Fun and responsibility | The lion is on the loose again!

My first contact with Kurt Tucholsky was a commentary that my pen pal copied onto A3 paper and folded several times into an envelope. It was in "The Lion Is Loose!", written in a feuilleton style, under one of his pseudonyms—Theobald Tiger or Peter Panter, Ignaz Wrobel or Kaspar Hauser.

In the style of a newspaper report, it describes how a lion named Franz Wüstenkönig escapes from the Berlin Zoo and strolls across the Ku'damm. The excitement is immense; the wild animal, with its threatening charisma, is being exploited by various political contexts and used rhetorically for their own purposes.

At some point the lion grows tired of becoming an instrument of mankind. Good-natured as he has always been, he voluntarily retreats to his cage and takes a nap in an enclosure that is safe from the political turmoil of his time. A time that was almost exactly one hundred years ago. Sometimes it feels like déjà vu. And sometimes I ask myself: How will I be perceived as a historical subject one hundred years from now? Were I on the right or the wrong side of history? The right or the wrong side of history?

Alexander Kluge says that a politically minded person should reflect on themselves in the future perfect tense: Who will I have been? And then he says: "Time can be read not only horizontally, chronologically, but also vertically." Historical layers lie on top of one another. Like the floors of a house. The attic is the brain, the memory, the long-term memory. Some memories need to be dusted off to be made visible again.

Birth is the first trauma of a human being, one who is swept ashore by water. One who spends their entire life trying to return to the liquid state. One who is literally left high and dry. And my friend A.'s mother says: "The first time you lay on my chest, I realized that I had given you not only life, but also death."

And D. says: We all just want to go back to the womb. And sometimes, the older I get, the more often I think: "Mom, I want to go back to your uterus." To hide away, to be invisible. Freed from the burden of becoming a historical subject.

It is not only the shortest, but also the longest journey that one undertakes in a lifetime, producing everything that then lies before one, beautiful and painful and beautifully painful.

And my friend the archaeologist says: "Historical layers don't exist per se. They are constructed by archaeologists retrospectively to tell the stories that history wants to tell. They provide as much insight into the historical situation at the time of the historiography as they do into the time being described."

And Alexander Kluge writes: "There are only three emotions: cold, hot, and longing. The rest is a combination." And I think: Even today, an escaped lion would be exploited by various political parties and positions for their respective purposes.

And D. lies on the jetty like a gentle, exhausted predator in temperatures of the century, a contemporary Franz Wüstenkönig in yellow swimming trunks over his yellow fur. And I think about how two years ago a lion was spotted in Kleinmachnow, which later turned out to be a wild boar. In the course of the investigation, it also emerged how many lions and other predators are actually kept in private households in and around Berlin. The real scandal.

And Jamieson Webster writes: "Human sexuality enters crisis when we are swept from the water to land. We must search for fluidity in our interactions with one another." Can this also be understood politically?