Cordula Daus – Tinder or children

The romance novel “Sehr” by Cordula Daus is divided into “services” like a modern love, and there is a good reason for that. The reason lies in the love structure itself, which is simply reversed here. Significantly, for example, the “Vrouwen dienest” (women’s service; 1255) by the minstrel Ulrich von Liechtenstein (1200–1275), who rides into the tournament on the cover of Daus’ novel, separates between “vrouwe” (lady) and “wip” (woman). . He sings about the “vrouwe” and sleeps with the “wip”. The minstrel serves one, he knows the other. Kay, the heroine of Daus, has it the other way around; she generally doesn’t sleep with men she knows.

What connects “Very”, albeit in the above-mentioned reversal, with love clearly distinguishes it from all other models of the romance novel, which range from Abelardus’ “History of Suffering” (1132) to Madame de Lafayette’s “Princess of Clèves” (1678). , “Nachtgewächs” (1936) by Djuna Barnes to Ronald M. Schernikau’s “So Beautiful” (1982), which address the often difficult rapprochement between lovers. At Daus, this approach should be avoided at all costs. The principle of the dating agency “Tinder” sets the principle of the novel: anonymous people meet anonymous people for anonymous sex.

Already in the first service, given to a painter named Ran, both partners want to “avoid getting to know each other” and avoid any “meaning”; they serve each other by not meaning each other, even if in the end Kay likes to say something, at least “meaning minimally.” « want to feel. But no chance. The second service, for the fat, equally self-satisfied wolf, is declared to be about “post-love”, the third man, Sef, is always “totally busy” and therefore unavailable on principle, the fourth service, with Rek, is a mistake on Google Maps and the fifth brings to mind the society underlying the novel: Bam, the washed-up actor, treats Kay “as agreed,” even if it wasn’t agreed that he would take her “bare.” Friedrich Engels already recognized marriage under capitalist conditions as a contract of purchase and use. However, the terms of such contracts have been extremely shortened since then.

The newer contracts are no longer concluded verbally, as was once the case in Clärchens Ballhaus, in the Krokodil bar or in the swingers club, but in writing, in advance, after a notary examination, so to speak. Each contractual partner has the basic information about the other, even his “video face,” describes himself to the other person “as if he were painting himself with numbers,” and has precisely defined his wishes and preferences. Now basically nothing can go wrong. And yet something goes terribly wrong. It is the sixth service. Kay falls in love. How could this happen?

Daus seems to want to explain the catastrophe in a Freudian way: Kay falls for Sal, a Georgian writer who lives “in a furnished scholarship,” possibly because he is a “Narcissus.” Sigmund Freud writes in “On the Introduction of Narcissism” (1914) that the child’s appeal is based “in large part on its narcissism, its self-sufficiency and inaccessibility,” and this also applies to the “appeal of certain animals that do not seem to care about us seem like cats and large predators. Yes, even “the great criminal and the humorist” amaze us with the “narcissistic consistency” with which they “know how to keep everything that diminishes their self away from him.”

Sure, Sal is all of those things, a child, a predator, a criminal, a humorist. Still, one wonders what sets him above all the other narcissists Kay has encountered before. Because they were all narcissists, self-sufficient, inaccessible, even if some of them demanded, in addition to sex, the illusion that they were highly desired. Sal may differ from the other lovers in that he is threatened with deportation, and therefore vulnerable. He also gives Kay gifts. And she finally succumbs to this dangerous mixture and has a child at the age of 45, which Sal doesn’t care about. She seems reluctant to have it aborted, but later has a child. In any case, the question is whether we are always dealing with the same Kay; it sometimes also occurs in the plural. In any case, the child represents a turn into the serious and problematic, one might almost say: into the heterosexual. Daus, a true master of the anacoluth, i.e. the unfinished sentence, puts it darkly: “Because with the child the idea that the child is dead also came into the world.”

The reader would gladly call out to Kay with the last sentence of Daus’ novel: “Be terrible and defend yourself!” But Kay shares the fate of all the characters in novels (except those by Macedonio Fernández) that they are the novel in which they appear , couldn’t have read. She wants to be fruitful, not terrible, she wants to add another unhappy member to the “group of interchangeable beings,” even if she would rather be his father than his mother. By the way, the “Very” of the title does not mean the adverb, but rather the original meaning of the word, which is still recorded in “injured”: “wound, wound”.

It’s all beautifully written and set in sarcastic notes, chat conversations and concrete poetry, and it nimbly runs through all the emotional layers still accessible to postmoderns, from happy-happiness to post-traumatic stress disorder. As the imprint shows, the well-known experimental poet Ferdinand Schmatz served as a “mentor” to the author.

Everyone who lives in Berlin, where the novel takes place, has extra fun. Because you can be sick at the Gesundbrunnen, or someone can think of something at the Memorial Church, or that two people can “ram” like rabbits in the Hasenheide – we could have thought it and yet we didn’t think it.

Cordula Daus: Very much. Romance novel. Verlag Ritter, 127 pages, br., 19 €.