The good column – in the strangle area of ​​the language image snake

What has always impressed me is the close relationship of the activity of a foreign correspondent with that of a significant modern writer: Both produce text full -time, both use our current reality, and both often maintain a radical experimental dealing with language.

For example, we take a typical international correspondence rate like this: “The hybris of the government seems to be a blunt sword in the long term.” The bold journalistic style, picture satet and juicy, as you know from political commentators, is as artistic, yes, subtly turned that it looks like pure poetry.

Couldn’t the sentence from Durs Grünbein also come from? One would only have to put it a little purification, artificially antique and write in verses: “The hybris of the state of the State / rather later / it becomes a sword.” And in no time you have conjured up three lines of poems for eternity with a bit of tact from a sentence that was indiscriminately removed from any political newspaper comment. Astonishingly, the procedure works the other way around in a way: You can also use two verses from a poem (“cosmopolitan”) from green bone and find one of the central basic experiences of the international correspondent: “From my longest journey back, on the other hand / I understand nothing from traveling.”

But let’s let it turn back to the art of foreign correspondent, his virtuoso handling of original language images and smart metaphors. Recently, I read: “In the slipstream of the war, through which the cards were re -mixed, the government pulled the emergency brake.” Here too, a lifelong picture that does not leave any reader wishes: the war – we see it, the monster, evil, torture of weapons and stubbornly and bloody, as it is dealing with card mixing, while in his shadow, on the floor, the members of the government cabinet, Concerned together in a vehicle, at high speed, permanently have to drive around him around him until the courageous head of government succeeds in ending the spook by gripping the emergency brake. What reads on superficial reading like a turbulent scene from an insane fantasy epic is actually: journalism at its finest.

If you look closely, you will discover other amazing thematic and stylistic overlaps between great literature and modest journalism. Quite often, in political comments, one reads from the phenomenon of the wind that blows through the gazettes almost in permanent, so that when reading the latest Middle East comment, you always think in the Antarctic as on a ship expedition: Obviously, someone has “tailwind”. Or “the wind is taken out of his sails”. Or he ignites a “storm in the water glass” that “lets the waves hit”. The wind as an invisible, unpredictable and irrepressible force that can change the fate of entire world regions! As a symbol of freedom and renewal, but also the danger and the continuous back and forth and conflict! Yes, this is how, so to speak, memorable editorial and page-1 comments arise that provide a breath of fresh air in the head of the readers. But: Hasn’t world literature also created with the help of this little wind-metaphor? Shakespeare’s drama “The Sturm”! Margaret Mitchell’s love -romantic bank “blown away from the wind”! Kenneth Grahanes “The Wind in the Weiden”, one of the best British novels of the 20th century!

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Thomas Blum In principle, it does not agree with the prevailing so -called reality. For the time being, he will not be able to change them, but he can use them to exhort them or, if necessary, also cover one. So that the bad withdraws. We are solidarity with his fight against reality. Therefore, “the good column” appears at this point on Mondays. Only the best quality for the best readers! The collected texts can be found at: dasnd.de/diegute

And is it not as exciting in newspaper comments and political analyzes as in the great war literature of the 20th century? There are “lunting” and “inflamed”, “dugbudges filled” and “torpedoed” agreement; Someone gets a “resounding slap in the face for their political action, or” they are targeted “or” put the pillory “; “Red lines are exceeded”; A situation is “explosive”, especially when the world region that is about is a “powder barrel”. And sometimes someone succeeds “strategic blows” until another “political neck” is broken. In short: you feel like you are reading the newspaper as if you are suddenly “in the middle of the steel steel”! Sometimes it is handled with “blunt” (see above) or “double -edged swords”, then you did not end up with younger, but at Alexandre Dumas (“The Three Musketeers”).

I am not sure whether all the world literature should not be replaced by newspaper comments political correspondents in a better future.

Hmm. As I said: I’m not sure. Whether that would actually be such a good idea to “remain waiting for the time being” (to say it in the language of the correspondents).

In any case, it is certain: The great art of the foreign correspondent and political commentwriter also includes the sensitive change between world literature and road traffic atlas (“Sackgasse”, “Course correction”, “The political tandem”, “timetable”, “Green Light”, “Ride has taken up” etc.).