The Critic With the Beautiful Name
Leni read it aloud on a park bench—we’d just dropped off bikes at an agency nearby and bought the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on the way back, and now she was reading from the feuilleton section at a volume that was bothering the other people using the park. Marcel Winatschek’s blog belongs among the epigones,
she read, doing a good imitation of appropriate gravitas. It passes for the Bild-Zeitung of hipsters. Because it concerns itself intensely with the breasts of various A-to-F-list celebrities, in that sloppy manner borrowed from Vice—somewhere between permanent boredom and permanent arousal.
Hannah, the critic. Hannah Lühmann. I’ve always liked that name.
Leni kept going. This journal, apparently, had also informed its readers that Crystal Meth would turn them into lazy zombies, that stupidly staring four-legged creatures were the true heroes of the night because some American blogger photographs strangers’ dogs after dark, and that readers were being urged to take the swastika back from the Nazis since it was originally a symbol of love and peace. All accurate. An older man with a wheezing dachshund moved past us and gave us a look. We were laughing too loudly.
The third piece of the indictment came more slowly. High-quality photo spreads, celebrity fun facts, a pseudo-subjective brand of closeness journalism whose defining feature was the embracing you
or we
in headlines, a lot of skin, and occasional political commentary that was frequently complete nonsense. What was missing was substance—the kind Vice still mixed in with its trash. But trash, apparently, was consensus for the thirteen-to-thirty generation. The recipe was always the same. The sun was in my face. We stood up.
By autumn, the piece had lost most of its half-life. Ronny had weighed in from his end, Matze had written something sharp from another angle. Media 2008 to 2013: blogs are dead. Media 2014: blogs are stealing our clicks.
The observation has held up. What I kept coming back to wasn’t the specific critique but the question beneath it: was she right? About the breasts, yes, at least partly. About the trash: also yes, that was always somewhat the point. About the irony-as-leveler argument—there I’d push back, but that required a better venue than a park bench in late August. What I couldn’t forgive was that she got the name wrong. And that half the piece was built from quoted headlines, which in the FAZ feuilleton apparently qualified as editorial substance. A cheerful world of easygoing redundancy has its advantages too.
I would have written her a letter. Personal, perfumed, sent registered post. But there was no time. The entire month of August had been burning over our heads. Leni and I had moved in together in the middle of Berlin earlier that year and turned the kitchen into something between a coworking space and a small catastrophe—no sleep, a lot of cheese pizza, ideas that felt important at 3 a.m. and embarrassing by noon and important again by evening. We weren’t trying to make this journal better or newer. We just wanted it to be as good as we could make it. Right now. This version.
Hannah Lühmann. On some cool autumn evening, when the squirrels are frantic between branches and the yellow leaves make that sound in the wind, I think about our afternoon together in a Neukölln café. What we talked about. Life, love, the specific damage a well-placed adjective can do to a person’s Wednesday. And what happened after. Now I see your name in print, black on white, and between the lines all the grudge and grief and score-settling. I fold the paper and set it in the recycling, gently. Hannah. I’ve always liked that name.