Literature – Christian Baron: He looks through it all

Günter Grass, Susan Sontag, Peter Rühmkorf, Jonathan Franzen, Brigitte Kronauer, Christoph Ransmayr … and now Christian Baron: The invitation to the “Tübingen Poetics Docency” in 2023 showed that he is now part of the league of the literary business. The literary operation is not its thing. He knows how the world of art and that of money penetrate on the book market and how his much attention, his autobiographical novel about his proletarian father “a man in his class”, presses him into a role. It made him a kind of class representative, as he also wants to be perceived as a narrator.

Both have become through talent and effort. In addition, the time was ripe to push the door in Germany too that didier Eribon, Annie Ernaux and Édouard Louis from France opened. It was a good thing that Louis 2023 was also a guest lecturer and the texts of both authors can now be found in a band of the Swiridoff publishing house.

“At first glance, one could say that the great performance of Baron and Louis’s autosociobiographies is the report of a spectacular advancement,” says the afterword. “Perhaps the much greater performance is that you have not just left the world from which you come, but somehow, everyone, everyone in a very remarkable way.” This should only be about Christian Baron, the up to 2018 was a theater editor at the »ND«.

He begins his first lecture, “the time of the monsters”, with horror films that accompanied the horror reality of his childhood. It had been a long way to somehow understand his beating father. The concept of the “class” helped him: “A society that systematically excludes people from economic and cultural participation in their prosperity may not be surprised if these excluded those excluded in the excess of bourgeois values ​​a refuge and thus a kind of last dignity hope. “

Reading you are always amazed at how Christian Baron comes to social analyzes in frank story, which in her accuracy must get under your skin. He does not accommodate himself, but also does not seek confrontation. He does not brag about his immense knowledge, speaks in such a authentic way that his texts and topics are also understandable for those who grew up very differently. By reporting on his literary career, his idea of ​​a “Kaiserslautern trilogy” across the area in which he grew up, he also wants to go to larger connections. »A person with a class shame lives with the impression of not being able to keep up in almost everything that is socially expected. And since capitalism works in such a way that he assigns all the fault of his fate to the individual, shame and fear are equally the basic feelings of poverty. This also applies if you proudly camouflage yourself. ”Such sentences should be memorized.

To throw off the “class shams”, but in no way to deny your own origin, is a mental performance that makes Christian Barons so special. »Art ability must be Educational promoters develop like a foreign language. ”What he knows from social science, literature, theater, film I was already impressed when he came to us as an intern to us in the Feuilleton des» ND «. In the meantime, “a man in his class” has also been filmed. In an interview with Wolfgang M. Schmitt, which is also included in the band, he talks about the problem of literary adaptations.

And all of this without the mask of the successful, with which people in this class society also protect themselves. Because he sees through all of this: the hamster wheel of the alienated wage labor (I didn’t even know that there was no labor code in the FRG), the pitfalls of the “self-realization screw”, which “overturns burnout”, and the extensive denial This misery in art, “as if we were all the free spirits who live from air and love alone”. He only briefly indicates his own cramped living conditions without complaining, and comes straight to his work on texts, which also takes place in your mind when changing the child, walking and shopping and baby swimming. Sometimes he “apparently found the ideal entry when the dishwasher was cleared up before throwing it back into the imaginary trash when I cleared the dishwasher.”

He defends himself against the term “therapy” for his letter. And it is also clear to him: to make social justice, by no means means reaching them. The contradictory is that fascinates him. “Because my most important impulse for writing is something that unfortunately comes out of fashion in the present: I want to understand.”

Christian Baron/Édouard Louis: To write his life – texts on the origin and future. Ed. V. Dorothee Kimmich u. Philipp Alexander Ostrowicz, under the employee. v. Sara Bangert. Swiridoff-Verlag, 137 pages, Br., € 14.