One More Stammered Verse and I Kick the Door In

If one more half-baked philosophy student drags me by the sleeve into their room to watch Julia Engelmann breathlessly stammer through her poetry slam manifesto on why my life is fundamentally broken, I’m going to lose it. She had a video go massively viral in Germany—a performance called One Day/Reckoning, all breathy conviction and free verse about seizing life before it slips away—and somehow this made every stoned flatmate in a thirty-kilometer radius appoint themselves my personal life coach. I know, okay? I know my life is a mess. I don’t need a girl with a microphone to confirm it in metered couplets.

Jan Böhmermann, Germany’s most reliably sharp satirist, had the good sense to respond to her—a parody that told Engelmann, essentially, to stop prescribing how other people should live. It lands with exactly the precision required. There’s something clarifying about watching someone articulate the irritation you’ve been quietly suppressing for weeks. Yes: cat videos, checking email, YouPorn. That’s a life too. It counts.