Literature: “Cripple Passion” by Jan Kuhlbrodt – Nothing works without a body

Like my mother, I will lie one day too” – Jan Kuhlbrodt falls into the house with the door. His mother’s illness and death introduce his book “Cripple Passion”. The author reports on her last visit to her sickbed, describing how she lay withdrawn and no longer aware of the outside world. How she no longer gets out of bed, just like she couldn’t get out of the wheelchair before. Kuhlbrodt’s mobility is also dwindling, he writes. One day all he will have to do is lie down and withdraw into himself. Because he has the same illness as his mother. So she becomes a dark role model for the suffering that still lies ahead of him and with which he mercilessly confronts the readers: “Slowly my body is giving up its obedience.”

It is a very personal and open book in which the author, who lives in Leipzig, writes about his life with – or better: despite – multiple sclerosis. He has already had to endure several bouts of illness and the disability is progressing. He is now in a wheelchair. The book is subtitled “On Walking”. Even if it’s about more than just locomotion, the common thread is the progressive restriction of it.

Kuhlbrodt was born in Karl-Marx-Stadt, which is now called Chemnitz again, in 1966. He worked as a freelance writer until he was unable to work. After studying political economy in Leipzig and philosophy in Frankfurt am Main, he studied at the Leipzig Literature Institute, where he later taught as a visiting professor. Kuhlbrodt was managing director of the literary magazine “Edit” from 2007 to 2010. He received the Alfred Döblin Prize in 2023 for “Krüppelpassion”.

20 years ago, Kuhlbrodt’s body showed the first symptoms of illness. He has now forgotten what it even feels like to move on foot. “You still remember how it works, how it worked when you left.” But he couldn’t remember the feeling anymore. He describes his last bike ride through a new development in Leipzig, during which he suddenly realizes that it will be the last time he sits on the saddle. Various facets of his biography emerge, scenes from his time in the army and his studies. Kuhlbrodt mixes them with mental asides and notes. His life consists of memories, files, photos. He slips into the anecdotal, writing whatever comes to mind so as not to write about the illness. Which, of course, he always returns to because he can’t help it.

You can feel how the author is fighting with himself, defending himself against his disappearance. In vain, because his physical immobility causes him to disappear from the outside world, and at some point he no longer leaves the old children’s room, where he is surrounded by stacks of books because he can no longer reach the shelves. He realizes that he will never read them all again. And finally he has to admit to himself that it is probably the very last book he will ever write.

It is moving, as Kuhlbrodt describes, being kept away from places that are important to him. Stairs and missing ramps or elevators result in exclusion. For a long time, he had not been able to take part in life at the literature institute, as if they wanted to keep him out. When he was still on crutches, he struggled to drag himself up the steep steps in the old Wilhelminian style villa. And he slid down on the seat of his pants, afraid of falling. Over the years he has learned to fall and not land on his face, he adds laconically.

Kuhlbrodt also unsparingly describes his difficulties with an acute need to urinate, how he once had to urinate in the aisle of a shopping center because there was no other option and he was ashamed. These lines become an angry plea against the restrictions that people without restrictions thoughtlessly impose on others. But it penetrates deeper, scratches at the contempt for the body that can be found in large parts of Western philosophy. Reason is placed above the body. You are human because you think; the body that makes this possible is ignored.

In the old dilemma of the body-soul problem, Kuhlbrodt argues for the body. Because he has to make the painful experience that the body is the basis and prerequisite for more than just thinking. What you only find out when it stops working.

You don’t have to have studied the history of philosophy about the Cartesian dualism of body and mind (“I think, therefore I am”) to share Kuhlbrodt’s insight: without the body, nothing works, without it nothing works. It hurts to follow the author as he reads, because you can see in the text the pain in which it was written. You have to be all the more grateful for his honest insights. They also represent a lesson in humility by taking for granted what seems so obvious.

Jan Kuhlbrodt: Passion for Cripples – or about Walking. Gans-Verlag, 240 pages, br., 30 €.