How do we manage to stay alive?

Helene Hegemann has written a new collection of stories, "Schlachtensee" is the name of the book (and was largely written in this part of Berlin), which begins with life on a knife's edge.

With a moment when everything is at stake: A father tells his daughter that there is bad news.

Invincible cancer that spread to the lymphatic system.

And he quotes Snoopy from "Peanuts", who answers the sentence "One day we will all die": "Yes, but not every other day."

Julia Enke

Responsible editor for the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

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Two hours later, the daughter is washed unconscious on the beach on the Atlantic coast.

Her surfboard broke, the edges sliced ​​open her thigh, and she hit her head on the ocean floor.

And it's just a coincidence that the day the Father's message came is one of those "other days" when they, the Father and we didn't die.

This survival and staying alive is what Helene Hegemann is all about, not just in “Snoopy, the Sea and Me”, this first story in which the daughter, with her bruises on her body, shortly after that surfing world champion with the meets a veiled look that teaches her to hold her breath longer and to calculate which movement requires how much effort.

There are people, he tells her, who have drowned because they swam at the wrong time.

The only chance is relaxation and surrender, otherwise too much oxygen is wasted.

A life instruction that also “really pulls the plug” on the astonished father, to whom his daughter will show videos with big wave surfers, as he puts it.

Her characters rehearse rebellion against death

"Rebellious bodies" is what the characters have in common in their stories, says Helene Hegemann.

She sits in a morning in a restaurant in Berlin-Charlottenburg that is only open to her and quotes the Italian philosopher Franco "Bifo" Berardi and his work "The Uprising - About Poetry and Finance".

In it, Berardi writes that we must learn to read the signs of the financial world, to interpret them as one interprets poetry.

This interpretation then teaches us that empathy that is the first step towards a new solidarity.

"Basically, I needed a motto from him for my new book," says the author.

"He calls for a revolution against the language of information capitalism, through poetry, through purposeless spaces" and speaks of the eroticism of the uprising.

She liked that very much.

In their stories, the characters practice rebellion against death, against the destructive nature of love, and the power imbalance within a relationship.

At the same time, on another level, Helene Hegemann rebels against an overly schematic order of language in which all references are revealed.