“If you don’t have confidence, you’ll always find a way not to win.” Carl Lewis

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“The universe likes speed. Don’t delay, don’t second-guess, don’t doubt.” Steven Seagal

Scratch with the chicken

When we dream, what do we remember?

Where does the anthropology that is in our blood lead us? Certainly, in hunger and pain, in trust and contempt, we leave the Bible and Babylon, the Flood and the beginning of sedentarism behind us. We return to hidden valleys that sheltered groups and encouraged isolation, and even go beyond them in the fleetingness of a thought, in a quick judgment, in an excellent reaction as a road user, in a seemingly unreasonable unease, a touch of disgust as well as in a sudden affection. Finally, we come to a crossroads where thirty thousand years ago people of robust nature left their mark for the last time. We may dream that this anxiety may have survived in fear and contempt as a phylogenetic legacy. For the longest time, we were not unchallenged among our peers. We came to our position in the course of a cultural acceleration that only began forty thousand years ago. What if an old rival rises from the boards of his defeat? If he would have been knocked out only for the blink of an eye.

Fly with the eagles or scratch with the chicken

Summer arrives as suddenly as a raid and as late as the German Federal Railway. I’ve just remembered that we haven’t even talked about the weather yet. Everything is getting spruced up once again, as if to encourage the realization that everything is only made for the moment. We turn each other around like people turn worn-out sets in times of austerity. That is Nana’s picture of the situation in the troubled garden of “Gernegroß“, a cabaret theater to which she feels connected. Because theater director Nasenschweiß is such an original mind, the Christmas party is in June. Nasenschweiß turns sausages. The grill is a relic from the Wild West era after 1989. Some people know about that, others don’t care. Most of the employees are blonde. That’s how it turned out in many job interviews. Nasenschweiß conducts the job interviews.

Nana is blonde too. Blonde and brown-eyed. The side parting is Sophie Scholz chic. Nana is enjoying her fourth day of dating Cornelius, who turns up in a suit to leave no doubt that he is a representative of the establishment and is aiming for a professorship in order to combine his family’s money with a noble spirit.

An artist is talking about pole acrobatics. Nana pulls Cornelius out of the turmoil. Disguising their intentions with a few pointless swerves, the two carefully. There is the television, next to a tower of empty boxes. On the table lies a gnawed bee sting on its bag. A joint is rotting in an antique ashtray. One could inspect a collection of bottle caps in patinated tankards.

A guy who everyone calls Texas enters the scene unsuspectingly. He immediately understands the situation, but also doesn’t care at all. Texas always knows who sang a song first and which version sounds right. He is annoyed that the whole world is listening to Johnny Cash at the moment. He talks about Junior Brown’s homemade guitar. He delights in the sound of pedal steel. His grandfather was a basket weaver, his father a policeman in a small town in the Taunus Mountains that became the outskirts of an American garrison after the Second World War. On village streets, Texas learned the world language of the victors. He imitated soldiers and thus accidentally adopted a foreign lifestyle. Farmers’ sons from Tennessee let him play with their weapons. They taught him this laid-back manner, which he has used like a shield to defend himself since he moved to East Germany. He still believes he is flying with the eagles.

Texas uses all his redneck sayings and wants to exchange email addresses with Cornelius. Nana saves Cornelius from Texas. She puts her arm in his.

She says: “You’re mine, I’ll never let you go.”

“Then you’ll have to accept sex the usual way.”

“I thought you’d be as bored as I’m. You underestimate yourself. The play in the club room was so good, and now we’re just as charged together as before.”

The philologist Nana von Eisenstein has erotic adventures in a small university town in northern Hesse. With an interest in identification, she analyses the life and work of the writer Wanda aka Aurora von Sacher-Masoch.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch breaks the bourgeois framework. But even he meets his match. No admirer before him - who turns up in anonymous writing - has ever been as labyrinthine and enigmatic as ‘Anatol’ approaches the matter. Leopold, affected to the tips of his fingers from the first letter he received, goes out of his way to meet Anatol in person. But Anatol shies away from direct contact. He invites the Sacher-Masoch couple to all sorts of places so that they can shine in his absence. Now and then a handicapped person stands in for him - in costume-like, absurdly expensive arrangements.

Aurora-Wanda von Sacher-Masoch still speaks about the unfortunate man in the coarse language of the 19th century. I leave it to your noblesse not to imagine anything at this point. I would just like to point out that Aurora finally lets her guard down and stops pretending that she is only crossing the boundaries of propriety under duress. Anatol is adept at narcotic babble. It catches Aurora so much that her mask falls off.

We see the wildly curious, sometimes delighted, sometimes disappointed wife, always diligently following the trail of a free spirit who is always used as a scapegoat.Anatol finally withdraws unrecognized. But he sets a final mark that allows him to be unmasked. In his farewell letter he reveals his congeniality. He could become sultry in Leopold’s place at any time. In one fantasy he presents himself in a “red ermine fur coat ... and white satin trousers”. The addressee lies at his feet and marvels at the big catch.

“I will undoubtedly fall in love with Wanda and she with me... a wonderful life - but I must not forget to break my father’s immaculate seal and tear up my family tree.”

This is how the Wittelsbach Bavarian King Ludwig II lays a trail into the Sacher-Masochs’ house. The couple manages to identify Ludwig’s whispering agent. It is Prince William of Orange-Nassau. Aurora makes a careless mistake here. She describes William’s brother Alexander as the deputy who gave her the saddest scenes in the most illustrious settings. Her Prince d’Orange exhausted himself in the Parisian afterlife until his premature death. Together with his lover, the actress Henriette Hauser, he posed for Édouard Manet. Henriette embodied Manet’s immortal ‘Nana’. She paraded her as “Citron”. Henriette christened her lover “Prince de Citron”.