Couples, passers-by

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Couples, Passers-by is a prose collection by Botho Strauss that appeared in 1981, in which the not only structurally similar play Kalldewey, Farce was published in book form.

Form and content

The book contains thought and observation sketches, fragments, splintered thoughts, aphorisms, everyday observations and essayistic considerations. It is divided into six chapters:

  • Couples
  • Traffic flow
  • Wrote
  • Twilight
  • Separate
  • The present fool

Overall, Strauss assumes the position of an analyzing, reflecting and commenting viewer, intellectual and penetrating. This becomes clearest in the first part, in which he describes couples whom he - like a stroller - observes.

In the third part, wrote , it is the writer whose meaning and attitude in postmodernism Strauss ponders - including the rejection of dialectical thinking with the central sentence: Without dialectics, we immediately think more stupidly; but it has to be: without her! . In the fifth section it is the individual that he places at the beginning of the section, alcoholics, drug dealers, the shoemaker in the department store: the loneliness puppet as a prototype.

The sum of this kaleidoscope creates a picture of the state of mind in the Federal Republic of Germany at the beginning of the 1980s: the relationship market , in which hedonistic present-day freaks who are integrated into networks predominate: apparently free, but actually only forgotten.

The formal structure also gives the impression of a society that consists only of impressions, a field of rubble with no context or lifespan. The book quickly became a cult text of cultural pessimism.

reception

“Couples, passers-by” was treated as a significant new release by literary criticism. Günter Blöcker wrote in the FAZ : “This narrow book is really a heavyweight.” In it, Strauss had a tone of “purity and urgent sincerity that is beyond comparison in contemporary German literature”. The reviewer uses the French writer Albert Camus for comparison and describes Strauss as the “German Camus of the eighties”. In the star it was critically noted that the collection of short texts resulted in a “hodgepodge”. In the introduction to the Reclam annual overview "German Literature 1981", however, Volker Hage regards the volume as a stroke of luck: "Tight blocks of text, carefully composed, of intoxicating analytical and stylistic brilliance". Strauss draws a bitter balance of the present in “Couples, Passers-by”, his cultural criticism is caustic, but despite all the malevolence without mockery: he is “not a guardian who knows that he is sublime”.

There are also voices exploring "femininity myths" and the "glorification of the androgynous childlike". Karin Bauer and Brigitta Huhnke are of the opinion that "hatred" and "resentment" towards women run through the book. In the chapter on dawning, Huhnke wants to identify " pedophile notions of violence" and writes: "In this volume, the man with a disorder of identity finds ... animating fantasy models for child abuse ." As evidence, she cites the following passage of text: "It is the Lamia shock that I suffer every time the prey is placed in my arms with confidence". The women in the book - all very young - are consistently described as "prey". The narrator feels particular contempt for a sexually active woman who demonstrates against nuclear power plants, "subordinates love to the good" and enjoys sex without pain and failure. Similar to the essay "Swelling Bocksgesang", Huhnke sees "couples, passers-by" also being permeated by " misogynous and nationalistic patterns of interpretation". Strauss's contribution, which was first published in Spiegel , sparked a major cultural and political debate in 1993.

literature

  • "German literature 1981. An overview of the year". Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart 1982; it also reprinted the cited reviews from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (September 26, 1981) and the star (November 5, 1981). The quotations can be found on pages 9, 191 and 196 f.
  • Karin Bauer (1996): Contemporary criticism and nostalgic recourse: The abdication of women as an object of male desire and the eroticization of the child woman in Botho Strauss' Couples Passers-by . In: The German Quarterly 69.2, 181-195
  • Brigitta Huhnke (1997): "pc" - The new mantra of the neoconservatives . In: Andreas Disselnkötter, Siegfried Jäger, Helmut Kellershohn, Susanne Slobodzian (eds.): Evidenzen im Fluss. Loss of democracy in Germany.  : “Botho Strauss” pp. 279–283
  • Christiane Schmerl: Everything under control? Men's emancipation versus conservatism . In: From Politics and Contemporary History . Supplement to the weekly newspaper Das Parlament , B6 / 93