This is Berlin: 25 Minutes

A man around 45 to 50 years old enters the antique store where I am. You can hear him the moment the shop door opens. “There! I know this business inside out! Come on in here now, then you can get out,” he says to a small, much younger person standing next to him.

Meanwhile, I’m standing in one of the most hidden corners of the winding shop and leafing through an old illustrated GDR edition of the fantastic story “The Horla” by Guy de Maupassant. And hear the new customer coming in from afar. He cannot be ignored at all.

The antiquarian and I have been the only people in the shop so far. The man walks briskly through the bookstore with long strides, as if it belonged to him. He talks constantly, makes exalted arm movements and points to this or that shelf. Self-absorbed, unsuccessful artist type. He has artfully twirled his sprawling brown-gray hair into a kind of oversized, bird’s nest-like thing that is held together by three knitting needles.

He has a young lady in tow, about 20 years old, to whom he talks incessantly in a loud voice for the next 25 minutes, without a break, without a period or comma. The man speaks in a harsh Berlin dialect that has not been softened by time or experience.

“There, look, this is van Eyck and this is da Vinci! You can’t go wrong with Dürer and da Vinci, they practically always work!« He shows the silent woman, who looks up at him in a vaguely amorous way, two art catalogs, which he leafs through carelessly, without waiting for any answer or comment , keeps talking.

»Yes, they could still do something! Not like the so-called emancipated artists today, who simply smear something together and say: This is art. And then the latest criticisms lie at their feet.” Every now and then, at regular intervals, he spices up his torturous endless talk with some calendar wisdom or common phrase that he seems to think is clever or wise. »Be yourself the change you want for this world, I always say. Old Confucius already said that. And don’t forget: you can only see with your heart!”

He doesn’t care in the slightest that in the small shop, where there was silence for a long time, no one speaks except him. Sometimes, when he takes a short breath, his companion starts to sentence for a fraction of a second, but the first syllable that tries to escape her lips dies in her mouth. Because the Berlin artist type is blathering on mercilessly again.

»Here too, look! There! Schopenhauer! Nietzsche! You have to read this, it’s really great! There are still thinkers out there! Nietzsche is a bit too soft sometimes, but Schopenhauer is tough! Maybe a little too dark for you, haha, but A-list material!” He grabs one of the books at random from a shelf and starts reading out loud. It is obviously not a passage he selected; he seems to have simply opened the 600-page volume at a random point. You don’t know whether he understands what he’s saying. In any case, he reads for minutes, as if he had just written what he was saying and was now extremely proud of it.

»You know, that’s because I know my way around. The Old Masters! This is my world, tell me! Most people don’t understand anything about it!”

He doesn’t care that other people are in his immediate vicinity. He is fully occupied with producing the endless flow of speech that flows from the front opening of his head. He is now, at this moment, the man on the stage, the leading actor, the great philosopher connoisseur, the super guy, the art expert, the original genius adored by his silent girlfriend. Nobody needs to come to him with any petty bourgeois petty stuff now.

»I’m telling you, you have to read this. That’s poetry! Olle Brecht doesn’t mind!” He puts a book in her hand as she walks silently and submissively along the shelves behind him, without looking at her. He simply passes the book he has picked out behind him, where it automatically lands in her hand, as if she had been used to this movement for weeks. She is his lackey that he carries with him. He is the chief thinker, chief philosopher, chief wafflehead. Who talks and rambles everyone around him without mercy into the ground and, if necessary, into total unconsciousness.

“Now come on, let’s go get something to eat, I’m done here.” They both leave the shop, he trots ahead, chatting persistently and bravely, she follows behind him. The antiquarian and I breathe a sigh of relief. We look at each other, wordlessly, and both know what happened. 25 minutes. 25 minutes of our lives were stolen from us. Time has disappeared forever.

Whereas the guy could come back tomorrow.