because even the “Instructions for Happiness” does not lead the hero, who is somewhat convinced of his qualities, to happiness, but rather to a world of organized disappointment, when dating sites become a vanity fair and everyone is only too happy to compare themselves to famous actors .
Because the places where you could otherwise get to know each other as people have disappeared, submerged in digital spaces where you hope to be able to buy happiness or an incomparable partner, only to come across other disappointed people. Or simply falling through the cracks because you can’t meet the exaggerated demands of this illusory world.
One could also quietly ask: Who is to blame? Who is actually forcing us to make our feelings and our entire self-worth dependent on the algorithms of cold-blooded profiteers?
So to look at ourselves as a commodity that needs to be “sold to the man,” to sell, offer, and then get folded up by angry bosses who have to bring “results” to their bosses somewhere further up the pyramid just because you’re not a miracle worker.
Or simply not ruthless enough for a world in which icy exploitation hides behind words like “efficiency”, “flexibility” and “compulsion to economize”.
The little human right to dignity
Engmann’s stories are like glimpses behind the thick curtain that hides the coldness of our society, endowing it with an air of hope and patriarchal mercy, while compassion and understanding for the increasingly lonely have been completely crushed. Where’s the consolation? Where do you get rid of the burden, that feeling of never being enough?
This is probably in the here and there inconspicuously built-in “No”, also the “No” to the boasting of the successful, who confuse earning money with a happy life. And realize far too late that they are actually stuck in a tin can whose destination they can no longer influence.
These decision traps are everywhere. That’s exactly what the stories tell. And sometimes they just encourage us to quit the nightmares of our working lives. Man has the right to his dignity and not to be degraded.
And you don’t have to follow even the most tempting invitations for brief fame. It’s as empty as the profile of the great women in the flirt portal. Human closeness and understanding can be found elsewhere.
And they usually start off by simply mailing the sellers a nice flashing fame notice. Or say to your face. Somehow being yourself starts with an early and brave “No”, especially when others say: “Are you stupid?”
Nothing is so wrong as the Talmi glory of a shallow world that promises a future on a desolate desert planet instead of fixing things down here on earth first.
Birk Engmann in the wavesPassage-Verlag, Leipzig 2022, 14.50 euros.
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