A clever group of gentlemen is sitting there together on a Friday evening in 1892, when the modern age is really getting going and unleashing visions of the future.

One by one, the upheavals in life that just seem fantastic, but which may soon be quite commonplace, are discussed.

The vegetarian told the group that there would be food from the chemical laboratory, pellets and powder.

Realistic painting will "starve" thanks to photography, predicts the art connoisseur and also advocates "systematically discouraging" the arts in order to prevent mediocre mass production. Burning down a museum every now and then - that is the only way to protect true art. This iconoclast then predicts the color accords of abstract painting. Even cinema and television are already being considered in the group.

But the essay, published in 1894, becomes really astonishing when the book lover starts to paint the future of his favorite medium. The witty man has nothing in mind with the usual humanistic glorification of printing and reading. Printed stern eye and body on; Reading a newspaper in particular requires "a certain skill when turning the pages and overstrains our tension muscles when we have to keep the pages wide open". And then he prophesies that the Gutenberg galaxy will shortly collapse and give birth to the audio book universe. Who else wants to be a reader when there is soon a wide range of hearing machines? Thanks to new "receiving cylinders", the eyes, which are overused in modern everyday life, are finally relieved by the ears.On the sofa with “refreshed faces”, people enjoy the “amazing adventures that the cylinders bring to their ears”.

Uzanne dreamed of what is reality today

The advancing technology would quickly lead to the reduction of the hearing aids to pocket size, and people would be able to listen to them walking or exercising: "The happy listeners will have the indescribable pleasure of nourishing muscles and mind at the same time." For the needs of the people There will be literature supply points with hearing tubes on every street corner.

Octave Uzanne (1851 to 1931) skilfully designed the picture of a hearing society - decades before the first radio stations went on the air. Above all, however, he also thinks of the changes in form and content associated with the prophesied change in media when he thinks about his audiobook utopia. The writers are becoming storytellers again, the style will be simplified for the sake of audibility. “Word turner” would only find a “tiny audience”. The art of speaking, on the other hand, will develop to an astonishing extent. "Authors without a feel for the beautiful lecture and the necessary melodies will have to seek the help of commissioned speakers and actors."

Octave Uzanne was a dandy person with numerous contradictions: a bit reactionary and at the same time a fan of the latest media technology, misogynous with sympathy for women's emancipation, a man who was aroused by texts (more male) and textiles (more female). And a bibliophile who with relish imagined the “end of the book”. But it is not pure masochism, because the speaker of his essay also expresses himself contemptuously about the book as a mass culture: every year hundreds of thousands of new rinds, in which mostly only prejudices, errors, fantasies can be read! This waste of paper is over after the “end of books”; then only a few exquisite works would go to press.

Octave Uzanne was a publisher of limited editions of jewelry himself. May the masses hang on to their hearing tubes from now on. The book lover also makes fun of the luminaries of the upcoming listening culture: “Ladies will no longer say about a successful author: I love his way of writing. But sigh: Oh, this speaker has such a haunting voice. She enchants and touches. Its low notes are heavenly. He is an incomparable ear flatterer. "

Wonderful how finely the speaker Friedhelm Ptok reads this Suada with a purr.

You don't even hear his elastic vocal cords in his eighty-seven years;

With his warm tone he is also a flatterer who brings out the essay's esprit to best advantage.

The literary and media scholar Jochen Hörisch also has a pleasant voice, who comments on the essay on the second CD and goes back a long way, from Goethe's “Elective Affinities”, where the characters already articulate a boredom with traditional media, to Friedrich Kittler's theses according to which new media are converted war technology.

Small, but oho

But what is the attraction of such old utopias? The boldest predictions of yore, even if they were correct, have lost their drive today because they don't tell us anything new. So is there nothing left but astonishment at the author's vision? It is not that easy. The subtle retrofuturistic allure of this listening utopia lies in the mixture of clairvoyance and touch in the dark, of boldly thought-ahead and bizarre details that were never implemented. This creates a world in a distorting mirror; a strange mixture of the alienated and recognizable.

It goes with the fact that the book lover does not conduct serious future research, but only wants to amuse and provoke the audience a little with his impromptu speech. He also reaps a lot of astonished "Oho", which Friedhelm Ptok performed in various pitches with grave amusement. The following applies even more to this audio book audio book: small, but powerful.