Urban life – call me wellness

Gerd Sulzenbacher draws us the city of Vienna as Dantes »Inferno« in twelve, twice eleven hell circles. But even if the “screams of the damned” can be heard occasionally, it lives in this hell. She is inhabited by him by undead yuppies without ambition, who, if you have one, do one, do the same in large institutions, secretly long for your village, mostly pay strict attention to your health, but when she overwhelms boredom, take drugs and sometimes empty your cell phones. The narrator, for example, only wants to lie, lie, lie, lie.

Lying, lying, lying down – that is reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s “Murphy”, whose protagonist always sits, sits, sits. Some have suffered Beckett’s Murphy and other figures because they are concreted in a hollow existence and seem to be dead long before their physical end. That is deceptive, because “whoever maintains such boredom lives happily”. If someone is allowed to sit or lie, it is not disturbed by ancillary cost statements, WhatsApp messages and raids.

A shape of Sulzenbacher slides from one “meaning crisis” to the next, another lasts for 14 hours at a time at a time – “call me wellness” -, others watch “to the trees at work”. Spacious emptiness of life is a privilege that does not enjoy the “cleaning power” that the narrator meets in the office area, or the proletons, who are shaken to home on the bus.

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In view of such a scene, there are two possible speaker positions: one that is also stylistically part of what she describes. Let’s call them the Christian Kracht method. The opposite position develops its own, often mannerist idiom in order to emphasize and overturn the distance to the described. This is the Werner Kofler method. Sulzenbacher moves exactly in the middle between these two options.

On the one hand, his narrator avoids the designer café and the “agonizing small talk circles”. “Everyone does yoga,” he doesn’t. On the other hand, he usually does not articulate much differently than those who dislike him: “He cared for a patent contempt for careeristy and had a natural lottery.” His sentences are truffled with the typical silliness (“Gauch”) and awkwardness (“prompt”) of the urban scene.

It seems that only thanks to this insider perspective can succeed as shiny miniatures as they do: »While the waitress picks up the order, the child crawled under the table. It extends the empty hands and says: Hey, give me money, I am a homeless. ”Here a complacent, although not always solvent, portrays with a preference for” old vegetables “, coffee specialties, roaring minimalism, luxury fashion from off-White and” Dolby surround nature “. “You have opinions and do not shy away from telling each other with freely clear.”

Not every Murphy happiness is given, some of them are inconsistently mistaken by the “abandoned terminal construction” of his consciousness. A degraded work colleague even plunges into early death from his “leisure worries”. But the following applies to everyone: there is no outside, disgust, but no conflict, only “extremely agreement”. Both the Malocher and the makers are only known from a distance. Matters from Migration seep into it, but the army will already judge it.

We should hold back with forecasts. But if Elon Musk now tears off the institutions, Friedrich Merz will swift civil society with the iron broom and, with or without Herbert Kickl, also blows a sharp wind in Austria, it could be that what Gerd Sulzenbacher paints us as an inferno is considered “paradiso” in the future, from which the yuppies can only dream more.

Gerd Sulzenbacher: demolition. Prose. Engeler, 162 pages, Br., 14 €.