Elfriede Jelinek's play “Lärm.

Blind seeing.

The blind see!”.

In Frank Castorf's production, a live pig also enters the stage;

the review of the premiere in the Viennese daily newspaper "Der Standard" was published in September 2021 under the title: "Die Liebe zum Schwein";

another reviewer spoke of the "pig gallop into postmodernism".

A few months later, at the beginning of 2022, sensational news of the first successful pig heart transplant in Baltimore swept the world, even though the patient survived the operation for only two months.

Cem Özdemir has now presented a concept for a five-stage state label for animal welfare labeling on food.

According to the Federal Minister of Agriculture, the obligation should initially apply to pork.

The message is clear: pigs are "awesome" and "a little like us".

This is also the title of a “Story about the Pig” by the Norwegian historian and journalist Kristoffer Hatteland Endresen.

Between reportage and field report

But even the first chapter of the book contrasts with the eminent visibility of the pigs on the stage or in the operating room: in it the author tells of his difficulties entering a slaughterhouse.

Endresen recaps how much pork is eaten in Norway, supplemented by the statistics for Germany, and then asks, "How can an industry of this scale, based on live animals of this size, be completely invisible to us?"

Referring to John Berger's essay "Why Look at Animals?", he resolves to look pigs in the eye before beginning to write about them.

The narrative unfolds logically in the alternation between reportage and experience report.

Sometimes imagination and reality are closely intertwined, for example when Endresen associates the birth of a piglet with "Alice in Wonderland", albeit in the opposite direction: While Alice is holding a baby in her arms that suddenly turns into a piglet, it is a piglet that seems like a baby to the author and father-to-be.

But the literary reference is quickly limited as soon as a foreman remarks that pigs are industrial animals, not cuddly animals.

In the end, you are bound to get blunted

The frequent change of perspective is one of the book's preferred stylistic devices.

The author not only professes his sympathy for piglets, but also his fondness for pork: "Although I stuff myself with industrial pigs in some form almost every day, my worldview has long been shaped by views that speak against this way of life." Some chapters lead us into early history, dealing with Palaeolithic rock paintings, but also with domestication processes;

other chapters tell of the well-known pork taboos in the Middle East, of appetite and aversion, and of the breeding of new pig breeds.

In addition, Endresen describes his everyday life as a pig farmer, without concealing his own apathy: "The pigs have become objects, they are no longer individuals and certainly not sensitive creatures." The book ends with a depressing chapter on slaughter and an epilogue that the "zoonoses", the transmission of pathogens through our farm animals.

The story of the pigs, the author remarks, is always a story of the people.