Not Smoking and Smoking: The Tenderness of the Lost

There is no nice German word for cigarette. The word itself feels like fur on the tongue; it sounds technocratic and distant. This is all the more disappointing because the dancing lightness of the French counterpart makes this deficiency just as clear as it does in contrast to the curt bluntness of the English counterpart.

Nevertheless, it remains the best word for this thing that has had to endure so many terrible corruptions. “Glimmstengel”, “Fluppe”, “Ziese”, even the equally silly and morally sour “Sargnagel” are still in use. Only in some German dialects – primarily Hessian – does something affectionately mocking sound: “a Kippsche”.

However, this loving mockery has not been able to prevail when talking about smoking. Also because it is a very harmful, fatal habit in the long run; This point is not intended to be an edgy defense of smoking. It is abundantly clear that among all bad habits, smoking is one of the most ruthless: towards oneself and towards others.

But this makes it difficult for those who smoke to explain why they continue to do so: the terror of reason, which at this point only proves that the opponents of smoking are right, prevents any conversation. The emphasis on the recklessness that is inherent in smoking in every respect, and which is also reflected in the unhandsomeness of the word “cigarette,” obscures an essential aspect of smoking: it is the tenderness of the lost. It is the tenderness with which Marlene Dietrich in “The Blue Angel” breathes humanity, and even more: a soul, into Professor Rath.

Protestantism has stood in the way of this understanding, approachable approach: it has invented the category of addiction for ostensibly irrational, harmful behavior. The term goes back to Sebastian Franck, who introduced it around 1526 and used it primarily to castigate the excessive drinking of his contemporaries. Even before addiction became medically relevant, it was already moral: it separated the excessive from the dependency. Modern medicine then cemented this split by giving addiction its disease status and pathologizing the addicts; not to help them, but to educate them.

In his book “Drinkers and Lovers,” Albert Memmi tried to explain addiction differently, namely as “a compulsive habit that can only be broken by those who pay the price of great effort.” But this effort is expected of all addicts because abstinents can never really forgive addicts.

That’s why smoking is also an escape from the world: all the more so as the spaces for smokers are becoming fewer. They have now largely lost many of their historic places – the factory, the café, the pub. It is possible that this isolation of the smoker further reinforces the transcendental aspect of smoking, which Odile Lesournes first tried to psychoanalytically grasp in her study “Le Grand Fumeur et sa passion” (1985). And which comes to the conclusion that smoking oscillates between masochism and autoeroticism, in an attempt to create a space between life and death, and ultimately to control death to a certain extent by withdrawing from life.

The absurdity of smoking is not that it is pointless, but that it is ultimately bound to fail. But for a brief moment you can escape the maelstrom of time by smoking. These fantasies in which smoking and dreaming come together are perhaps the moments that smokers value most. Fernando Pessoa dedicated entire pages to this practice in his “Book of Unrest”: Just like Proust’s Madeleine, his main character Bernardo Soares only needs a few puffs of this or that brand to travel back to those places and times when he once had that variety smoked. But these memories are always an escape: Soares is a lonely soul who is frightened by the demands of the outside world, the sheer existence of his fellow human beings and who is particularly interested in the many corners of his soul: a seeker who almost nothing can hold on to; and that’s exactly why he smokes.

Any moral or rational superiority of not smoking, no matter how justified, must pale before a figure like Bernardo Soares. Smoking, says the Federal Ministry of Health, is the “biggest avoidable health risk in Germany,” but it is also much more than that: it is also a strategy for coping with the impertinence of existing in this strange and hostile world.