Anthology: Richard Schuberth: Beggars and citizens, hustlers and nerds

It cannot be ruled out that Richard Schuberth is something like the last left-wing intellectual in Austria. The Viennese writer has seen through capitalism as well as the cultural world, and fortunately he doesn’t agree with a lot of things. And: In contrast to others, he can formulate his criticism precisely and with well-chosen words. Which is anything but a given, especially among German-speaking writers. In this country and today, someone is often celebrated as the reincarnation of Thomas Mann if he or she can proudly demonstrate the vocabulary of an average Bundesliga footballer. And we don’t even want to talk about the general willingness to ingratiate and agree at any time, intellectual streamlining and widespread FDP sentiment in this milieu.

On top of that, Schuberth has humor, a quality that is notoriously frowned upon by people who are considered intellectuals in Germany. In Germany, anyone who knows something about humor, satire and polemics is traditionally denigrated as a kind of dubious clown or labeled as a killjoy and is no longer allowed to take part in the show at the book fair or in the media business as soon as he can say “Habermas”. . In Austria, this resentment doesn’t seem to run quite as deep as it does here.

Schuberth, steeled by decades of studying the works of Karl Kraus and critical theory, is an independent, radically critical spirit. The spirit that always denies, I almost wrote now. (Yikes, now I’ve done it.) Someone who isn’t afraid to say what is. And who also says or writes that, more eloquently than others (who, by the way, would probably never say or write something like what is quoted below).

Schuberth wrote the most beautiful and truest sentence that a person can write about Peter Sloterdijk, who is seriously revered in Germany as a “philosopher” and who has been successfully broadcasting reactionary theses on TV channels for years and who produces bad prose as a part-time job. The sentence reads: “For 40 years, this astonishingly unchallenged contempt for democracy and the mob, eugenics, the cult of fate, apologizing for capital and anti-humanism has been packaged in the solemnly inflated jargon that makes semi-educated Germans so often shudder.” As I said: Sloterdijk’s can be done better Do not summarize business model.

As befits critical minds, Schuberth proved to be a humorous whiner and a good-for-nothing in the best sense of the word. He is, which is rare enough in his industry, an avowed leftist; and to be that he needs neither a party nor another warming collective. He escapes the clutches of social democracy, which has been dying at room volume for decades, just as accurately as he does the extra-parliamentary thugs, which see themselves as vaguely left-wing, national-radical, anti-imperialist, which are currently reawakening and whose sometimes love-serving fraternization with Islamists and other misanthropes he criticizes as well as the activities of the right .

Rather, the cultural scientist Schuberth, as a left-wing self-thinker and loner, takes the side of the defenseless and oppressed. For example, in his glorious defense of beggars, in which he explains to citizens what their aversion to the poor is all about. The text first appeared in the Austrian daily newspaper “Der Standard” in 2019: “The explanation that the fed up ward off the hungry because they are a reminder of their own social decline has a lot to offer. (…) You know only too well, or at least feel, how evil and senseless the entire structure is and how little separates you from the beggar. That’s exactly why and why this must be removed. You subway users on your way to work know full well that you will and could be the beggars of tomorrow. You will take revenge on the weaker ones for what they have done to you when the rallying cry for the great cleansing is heard.”

Schuberth, who is not afraid to call the “FPÖ inoculations” who have just been elected by the majority of the Austrian population what they are, is familiar with the citizen who is setting out on his journey, to become a fascist and who reflexively steps down when he experiences pressure from above. Richard Schuberth has been dealing with the “genuinely Austrian aggregate state of right-wing sentiment” for a long time now. About the many who are Nazis but prefer not to be called that, he writes: “There are no authentic Nazis here because there is no authenticity – in the postmodern open-air laboratory called Austria. Nobody who acts like a Nazi, thinks like a Nazi and feels like a Nazi wants to be one. The right manure rises like quicksilver, flows away and flows together again somewhere else.

This observation that he made about the former FPÖ chairman Heinz-Christian Strache, who was overthrown a few years ago, is also apt: “Early on, behind his glowing-eyed Doberman attitude, the Viennese lack of seriousness, scatterbrain, hunger for universal recognition, his entire habitus was deeply petty-bourgeois , that of a well-rounded, insecure nerd.” (The Austrian word “kampelt” means something like “cleaned and groomed.”) It’s possible that the same thing, minus the “Viennese non-seriousness”, can also be said about the local AfD bullies could say.

Richard Schuberth: “Return of the Jungle”. Essays and other texts 2017–2023. Drava-Verlag, 470 pages, hardcover, €24.90.