Book “Everything used to be different” – a short vacation from the present

Nostalgia is triggered by the discomfort of older people on the present. In retrospect, your own life into bittersweet melts moments when you find the package with the Playmobil pirate ship as a child under the fir tree decorated with Lametta. You lay down in your memories like in a comfortably warm full bath on Saturday evening “Wetten, dass ..?”. The oceanic feeling of the unity of the ego at the moment shrinks together to the sanitary area. The bourgeois muff, the fear of the forest death, the Ozonloch, the Third World War, may scratch ironically on the bathroom door, but the focus is always on the first-person narrator and his small world, and he says: It never gets so beautiful again.

Nostalgia also has a grumpy, bourgeois side. The young people have no idea. Such a behavior, such a look or such a laziness would not have existed in the past! There would have been something going on! It’s always a bit like Ernst Jandl: “Father, come to tell about war!” Or, as my mother likes to say: “It was so long ago that it is no longer true.” And so it is. Nostalgia is a short vacation from the present, in a past that has never existed.

Frank Jöricke’s book “Everything used to be different” is also a generation book. You can already see it on the subtitle: »From Dr. Summer to Sunday roast – journey back into a wild time «. Jöricke, born in 1967, wrote about the time of his childhood and youth in the 70s and 80s. The work was created from 60 newspaper articles that the author wrote for the “Trierische Volksfreund”. And in fact it has something archaeological when he deals with topics such as “party cellar”, “television”, “dance school” or “regulars’ table”. But he is also not immune to nostalgic grim. For example in the chapter »Hartplatz«. Then he also tells of the war. The hard court hardened the children and young people. “This is how football reflected life,” he says. “Because there, too, courageous attacks were not always emerged.” For him, the lawn area, on the other hand, is a symbol of the softness through helicopter parents. The grass pitch does not teach you anything. “He is pretty to look at, there is no dust and who falls on him ends up softly.”

On the other hand, chapters such as »School«, in which Jöricke, the crashing reform of mathematics teaching in the early 70s, brings to the point: »… Parents desperate that the teaching material for six -year -olds exceeded their mental capacity.« The language laboratory, which has long been grave to grave, also exhumes Jöricke. In these rooms, reminiscent of the bridge of the Enterprise spaceship at that time, students should learn foreign languages ​​individually through headphones. The author Larmoyant explains the weak point of these institutions: “In practice, the honorable intentions of the reformers regularly failed because the technology gave up the spirit.” Based on these wrecks in the abyss of education policy, pedagogical professionals could once again worry about current reforms such as digitization. Jöricke keeps succeeding this type of recording of the present. “You may become wiser,” he writes in the chapter “Nostalgie”, in which he summarizes the relationship of his texts to the past and the present, “but not necessarily happier.”

His wisdom does not prevent him from making strong judgments. For example, that Modern Talking was “the biggest disaster in the 80s” after Chernobyl. And in Eurodance he even recognizes an “acoustic torture method”. This may also be a form of nostalgic distinction gains folklore.

Jörickes’ language is like a museum glass between reader and text.

“Using concrete examples such as the telegram, the vochila silencer and the deadline, I wanted to illustrate what was different in the past,” the author describes his concern. Mind you: different, not better. Because Jöricke wants to expressly distance himself from the commercially available nostalgia à la “Generation Golf”. He does this by consistently using the generalized personnel pronoun “Man” or an auditorial “she” instead of an ego meter. “You” mean nobody, just “people”. It generalized what experiences, raises it from individual experience and shifts it into a kind of collective memory. The existential philosopher Martin Heidegger even included this “Man” in his terminology. With him it stands for everyday existence in which the individual disappears in the ordinary. You do what you do because you do it.

Jörickes’ language is like a museum glass between reader and text. Perhaps this is exactly his goal: not experiencing personal reliving, but the distant exhibition of collective forms of existence in the 60s and 70s in the Bonn Republic. Not as private memories, but as exhibits in a larger context. With each chapter you enter a new small exhibition room that you hike through and in which you can recognize yourself in the exhibits. Or are surprised about how different everything was back then.

Frank Jöricke: In the past everything was different: from Dr. Summer to Sunday roast – a trip back to a wild time. Yes publishing, 217 pages, born, 18 €.