The good column: Uuuh-Huuh! | nd-aktuell.de

I’m not sure that in a better future non-human dwellings should have much more solid walls.

My neighbor gives a solo concert in his apartment every afternoon. Musical instruments are not involved. I know this because I hear him. I can hear him very well. Above average. Because his voice penetrates through all the ceilings and walls as easily as a hot butcher knife through a kilo of butter. Or through my bowels. I’ve been listening to him since he decided he needed a “home vocal system” for the experimental performances he never tires of performing in his apartment. That in itself wouldn’t be particularly remarkable. What he is doing is not forbidden.

Although I would like to ban it. And still today. I would also like to punish those unscrupulous criminals who sold him the microphone and speaker. I would punish her very slowly. In a way that greatly intensifies the feeling of pain. I would do this with great pleasure and publicly. To deter other rogue electronics retailers. To be sure that no one ever sells a single cable to my neighbor again.

With his singing he inflicts raw, severe violence on the songs he has chosen as his sacrifice. Not just the songs. Me too. It then feels as if he is driving a sharp, pointed object directly into my ear canals. Shortly afterwards, it feels as if a painful, irreversible, albeit smooth-edged tissue severance is being caused deep inside me in an organ that is vital to my survival, accompanied by an ugly tearing sound: RRRRATZZZSCH!

The writer Johann Gottfried Seume (1763–1810) once wrote in one of his most famous poems that just “one note” from a person singing is enough to “magically awaken our souls from their deathly slumber.” What he didn’t mention was that “one note” was enough to kill her in a very unmagical way. In any case, when my neighbor sings, my soul is clearly being stabbed rather than resurrected.

What is he singing? He sings “Stand by Me” by Ben E. King and “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” by Elton John and Kiki Dee (“Uuuh-huuh”). I recognized these two titles. He sings the songs in a kind of mocking Mr. Hyde version. As if he wanted to punish them for their existence. He tortures, defiles, destroys them. Crush and yodel them.

But songs have no rights. They don’t bleed if you mistreat them. They don’t die if you torture them. You cannot appeal to the International Court of Human Rights. If my neighbor’s apartment were not here, in Berlin-Neukölln, but in the border area of ​​Germany, the Federal Republic would have been at war long ago.

I don’t think my neighbor has an audience. At least not a voluntary one. He seems to be doing what he’s doing for himself. Or rather, do it to yourself. He sings as if he wanted to use his voice to prove anew every day that – in the Middle Ages – it was not the use of garrote and mouth gag that violated human rights, but rather their abolition.

I bought sound-cancelling headphones. The kind you put on so you no longer have to hear noises from your surroundings. But of course I still hear them in my neighborhood. If you’re hit at close range by a large-caliber bolt-action shotgun, a sticking plaster won’t help.

In any case, one thing is certain: at some point during the day my neighbor will stop his performance again. Before he starts again sometime tomorrow, of course.

Sometimes, in moments of silence, I imagine what it would be like if he continued to yelp and hoot all the time. If I had to sit here for the rest of the day or week waiting for him to stop what he thinks is singing. The idea even briefly crossed my mind that I might have to sit here for the rest of my life. Decades would pass. And my neighbor, meanwhile, would continue to bark incessantly, intoning, in an endless loop, his version of “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” that was bravely ignored by the UN Human Rights Council: “Uuuh-huuh!” (Sharp, pointy object. Penetrating with a jerk .RRRRRATZZZSCH.)

And I would grow old in the meantime. And the last thing I would hear before death finally takes me away would be a siren-like “Uuuh-huuh!”