C2.1 · 17 of 30
Lesson · 3 rules · about 3 min
Ein Feuilletonartikel von etwa 410 Wörtern über die Wiederentdeckung der Langsamkeit. Er hat eine klare Architektur: eine gehobene Eröffnung mit einem dreifachen sei es … sei es … sei es; zwei Fachleute, die uneins sind, beide im Konjunktiv I wiedergegeben, der Verbform der indirekten Rede (die Soziologin Karin Wendt: Die neue Langsamkeit sei daher weniger Nostalgie als Notwehr.; der Ökonom Thomas Berger: Langsamkeit, so Berger, lasse sich nur deshalb so gut verkaufen, weil sie knapp geworden sei.); dann das eigene Urteil des Autors im Indikativ (Beide haben recht, und gerade darin liegt das Interessante.), eine ironische Nebenbemerkung (gemächlich, versteht sich) und eine Warnung zum Schluss. Die Fragen wollen wissen, was jede Quelle behauptet, wie der Autor sie gewichtet und was das Ende bedeutet. Sortier also zuerst jeden Satz nach der Stimme: Konjunktiv = eine Quelle, Indikativ = der Autor.
Inmitten einer Gesellschaft, die Geschwindigkeit zum Maß aller Dinge erhoben hat, formiert sich leiser Widerstand. Man begegnet ihm an unerwarteten Orten, sei es in Kochkursen, in denen ein Brotteig drei Tage ruhen darf, sei es auf Bahnsteigen, wo Reisende bewusst den Nachtzug nach Rom nehmen statt des Flugzeugs, sei es in Buchhandlungen, deren Ratgeber zur Entschleunigung inzwischen ganze Regalwände füllen.
Continues on the next page
In the midst of a society that has elevated speed to the measure of all things, a quiet resistance is forming. You come across it in unexpected places, be it in cookery courses in which a bread dough is allowed to rest for three days, be it on station platforms where travellers deliberately take the night train to Rome instead of the plane, be it in bookshops whose guides to slowing down now fill entire walls of shelves. What twenty years ago was still regarded as the retreat of a few dropouts has today arrived in the mainstream of society. The sociologist of time Karin Wendt does not consider this a whim. More and more people, according to Wendt, have rediscovered the value of slowness. Many of the people she interviewed experience a slower everyday life not as a sacrifice but as regained autonomy. Acceleration has reached a limit beyond which it no longer brings any gain but only produces exhaustion. Whoever has to be reachable all the time loses the sense of when something is finished. The new slowness is therefore less nostalgia than self-defence. The economist Thomas Berger disagrees. He considers the movement a phenomenon of the affluent. Whoever can afford a night train to Rome generally also has the time for it; the care worker on shifts, by contrast, is hardly reached by the praise of leisure. Slowness, according to Berger, only sells so well because it has become scarce. Demand for slowing-down offers, he calculates, has multiplied over the past ten years, above all in high-income households. For someone who has two jobs, by contrast, leisure remains a foreign concept. Both are right, and that is precisely what is interesting. What at first seems like a nostalgic quirk could prove to be a necessary correction. For whoever constantly accelerates risks losing sight of the very goal for which the haste was pursued in the first place. At the same time it is impossible to overlook that slowing down has long since become a commodity itself. There are apps that remind you every minute to pause, and weekend seminars that charge a hefty price for three days of silence. The calm that people buy there is not infrequently planned with the same thoroughness as a business appointment. There is no need to see a contradiction in this. Even a movement that criticises time pressure does not escape the market that creates it. What matters is whether it opens up room to breathe or merely adds another workload to be got through efficiently. Whether the trend is more than a fashion of the affluent remains to be seen – at a leisurely pace, of course. But one thing can already be said today: whoever makes slowness a duty has already lost it.
Exercise
Lesen: Zeitungsartikel · C2.1
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