Literature / annotated – read – was there

Save journalism

Poor old journalism. Print goes there, digitally hardly brings money, but a lot of nonsense that claims to be able to compete with journalism. The Swiss journalist Roger de Weck, most recently director of the Swiss Radio, has published a thoughtful booklet on his old days (he is born in 1953) because “we have to save journalism from the media” (subtitle). Because the so -called attention economy has long since conquered politics. Donald Trump is like radical right -wing trash television in power. “Anyone who is not for me is against me, is the thinking pattern of the authoritarians. As a result, if you report independently as a journalist or journalist, you are on the wrong side. Improperness is partisan, journalistic-critical distance, «summarizes the misery of the right-wing revaluation of the values ​​as from the picture book of totalitarianism. The state must be defended against these forces so that it can help journalism, is de Weck’s proposal for general security. And the EU is meant by the state. He calls this “principle”: “to make journalism (…) despite the media concentration, despite the mining in editorial offices, despite the global platforms, despite the commercial pressure, despite eroding salaries and fees, despite ‘lying press, the face’, despite the post -factual era.”

Roger de Weck: The principle anyway. Why we have to save journalism from the media. Suhrkamp, ​​224 p., Br., 17 €.

Dangerous billionaires

The billionaires are afraid. What should you do when the world brings in the climate catastrophe? They asked for the US digital theorist Douglas Rushkoff. He thought he should give an excellent paid lecture at a remote place about the “Future of Technology” at a congress, but then met his great astonishment at »five super-rich men from the world of tech companies and hedge funds. At least two of them were billionaires. ”Above all, they wanted to know what was safer: New Zealand or Alaska? And wondered whether they should perhaps build certain robots for their survival in extremely secure areas, provided that it was possible to develop them “in good time”. For moral arguments and models of cooperation or solidarity for disaster defense or at least-they were by no means accessible, reports Rushkoff in his book “Survival of the Richest”, in which he wonders what has become of the former internet revolution of the 1970s hippies that such barbaric capitalists think that they are left of humanity should.

How did that start on the World Wide Web? “It didn’t take long for it to have been found in almost all speeches, articles, studies, documentation or white books about the resulting digital society refer to any ticker symbol of a stock exchange value,” Rushkoff recalls. He calls this “blind plys of growth”: “Companies see themselves as colonizers and consider the population of the countries, on whose markets they advance, as indigenous locals who have to be exploited.” They are always concerned with building monopolies, just as Lenin and his comrades have determined over 100 years ago. However, if the earth tends to be uninhabitable in the “postmodern economic war”, the billionaires dream of pressing the reset button, against society, against the state and supported by hordes sexually frustrated, toxic men who can already be mobilized on the Internet today. It is like Dagobert Duck in Entenhausen: “The more billions of billionaires, the greater its fear and the more extensive his countermeasures.” Only these countermeasures are not funny, we are already feeling them.

Douglas Rushkoff: Survival of the Richest. Why we are not even safe on Mars in front of the Tech billionaires. A. d. Engl. V. Stephan Gebauer. Suhrkamp, ​​288 pages, Br., € 22.

Genius amber

FW Bernstein (1938-2018) was the first professor of caricature in Germany. From 1984 to 1999 he taught at the UDK in Berlin. He was a genius of “high comedy” to use a concept of the magazine “Titanic”, the founder of which he was founded after leaving the satire magazine “Pardon” with others, which did not cope with it and then perished pretty quickly. There he and his also brilliant friends Robert Gernhardt and FK Waechter founded the new Frankfurt School when they raised the “Welt im SPIEGEL” out of baptism in 1964, a fake newspaper as a double page in a monthly magazine. The German feuilletons only noticed how good that was decades later – logical. And it was only in this century that they understood that strange literature and art belong to the canon. Nobody got the Büchner Prize from the three friends.

FW Bernstein was also a great postcard writer. And he drew the motifs himself, almost every day. This – mostly sent – postcard art has now collected his friend and graphic artist Henner Drescher and united to the very nice book “Postcards from the ego”. They are, so to speak, listed drawings, pictures and also small paintings that always only have one topic: the various conditions and moods of amber itself. Very fresh, funny and also touching. You can see him as a “poet” (with laurel wreath) or as a “crane”, also as a “expression study must” (hands in front of the hob) or as a Harlekin, who wonders: “Whether I can get through the fool’s exam?”, Or as a reader in a saucepan on the shoulder of another with the demand: “Always keep a cool pot”.

In a very instructive foreword, Andreas Platthaus, the comic expert of the “FAZ”, calls this a “big anhing gallery”, to determine: “There should be no artist who has made himself in this way to the subject of his own work, and also none who has made himself the subject of his own mockery.” Education novels and Wilhelm Busch as master of image history. «

FW Bernstein: Postcards from the ego. Published by Henner Drescher. Favoritenpresse, 208 pages, born, 24 €.