Interventions in literature: Melanie Möller’s “The Incapacitated Reader” – Kafka’s Axe

The publisher announces a polemic for “the freedom of literature”. But this book is more than that. It is a wild ride through literature from the epics of Homer and the Bible to Astrid Lindgren and Annie Ernaux. Sharp and articulate. Melanie Möller, Professor of Classics and Latin Studies at the Free University of Berlin, probably enjoyed formulating it herself. Zorn also wrote her pen. Incredible: For years, great effort has been put into dressing the Bible in the garb of “fair language”. After all, Scripture is male-dominated, sex-laden, and full of violence.

Incest (Lot’s two daughters became pregnant by their father), blood revenge and assassination – reading the Old Testament in particular can actually be frightening. What Melanie Möller fundamentally connects with the meaning of literature. She chose a quote from Franz Kafka as the motto of the book: “I believe that you should only read books that bite and sting you. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a punch to the skull, then why are we reading the book? … a book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.«

Now, many people don’t want to receive such a “punch.” It is your right to seek relaxation and edification through reading. Even though the author promises “provocative material for the faint-hearted” – the fact that people can become (or can) become more sensitive is an achievement of civilization.

I don’t like reading some of Grimm’s fairy tales to my little granddaughter, which gave me terrible dreams as a child. But that does not mean that these texts should be rewritten, as has already happened several times. “Cancel culture”, “Wokeness”, “Political Correctness” or “Sensitivity Reading” – Melanie Möller is right: “It used to be simply called censorship.” This is no longer the responsibility of any authority, but is open to general participation.

Instead, one must keep the “emerging core” of the original texts glowing because they tell us a lot about the time in which they were written and generally about the depths of humanity that have always accompanied our species and will continue to do so in the future. The inability to distinguish between art and life has also always existed. What is possible in a pluralistic society – accepting attitudes even if they do not correspond to your own – is in danger against the background of critical developments.

Joseph Brodsky’s insulting poem “On the Independence of Ukraine” from 1992, for example, can today be used in the service of anti-Ukrainian propaganda. Does this mean condemning the Nobel Prize winner for literature, or does it rather show an “inability to deal with breaks and contradictions”?

There were many artists who wanted to compensate for something within themselves through writing, to counteract the narrowness of their environment, and even to shock. Subjectively morally evaluating what arose from a poet’s imagination (many readers do it involuntarily) becomes socially problematic when, for example, members of the artist group “Frankfurter Hauptschule” threw toilet paper at Goethe’s Weimar garden house in 2019 to draw attention to his “misogynistic image of women.” make.

On the other hand, Melanie Möller delves into Goethe’s “Roman Elegies” in detail, Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s “Journey to the End of the Night”, Astrid Lindgren’s “Pippi Longstocking”, Annie Ernaux’s “Memories of a Girl”, but above all works from antiquity , which are their area of ​​expertise. That she was excited about the book by her Potsdam professor colleague Katharina Wesselmann “The Severed Tongue. “Rereading Sex and Power in Antiquity” has annoyed her, but she doesn’t hide it.

That the claim of the “woken” front with its special terminology “ranging from ‘racism’ to ‘sexism’ (with the various specifications in ‘heterosexism’ and ‘cissexism’), ‘ableism’ (= disabled people), ‘classism’, “Ageism” to “adultism” also has an economic aspect is only hinted at here. The widespread need to live from intellectual production leads to competition. Those who appear as opponents basically want the same thing: attention.

Readers are at the mercy of an evil game whose own judgment is not taken seriously and instead is subjected to pseudo-educational efforts. Should we perhaps call this “hubrism”? “The good thing is that readers can also remain decent, humane in life, even those who enjoy evil and “hurtful things” in art,” says Melanie Möller. That’s right, otherwise all crime novels and thrillers would have to be removed from the book market.

Melanie Möller: The* incapacitated reader. For the freedom of literature. A polemic. Galiani Berlin, 237 pages, hardcover, €24.

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