It was Martin Walser who, in a novel of the same name, brought to mind the phenomenon known from botany as the flower of fear and applied it to the human being;

it belongs there too.

What one, with the gesture of know-it-all disgust, tries to keep out of the realm of what can be expressed artistically as “elderly eroticism” is a sometimes touching, sometimes ridiculous, in any case a serious expression of (felt) declining vitality, in the case of plants threatened with thirst in the shape of flowers or leaves;

in humans, actually only in men, as a once again dramatically intensified longing for union, at times accompanied by a tendency to smut or to assault, preferably with a younger woman.

You can make fun of it, be disgusted by it, simply reject it - it's not fun for that reason alone,

because biology is involved, which seems doubly merciless in its absolute inevitability: as an aging process and as a never-ending desire, more generally as a hunger for experience.

For those who can, sublimation in the form of an old work is not the worst way out.

Edo Reents

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Marius Müller-Westernhagen could well have called his new, 23rd studio record, with Martin Walser's kind permission, "Fear Blossom".

The fear of not having experienced enough and that not much is to come is something to be grasped at.

"One life" (Sony Music Germany) is just as true: "Roller coaster thoughts torture my head.

Hospital figures on life-prolonging drips.

I want to travel, travel!, time flies like sand.

Sleep with all beautiful women in Cockaigne.

And I want a crown made of gold or even braided from rose thorns, that would be wonderful.

Life is life and not paradise.” Nobody ever claimed otherwise.

The only question is whether one cannot have this insight earlier.

It would be easy money to poke fun at something like that - "that hurts the old man!" one might say with the hit that hit all the radios in 1989 and that of the very obsessed man who was no longer young is about a certain "Sexy" holding him by the outstretched arm.

.

.

well, you know.

You could also use other, much more powerful main songs like "I want out of here", which is of course about Corona, or "Zeitgeist", a routinely backed video attack on the false role model of the rich, powerful and beautiful, from the Kardashians to Gerhard Schröder and even Putin, as the opportunism that is part of the business if you still want to earn something;

Embarrassments like "The strength in my loins melted in my hands",

for which any dirty-old-man writer would be too fine, included.

Because lyrically, since the end of the really snotty proletarian phase marked by the record "Geiler is' schon" (1983), it has been a Westernhagen problem that the will to create meaning is often compromised by a susceptibility to the absurd, yes, even to the senseless.

The tautologies (now "Life is life", "It only ever goes as far as it goes") are the lesser evil.

One hears again that he is still best in the mode of impertinence.

senseless gets in the way.

The tautologies (now "Life is life", "It only ever goes as far as it goes") are the lesser evil.

One hears again that he is still best in the mode of impertinence.

senseless gets in the way.

The tautologies (now "Life is life", "It only ever goes as far as it goes") are the lesser evil.

One hears again that he is still best in the mode of impertinence.