Old television – devil on TV

South Hessian writer Andreas Maier particularly stands out among the autofictional novels, infusions and shows. Since 2010 he has published the novel series “Local bypass” and is also negotiating social change and standstill in the Wetterau. This is an area near Frankfurt/Main in which Maier (born 1967) grew up in Friedberg. In the beginning of the 90s, this town was driven out of the surrounding villages for the important purchases, nowadays it has become an inconspicuous Frankfurt suburb.

The beautiful, clever and sympathetic to Maier’s “bypass” is the prescription form of narrative and essay preferred by him. He writes a kind of family chronicle from the inside, as a involved and observer. He examines the forms of socialization, terms and ideas that shape him with a light hand.

The tenth and penultimate volume of this series was published in spring with “The Teufel”. If the previous parts were about studying, vacation trips and the term “homeland”, the new book is about a “lost leading medium”, television, and beyond dance lessons, masonry and men who do not want to be “Macker”.

The older ones will remember: linear television once structured world perception as a dichotomy: the good ones against the evil. This split begins with the programs that Maier divides into two categories as a child: “Some just ran like this and were put in touch as if it were about destroying mere time.” These were the “early afternoon series and weekend morning series”. The programs of the other category, however, were “inaccessible, quasi -service -like appointments”, to miss them, was painful, for example a sequence of the rarely running “Augsburg Puppenkiste”.

In the Cold War, the well-evil layout was mandatory. On western television, the Soviet Union was “connoted with the Arctic Ocean, submarine and rock hats”, the general secretary “always moved as if it were actually rigid”. The changing US presidents, on the other hand, smiled, shook hands and ran much more freely. They had only set up their weapons of mass destruction to protect us from the others. ”The system confrontation extends to Maier’s family. When aunt lens from the east, the “repressive hammer -dark state block”, arrived, “she was” received with a certain reservation “. Because she defended the east, also when the wall had fallen, she was not even in the SED, but in the farm party.

On closer inspection, the parents also appear divided (the mother despises the father when she drank something). This also applies to the closer relationship (due to inheritance disputes), as is the case for women and men’s AGs (in both of the “mere tail plug without romanticism”) and the political perspective (“was considered on the right, which was not left”).

But this difficult mixture is clearly designed by the effective simplification apparatus television: by marking the devil. Saddam Hussein appears as such not only in the “Tagesschau” when the USA and its allies attack Iraq in 1991 after he previously incorporated Kuwait. “There it was, evil, the dark, the no”, in the snout -bearded Iraqi dictator, which was proclaimed by Hans Magnus Enzensberger in the “Spiegel” as “Hitler’s recipient” and who looked a bit like the mentally limited uncle of Maier.

No one was interested in the fact that Hussein had previously been supported by the West in the war against Islamic Iran. This war had taken eight years and cost at least 500,000 lives. When he started, Maier went into seventh grade when he ended, he studied in the third semester. Sometimes this war was reminded on television, and was not mentioned for two weeks, he was forgotten again.

But if you are a devil, you just challenge the war to save the war, of course to save peace. Putin is currently called. At Trump you are unsure. Merz probably fails. The proclamation of the devil and in itself was one of the last cultural achievements of old television before it sank into the Internet and streaming. Maier describes how the picture of a naked devil was demonstrated as a youthful in the city church of Friedberg. Later, an art historian will tell him that it was a confusion. The next, final band of “Local bypass” is called “God”.

Andreas Maier: The devil. Suhrkamp, ​​160 p., Br., 25 €.