Thilo Sarrazin has written another book. It says, brazenly varying the title of a Karl Popper book, “Reason and its Enemies”. According to the subtitle, it is about the “mistakes and illusions of ideological thinking”. Sarrazin finds it worrying, as he says in his introduction, “that for some years now in the western world there has apparently been a growth in the number of minorities that put desires, fantasies and prejudices in the place of positive knowledge”.
He sees these tendencies in the media as well as on “the left as well as the right side of the political spectrum”, and then on the one hand he names Russia’s attack on Ukraine (“the greatest attack on human sanity”), the Trump voters who believe that Trump stole the election because of falsifications, and lateral thinkers and corona deniers. Good this way. On the other hand, he does not forget “the fanatical representatives of gender ideology”, the dangers of political Islam, the left-wing ideologues who ignore the fact that intelligence is biologically determined and has nothing to do with social conditions and circumstances.
On the one hand, everything is clear, obvious, obvious – on the other hand, Sarrazin’s eternal agenda, basically little that is new under the sun of the “Germany Abolishes Itself” author, despite all the philosophical overlays.
In order to present this agenda even better, yes, possibly more effectively to the public, Sarrazin and the Stuttgart-based Langen Müller Verlag came up with the idea of inviting the well-known Dresden writer Uwe Tellkamp to the book launch on Tuesday morning in a meeting room of the federal press conference, so that he could give an introduction may hold.
However, this is Tellkamp a size too small. This morning he would like to give a “eulogy” to Sarrazin, to an “uncomfortable”: “Praising Thilo Sarrazin is, if you follow some journalists, a crime, crossing the red line, a crime of the mind,” he begins, to come after a short introduction to the eruption of the “diversity mountain” in 2010, the “biggest volcano in the field of the German democratic opinion economy”.
Tellkamp then gives a lecture that could pass as a eulogy in parts, but above all it is a satirical reckoning with politics and the actors of the traffic light government. It speaks of the “Habecken” – “Habecken didn’t just mean hamsters, but also voluntary renunciation for peace” – and of the “Baerbockenden”, of the “Lauterbachen” and of the “Scholzen”, but also of the “Merkeln” and ” Merzen”, from the “Talkshowkratie”. Tellkamp knows that “state drama has long ceased to be about content”. But not with him either, he likes his formulations. “Sarrazin doesn’t need the Federal Gavel of Merit on the hero’s chest, certainly not from this Federal President.”
When the writer has finished, Thilo Sarrazin seems amazed at the extremely polemical fury of his laudator: “If you listen to my lecture, you will notice the difference between art and craft. Now comes the craft.” He then briefly presents his book, chapter by chapter, which, despite all the focus on right-wing ideologies, conjures up the usual enemy images at its core, from so-called gender madness to political correctness and wokeness to the supposed cultural and ethnic alienation.
It seems strange when Thilo Sarrazin of all people thinks he is beyond all ideological thinking, he refers to facts, knowledge and rationality and all of this, head to head with his laudator, denies current German politics. When Tellkamp is asked why he actually gave his lecture so angry, he asks back: “Are you calm? Where does your calm come from? I have to think about what kind of burning option I can get for my family in 2022, but we want to save the world, the climate. And they can’t even get the train to run on time.”
Uwe Tellkamp is about to explode again, shortens this, mixes that. Hot anger always comes before cool rationality.
