Calf's silence
Kalbs Schweigen is the first novel by the German journalist and writer Alexander Gorkow , published in 2003 .
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The title character of Gorkow's media satire is the forty-year-old Joseph Kalb, who has been a talk show host for five years with his own production company in a nameless (large) city with important production facilities for TV entertainment.
When Kalb suddenly falls silent on the 300th edition of his live talk show, the same catastrophe overtakes him professionally that his life has been on for years, but at the latest since his wife Alma separated from him four years earlier, taking along their four children. has developed. On that autumn day, Kalb's silence preceded various harbingers: severe headaches from the earliest hours of the morning, a spontaneous, irrational departure from his parking routine in the studio parking lot, a dying pigeon in front of the studio entrance and an uncomfortable conversation with two works council members of the station, the calf want to question before the start of the program for not taking on a volunteer by his production company.
Kalb swims for the show Bad when he realizes who the guests of his talk show will be: a disgruntled young writer, an old man who has made it to temporary prominence through a politically correct heroic act, the “woman who is active in social matters recently stumbled minister ”and an actor - the latter two“ of apocalyptic stupidity ”. In fact, the talk show guests start quarreling minutes before they actually start. The cameras are not yet on the air when the works council members sneak up on Kalb through the set in order to put him under pressure by saying that the rejected volunteer has just committed suicide. The talk show, which Kalb tries to moderate under these conditions, develops into an orgy of aggressive talking past one another through the nagging of the guests, which culminates in the moderator's silence a good eleven minutes before the program is due to end. A pushy newspaper photographer who snuck into the studio takes photos of it.
This ends the first part of Gorkov's novel entitled “Kalf” and told from his perspective . The second part, which is twice as long, gets its title from the name of the talk show producer, Hambeck, who is now a perspective holder.
It is Hambeck who for the next two weeks - more as a friend of Kalbs than as his employee - takes care of the silent calf. This is also necessary, because an unleashed sensational press rushes on the talk show presenter , assuming that Kalb's silence had something to do with the intern's suicide, and that this in turn was due to the presenter's broken promises of love towards the young woman. Hambeck organizes whatever he thinks is necessary to restore Kalbs and save the talk show, and in doing so, Gorkow has a parade of bizarre characters appear before the reader . Hambeck leads Kalb to his family doctor, a neurologist and a psychologist, fends off hyena-like journalists, talks to the confused director , confronts the silent man with his world-traveling mother and finally appears with him on another talk show in which the silent presenter remains silent and falls asleep three minutes before the end of the program. All of these impulses are unable to get Kalb to talk, and this is probably one of the reasons why Hambeck - actually of a robust nature - comes under more and more pressure himself, so that in the final scene he watches with shaky hands, like a family get-together on a ruined site by the river Kalf's younger son poised riskily on a wall above the bank. Only at this moment when his child was in danger - and only in the role of father - did the silent moderator say a word for the first time in over two weeks when he called out the saving "Jump!" To his son.
Acceptance by literary criticism
The novel was consistently viewed by critics as media satire. However, his author rejected this thematic exclusivity in an interview: " Kalb's silence is [...] not a media novel, but a novel about friendship". The quantitative proportions between the "Kalb" and the "Hambeck" headed section of the novel (68 to 144 printed pages) give this self-interpretation a certain plausibility, but this aspect of the novel - also in view of Gorkow's leading position for the weekend supplement of the Süddeutsche Zeitung (until 2009 ) - received little attention from the critic. Gorkow took his self-interpretation that Kalb's silence was “not a media novel”, in the same interview a few sentences later, the exaggeration by generalizing that “almost every novel today is a media novel. With Kalb, too, the media is just the usual chatter wallpaper in front of which we play our lives. "
Peter Richter's review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is representative of the generally benevolent reception of Gorkow's novel. At the beginning of his detailed review, Richter initially expressed the fear that a media satire like the Gorkovs would bore him: today's media by no means need another revelatory novel, as they are "not only self-explanatory, but also practically self-indignant". In conclusion, however, Richter acknowledges Gorkov's novel:
- “The book is a counter-draft to the elegiac inwardness of the new German successful literature, where tea is constantly drunk and then smoked, although it essentially delivers exactly the same thing: a great inner monologue about a still world in which little happens and a lot is talked about . Just a lot funnier. It is actually very conservative , culturally pessimistic media criticism. But a particularly grumpy one. "
Sources and individual references
- ^ Munich: Heyne-Verlag, 2003
- ↑ Helmut Ziegler: "'Going crazy is near'" [Interview with Alexander Gorkow]. the daily newspaper of May 17, 2003. Quoted from the reprint at http://www.taz.de/1/archiv/archiv/?dig=2003/05/17/a0147 . Download from February 25, 2011
- ↑ Cf. Kress: The media service. https://kress.de/koepfe/kresskoepfe-detail/profil/4244-alexander-gorkow.html . Document viewed on February 25, 2011
- ↑ http://www.buecher.de/shop/spezial/kalbs-schweigen/gorkow-alexander/products_products/content/prod_id/11299042/#faz Peter Richter: “Blue miracle in the red light district. Dr. Murke is now doing talk shows: Alexander Gorkow's media satire. ” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung No. 71 of March 25, 2003, p. 34. Quoted after reprint on http://www.buecher.de/