Comrade Shakespeare: Candidates on the rise

The weak point of the democratic industry is not least its inadequate personnel. The last election results have barely been digested with convulsions when the losers of the last vote are once again campaigning as if nothing had happened. The free citizen sometimes feels like a hostage of the rulers and, as if to humiliate himself, is also made a witness to the election of the candidate.

Friedrich Merz, almost 70 years old and therefore hardly worth anything on the free market he worships, is the candidate of the Union parties. A caricature of the conservative. A Rumpelstiltskin. With his head very red, he becomes excited, shouts to his audience and rushes as ever.

His counterpart is Robert Habeck, who, with his intrusive chummyness, knows how to get along with anyone who secures him a post. It is the heat pump of German politics: The label “green” may be misleading; this is about mere actionism, dressed up in big words that assert the moral significance of every printed matter to be dealt with in parliament.

Only for the Social Democrats it remains unclear for the time being whether they should nominate a candidate from the right wing or the very right wing of the party. With Walter Benjamin’s sentence “The fact that it continues ‘like this’ is a catastrophe” has actually already said everything about Olaf Scholz’s personality. However, the competition within the party goes by the name Boris Pistorius and has reintroduced the term fitness for war into general usage. It is to be feared that anyone who rattles all their sabers so obtrusively will want to stab them at some point.

The four are alike in one thing: they all lack format, one of these gentlemen is hardly capable of a single thought and if he does, he will only be able to wrap it up in a technocratically impoverished language and bury it as soon as possible. The three candidates from the progressive coalition will no more be able to contain the reluctance against the prevailing politics than the Sauerland Bockwurst from the last millennium.

You ask, dear reader, what all this has to do with Comrade Shakespeare. Isn’t it the case that we still deal with Stratford’s son today because with his literature he put something timeless, something universally human on paper? Aren’t we looking for the universal in art? And shouldn’t we believe in their prophetic power? Doesn’t the young Danish prince, who lives in Elsinore, have a lot to do with us, at least no less than with people around 1600?

And because that is the case, we find what concerns us today written down in Shakespeare. If we look at the 66th of his sonnets, the so-called Hamlet sonnet, perhaps with the help of Christa Schuenke’s excellent translation, we see the dreary candidate spectacle of our day described centuries ago. We read of virtue being turned into a whore, of art being shut up by the apparatus, and of the good licking the boots of the worst.

And then – with our finger we follow the words, stop at the fourth verse of this perfectly formed poem, with Shakespeare’s eyes we look into the year 2024, meet Scholz and Pistorius, Merz and Habeck, now recognize them very clearly and look with the bard now, tasting every syllable, “little zeros expanding in the updraft.”