Berliner Boheme – Marc Ottiker: Apocalypse now

The scene metropolis of Berlin has always benefited from the error: that people with a very specific Berlin picture opened in the city and were then quickly disappointed by reality. As a result, many of these people searched the vastness – Munich, New York or the Uckermark. But others made their own thing on site and reinvented Berlin. Some of them later became bouncers in some clubs or cultural senator. Others remained true to each other and still beat themselves through as an artist; People like Marc Ottiker, a film, song and recently also literary maker from Switzerland. The “Trespassers” in Prenzlauer Berg only opens in the late afternoon. Here you meet him more often, here he has his “office hours”.

His first visit to Berlin was a long time ago, he says. In 1988 it was Wiener Straße in Kreuzberg on a May 2, afterwards. You could see charred cars on the side of the road and made a make -up shop window. And the friend with whom he descended had the refrigerator full of vodka bottles. Everything from the previous day, from the expropriation of the expropriators, because the letters had also broken at »Bolle«. Such self -sufficiency is of course not known in Zurich, where Ottiker comes from. “And then I said to myself: I want to be here. I want to go to Berlin. ”Back then the capital was still on the other side of the wall. And of course that was not Berlin, where people should actually live who live a normal life, go to work, raise their children and go on vacation in summer. And anyway: when, please, was the last looting with us?

In any case, Marc Ottiker stayed in the city and successfully applied for a place of study at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB). Detlev Buck studied here, Gisela Tuchtenhagen and even Holger Meiners, who was not only building a Molotow cocktail for his film? ” Since the early 90s, Ottiker has asserted himself as a screenwriter, director and with a little acting. Sometimes he lives better, sometimes worse off work. The film service wrote about its film “1/2 rent” from 2002: “But with a digital camera in hyper-hinge images about uprooting, uncomfortable and loneliness, which appears like an even unfinished preliminary study, but takes on a utopian life draft.”

Loneliness is his big issue, also as a musician and band leader from Mo & Kapelle – wonderfully melancholic country music in Swiss German (“I Loos Es Sii”). You can listen to the band’s albums on the portals on the Internet.

Ottiker lives in the immediate vicinity of the “Trespasser”, more precisely: opposite me on the other side of the street. From my window I see when the 58-year-old visits and also that he likes to sleep longer in the morning. But that’s why you get an artist because you can sleep in. And as long as we sleep, we are not hungry, no thirst, don’t spend money unnecessarily – everything is good! Wouldn’t it be the things that rob you of sleep …

It is better to talk about the apocalypse than with Marc Ottiker. Climate, war and capitalism are his issues. So quickly a transparency note: Ottiker and I are friends. When asked what happens, if the AfD takes over in the foreseeable future, I try to calm it down: with global warming, the survey values ​​of the Greens will also increase, which Ottiker considers an error.

100 years ago, people in pubs met because their apartments were too small because too many people lived on too tight. Today they go to the pub because their apartment is too big for them. For example, Alois Krummenacher, the hero in Ottiker’s novella “Risk appetite”, enters the tap management in slippers. Quote: “So in slippers, as we amused, but also concerned the occurrence of a neglect, noted.” Whereupon this Krummenacher begins to tell in a trembling voice, and “should the tell of the facts to tell the facts, mankind would be on the threshold of a new age …”

It is better to talk about the apocalypse than with Marc Ottiker: climate, war and capitalism.

What an outrageous event! A motif that does not occur so often in the world literature: This Alois Krummenacher has accepted a permanent position again. Of all people, he writes, writes Ottiker, who only met any work with great shyness and reluctance, wherever possible, out of the way, yes, yes, “like the deer the hunting society”. Where do you think of such metaphors? Not at work.

Wage labor, perhaps still at the switch of a Kreissparkasse, is possibly the last big adventure of our time. In “Risk appetite” Ottiker writes that the consistent avoidance of the bread purchase had just led to bizarre engagements, “the greater the need for greater employment, for example if what was written in the colorful dog was already in three digits.” The “colorful dog” is of course the “trespasser”, but maybe also the café “Kastanienbaum” in Orwell’s Roman 1984 “. Because that’s what the browse is about: a AI, an artificial intelligence, gradually takes over the power. Fabric for a Netflix series.

»In addition to fire, earthquakes, flood waves, droughts, war, volcanic eruptions or pandemics, a new danger was now born. A plague that was powerful enough to combine everyone. ”In a few decades, the new binary technologies would have managed to infect almost all areas of life with an unlikely -looking acceleration. With this, however, they would have brought back medieval manners for a long time. The pillory is again a legitimate form of punishment: »Superstition and hostility to the sciences experienced a triumphal return. The rabble was able to spread his dullness in networks and forums with deserts and forums with desolate insults, limitless evil and finally archaic, meticulously described fantasies of violence. ”Reason enough to get drunk offline.

In Berlin gastronomy, the gentrification can be observed well, like the social division of the city at all. There are more and more Spätis and Nobelrest restaurants, but also the coworking spaces for the freelancers and the café monoculture for the yoga mothers from Kollwitzplatz. The small pub next door or the Eisbein deck have been closed for a long time. That means: the center of social has disappeared. (A few resistance nests of proletarian beer culture still exist. The “Watt” in Metzer Straße, for example, for people who think that life without lung carcinoma is overvalued. Unfortunately, the contract was terminated on September 30th, presumably because of noise. Mo & Kapelle giving a solidarity concert this Tuesday, which sounds a little counterproductive, but also consistent.)

The “Trespassers” now, where Marc Ottiker welcomes the author during his “office hours”, this restoration on Teutoburger Platz falls a little out of the frame; The operator is half Ossi and half Guatemaltke. The people here always have fun, the beer at Carlos should be on the prescription. And thirst is worse than homesickness.

These days it was said that Joe Chialo these days would become Minister of Culture, a completely meaningless function, a kind of breakfast director in the Chancellery. If this is the case, he leaves a broken department in the cultural senate. 35 years after the reunification of two culturally flowering city halves, Berlin becomes the province. Clubs will die, theater will close, and people like Marc Ottiker will go to the job center, because of course the scholarship programs have also been set. “The life of bohemes,” says Ottiker, “in the future only the actors of artists can afford, but no longer the artists themselves.”

Marc Ottiker: Risikoappetit. Edition Schelf, 80 S., Br., 12.99 €.
Albums Mo & Kapelle: “Stubete”, “above the perception border”, “stream the stones on my way”, for example on Tidal.
Appearance MO & Kapelle: Tuesday, April 15th, 8pm in Watt, Metzerstr. 9, Berlin.