A volume with texts by Franz Schuh: “Of Good, True and Bad”

SEven when he was at school, says Franz Schuh, the poets promised him the “alternative world” of a free life: “I still hate power, which can never really legitimize itself because it always tacitly, anonymously assumes its legitimacy, but also the romantic hope for the victory of literature against the mighty lemurs.” That’s how he became a critic. Word has gotten around that Franz Schuh has become much more than just a critic who undauntedly adheres to his belief in the “rebelliousness of literature”, namely a headstrong thinker and brilliant essayist, as well as a declaimer and actor of his own style. In 2006, Schuh received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, and in the previous year the Darmstadt Academy’s Johann Heinrich Merck Prize.

A “reading book” has now been published for his 75th birthday, in which texts from fifty years are collected, or better: composed, in a manner that is as coherent as it is appealing. With its help, one can get an idea of ​​this author, who eludes the usual categories of the literary scene: he does not write fiction and yet he has a lot to tell; his reviews break the boundaries of critical narrow-mindedness and aim for the big picture; his studies are too personal, volatile and anecdotal for a philosophical treatise; Schuh also doesn’t write any non-fiction books, unless the issue at stake is people and their social constitution.

He brought up the concept of time

The sections of the volume bear headings such as “Physical”, “Happy”, “Linguistic”, “Critical”, “Philosophical”, “Political” and “Personal”. One can lose oneself here, in fact without distinction, with both high and low objects, with love and death, Hegel and Nietzsche, Peter Sloterdijk and Karl Heinz Bohrer, Lenau and Ernst Jandl: “No one else can understand the connection between eschatology and aporia so directly and often portray it in such a flash.” But also with the “crime scene” and Commissioner Maigret, with the kitsch industry, with the stupidity and instinct of the actor, with the lowliness of Austrian politics and the cheerful obscenity of a “state act”, in the context of which an entertainment film actress “Cross of Honor for Science and Art”. Aphoristic sentences and short statements are represented in the collection as well as interviews and detailed essays, all sources and cursory explanations can be found in the appendix.

Perhaps Schuh is really concerned, as his editor Bernhard Kraller believes, with a “great history”, with the “comprehensive contemporary and social novel”, albeit with the means of the essay. What Hegel demands of philosophy, namely to bring its time to a concept, the Hegelian Schuh also achieves as an essayistic causeur in search of the phenomenon, the supra-individually effective appearance of an essential. Because Franz Schuh is a stylist who takes the successor to Karl Kraus seriously, a review doesn’t even come close to saying what this book is about. Finally, its author tries “to find a language equidistant from the journalistic and the academic. In comparison to the Impressionism that is customary in the country, however, I use a terminology: it doesn’t have it easy here, because in Austria you think everything is stupid if it sounds clever.”