“From the Nameless Crowd”: A handful of firecrackers

A late afternoon on the last day of the old millennium. To escape the feeling of being alone, I lace up my shoes, shout a few words to my mother and leave the apartment. My mood suits this cold, wet December day, it suits the dove-gray sky, it doesn’t suit the day of days for which I don’t have enough close friends, I’m too broke and too hobbyless. I’m eleven years old, I’m out on the street, roaming through the city, with a handful of firecrackers.

Twilight is slowly falling when I decide to make my way back. Past the steps that border the outer wall of the Karstadt building, past the post office near the large Bergstrasse. In the window of the Hundertmark clothing store, my eyes are glued to the dark brown leather jacket for 699 marks. My mood brightens briefly as I imagine owning this heavy, elegant leather jacket one day. After a few seconds I pull away. There is the world behind the display, and there is my world, and in between there is the safety screen that stands insurmountably between my daydreams and reality. That behind the window is not me, that will never be me.

The cold pulls me back home like a string. Just throwing firecrackers into the street, like I was doing up until a few minutes ago, doesn’t bring me joy; it’s more something I do dutifully because all the guys around me are crazy about throwing things into the air to hunt. I put the last two D-firecrackers back in my pocket. At the end of the big mountain road, something suddenly explodes right in front of my feet. The detonation is violent, it breaks me out of my lethargy. I see a few cocky teenagers throwing firecrackers at each other and hope they aren’t aiming at me. The shock that the explosion causes in me is compounded by the perceived isolation from the world that has surrounded me long before I left the house. An isolation that is, strictly speaking, a part of me. An isolation that is also a fallacy, because I am not alone, my mother is waiting at home, she is not feeling well either, she is alone too. Strictly speaking, it is not isolated aloneness, we are each alone next to each other. It is the aloneness of the scattered remnants of a lower class family.

Some time ago I watched a panel discussion online about social background and class change, and in the weeks and months that followed, the title of the event kept popping up in my head: “The Class That Doesn’t Exist.” The formulation showed me a reality that had previously eluded my awareness, although I physically felt its truth. I can’t think of a feeling that is both more honest and sobering than that felt in the process of confronting a reality in which there is so little to gain for most. The same truth says that I will leave this earth alone. A truth in which it is written that I must die in loneliness and poverty, must die too early, because these phenomena follow a law.

The boy with the firecrackers in his hand transformed into a late pubescent teenager, the turn of the millennium became 2007. If someone had asked me back then who were the people behind 9/11, I would have had a smile on my face that was supposed to show superiority , but was characterized by bitterness, said it was an inside job – what else? That wasn’t a purely private opinion, it was something like the collective truth of my milieu.

It was a good, a superior feeling to be one of the people in the know. In mid-2008 I started working thirty-two hours a week in a supermarket. At some point during this time I started smoking weed before my shift, and starting to drink beer in the afternoon or evening, and schnapps a few times a week. The work colleagues and friends I surrounded myself with were like me, or at least I felt like them. They did speed before the morning shift, painted walls and trains in their free time, dealt and smoked weed or drank too much. Nobody believed in their own progress. No one was under the illusion that the world had anything else to offer any of us. People fought to make things a little less bad in their everyday lives. More free time, less wage work: that was the whole vision of the future. The beautiful life we ​​imagined was characterized by the desire for “less,” to have fewer problems, rather than for improvements we dared not dream of. Getting ahead meant stopping following the rules of the upper classes, such was the hopelessness that had engulfed many of us.

Recently, while re-reading Didier Eribon’s “Return to Reims,” ​​I read the following sentences in which I find myself. »You know very well that things are different elsewhere, that other people have different goals and opportunities, but this somewhere else lies in such an inaccessible, separate universe that you neither feel excluded nor disadvantaged if you have access to the things that are self-evident is denied to others. That’s how the world is ordered, period. We don’t know why. To do this you would have to look at yourself from the outside, you would need an overview of your own life and the lives of others.«

At various moments in my life I have felt part of something that I now later refer to as a class or class faction. In the stadium, when I melted into a song and the thoughts that otherwise rattled incessantly finally fell silent. When I skateboarded around the city with friends and bridged the divide between myself and the world. When I demonstrated with neighbors and acquaintances against a clothing store from the right-wing extremist scene, whose employees and customers were present in the district. When I saw a left-wing party winning an election somewhere in the world. I think: Class consciousness is like happiness; It takes a quick look, it touches the mind, warms it, but I was unable to preserve this feeling neither as a child and young person nor at the time when I was doing physical work. That changed as soon as I started writing. In “Thinking in a Bad World,” philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie describes how the production of art, literature, and knowledge comes with a responsibility to engage. At the moment of writing “we have therefore decided to get involved. We are committed to something. And this means we can no longer suppress and deny the political dimension of our actions.«

I believe in this commitment. My writing is an attempt to live up to this demand for one’s own commitment. Through my writing I brought to life the social conditions through which I was fundamentally shaped. Or better: I gained an understanding of the power dynamics at work within me. The need to understand myself triggered the search for my own position; it formed the starting point for an engagement with my parents’ stories. I wanted to write my story and the stories of my family. It didn’t stop there.

This text is an abridged excerpt from Olivier David: From the Nameless Crowd. About class, anger & loneliness. Haymon, 176 pages, hardcover, €22.90. The book will be published on May 16th. At the Berlin conference “Marx Is Muss” he will give a lecture on class and mental health on Saturday, May 11th at 7:45 p.m. at Franz-Mehring-Platz 1.