Knut hamsun – »HUNGER«: ungundille

“Everything for Germany!” Interest in my back through our neighborhood. It was the caretaker of DeGewo, a real German happy nature who greeted his colleagues across the street. It is Friday morning, I have to go to the train station to catch my train to Leipzig to the book fair. “Words move worlds” was her motto this year – and one wonders where to go? In any case, the caretaker quickly disappeared in the caretaker’s office at the other end of the block.

The concrete silos of our social center rustle past me, there are no condominiums and no Teslas, but about 80 percent people with a migration background, as it is called in this country – whether a red pass or not. The spring sun is slowly fighting through the cold haze, but it only warms up the old shit down here: “Everything for Germany”.

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I reach my train and immediately consume the content of my left-wing proven tupper can. Shortly before Leipzig I get hungry again. I only have a few coins in my pocket and nothing more in the account, at the end of the month. It is clear that at the fair – despite the press card and accreditation – I will not even be able to afford the cheapest meal sold there. I don’t have 6, 7 or 8 euros for a small portion of fries or sausage.

To distract myself, I continue to read in Knut Hamsun’s debut novel »Hunger«, published in 1890. Deutschlandfunk had recommended it as a must read of this year’s Book Fair guest country Norway. “A classic, so diverse that he doesn’t stop surprising us,” said Daniel Kehlmann, for example, about the novel. And yes, this diversity that surprises us again and again when we are fed up and without any problem, the visionary everyone at the doctor or in any clinic and so from our eyes and the meaning, this book. A comfortable shower overcomes and you can feel briefly again that you are a feeling, social being. Short.

At the fair I was killed by the masses rolling back and forth, a soup from alleged literature lovers and cosplayers in the craziest outfits. Basically, I have no idea what all this is about here. “I didn’t know my cheerful mind again, and the most peculiar visits to me,” wrote Hamsun in “hunger”.

Later I read on the side of MDR culture: »At the Leipzig Book Fair, a group of alleged fraudsters was blown up. She is said to have specified to collect money for an aid organization. ”I wish to have come up with it myself. I would have written on my bell: “Please donate to the millions of German victims who still suffer from Johanna Haarer and their Nazi pedagogy without knowing it”. Somehow something like that.

I can get the interview for which I had mainly come to the fair and am happy when I can leave the exhibition halls somewhat unscathed soon after. On the train back to Berlin I get to know a colleague. She is a spokeswoman especially for radio and television contributions and looks very tired. We talk about this and what seems to me and her. The conversation is sometimes interrupted by one of her tired sigh or growling my empty stomach. But I don’t ask her if she still has something to eat, after all, we are honest people in this society and it is no longer 1890.