He was an intellectual who easily got into contrast with those around him.

In almost every situation he cultivated malaise.

As a student of literary history, he was uncomfortable with the Heidelberg professor's bliss with Goethe.

They had a quote ready for everything, and if it wasn't from Goethe, then another cozy one, from Gadamer, for example.

Nothing surprising, everything has already been said.

That was around 1960.

According to his memories, Karl Heinz Bohrer was already cultivating the existence of a bohemian at that time, followed the existentialist philosophers and pursued the study of early romantic aesthetics, which remained decisive for him.

Jürgen Kaube

Editor.

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With this hunger for the unexpected, it seemed logical to become a journalist. This was followed by a short time as an editor at the daily newspaper Die Welt, but in retrospect he did not like anything about it, least of all the stale and therefore playful conservatism. Later, from 1968 to 1974 as literary critic and literary director of this newspaper, the malaise doubled. Bohrer did not want to be bourgeois, least of all in the sense of Thomas Mann's self-contained and at times pompously reflected bourgeoisie. Rather, what was exemplary for him was what did not even exist in Germany: Surrealism in all of its predecessors and varieties. His sympathies with the 1968 revolt still led to any anti-bourgeois political associations.

Once he called himself “anti-social”, with capital and work he could not do anything.

The almost ritual indignation of critical theorists about “the circumstances” bored him just as much as literature that was just a “draped story of ideas” without sudden attacks on the reader.

In 1968 he especially enjoyed the out-of-the-ordinary and the being mixed up in society as such.

The sentence that demanded that the imagination come to power could have come from him.

So his Marxism was not that of Karl, but that of Groucho: "Whatever it is, I'm against it."

Desire for doom

Fifteen years later, in the meantime, Bohrer had not only become a professor of literature but also the editor of the magazine Merkur, about the establishment of the supposedly left-wing mentality in the eighties. The dungarees and the fairy lights, the demand for a "culture of debate" and at the same time for more community were just as repugnant to him as the provincialities in Helmut Kohl's country. Bohrer called for more frivolity and at the same time more sense of role play and style. He didn't like row houses. Unwellness also in Germany, which was neither France nor England, whereby Bohrer sometimes seemed quite ready to confuse these countries with Paris and London, where he lived.

Finally malaise in the university. She accepted him after the FAZ editor at the time, Joachim Fest, who was responsible for the feature pages of the FAZ, had replaced him with Marcel Reich-Ranicki in 1974 and sent him to London for a few years in luxurious correspondent exile. There Bohrer wrote the most beautiful essays of his essays about the theater state England, its monarchy and parliament, its class society and its football. They are gathered together in the volume “A bit of pleasure in downfall” from 1978. And he finished his habilitation, a tome about his life's theme: “Aesthetics of Terror”, which could just as easily have been called “A lot of pleasure in downfall” .