Why Heinz Strunk delivers exactly the humor we need to survive

I have known Heinz Strunk since I danced the night away at the WMF with his combo around Rocko Schamoni and Jaques Palminger “Studio Braun” ages ago. Since then, Berlin has gone downhill and Strunk has gone uphill.

Since “Meat is my Vegetable” he has been considered a serious novelist who has not only maintained his street cred, but has wallowed in it. And of course the German feature section loves that very much. But of course not enough to clear the space for him that he might have long had somewhere else: world best-selling author German Psycho.

After all, at the end of the month he will receive the Bremen Literature Prize for his collection of short stories “No Money, No Happiness, No Fuel”. The 64-year-old has to pay taxes on the 25,000 euros in prize money, he said in an interview two days earlier. Only prizes for life’s work are tax-free. And just mentioning this detail, instead of intellectually ignoring it because everything is surely just for art, makes him likeably money-hungry.

Contempt for people who don’t drink

Strunk works like on an assembly line. His work is steeped in contempt for people who don’t drink. He drinks it ugly. Draws from proletariat and private program and you can see the effort it takes him to read in front of the Volksbühne audience, some of whom probably got their card from their pubescent relatives for Christmas. “Cool guy!” says an uncool guy in a button-down shirt behind me after the show.

Letting the author read stories to you about what one likes to call the “banalities of everyday life”, but which are exactly the opposite: dramas of everyday life, namely about loneliness, self-hatred, death, gives us the same feeling as throwing a 20 euro note into the collection for “Bread for the World” after the children’s service on Christmas Eve.

Good thing we’re doing quite well.

Heinz Strunk’s fan base devours every new book like episodes of The Simpsons. The stories may be different (sometimes they aren’t even that), but the core is always the same: the impossibility of living in this world. Heinz Strunk is our proof to the contrary. A Hagestolz that continues.

Like Jesus, he nails himself to the cross for us. We applaud and hope he is wrong. I wish you a happy new year.