Sex is like sneezing ...
WOMAN: Mrs. Berg, why is it raining all the time in your new novel?
SIBYLBER BERG: I feel like it's raining more than before, and the weather blends into a Blade Runner perpetual vision.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Going in or umbrella?
BERG: So I think it's always better inside, anyway, if I have the choice.
Sibylle Berg and Milena Moser met in the hotel "Claridge" in Zurich
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: The other day you wrote on Twitter: "A woman who is in bed all day and is not interested in anything other than TV shows is looking for friends who do not bother and do not want anything."
BERG: I just can not stand people so well.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: What's so bad about humans?
BERG: Nothing at all.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: But?
BERG: Nothing but. I just like to be alone.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Mrs. Moser, please help me.
MILENA MOSER: I think that's very nice. TV series, bed and me - alone. This is my samadhi, the highest level of yoga. For me, being alone is the great unfulfilled yearning. All my little escapes are about being alone. Whenever I have a reading, I often hang on for one more night pretending I can not go back by train. That sounds like a secret affair, but I just like to be alone, alone in the hotel room.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: And then?
MOSER: Then nothing. Then I turn on the TV or not even. I sleep with my feet up on the wall - like Pippi Longstocking. The mobile phone has to be plugged in from time to time to make it work again. You have to leave me alone now and then.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Do not you feel lonely?
MOSER: I never feel loneliness when I'm alone. Only among people. For example, in a relationship when it is going badly. Especially among women this is sometimes taken note of with surprise: What, you want to be alone?
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Ms. Berg, in her new book, "The Man Sleeps," tells a love story that works without much passion. The highest of feelings are words like touching or cute. Is this the positive suspect?
BERG: Not at all. Cute for me is simply the highest level of development of a human. That includes for me: One would like to stroke the car, it is touching and not stuck. He speaks in original tones. I did not want to hide love behind platitudes or behind any excesses.
MOSER: Relationship is not always intoxication and always kisses and always standing up. But maybe: go to the supermarket together and stop in front of the shelves. In "The man sleeps" comes this man, who is really nothing special. And the woman falls asleep immediately when she sees him for the first time. Falling asleep on the shoulder of a stranger - there is no more confidence.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Later it is said, "He had become the one closest to me, who had become accustomed to me." That sounds unspectacular, almost sobering.
BERG: The love in the book is a great feeling in the ramification and not in the volume. There is no passion for it.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: What's wrong with passion?
BERG: Nothing at all. It's just not good for a long time. I do not know a couple that has been together for 30 years and is biting things off the body. The book tries to separate sexual and intimate love.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Why is it so rare?
BERG: Much is sure to come from advertising. Since a false image of love is sold to us. If you are slim, beautiful, intelligent, well made, sucked - then you will be loved. But that is completely wrong. It's not about love, it's about desire - and selling. Sex is much more striking, faster.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Are you also at risk, Ms. Moser?
MOSER: I thought I was immune to advertising and the pressure of society. I am an artist. But there are other pictures just as dangerous. I was influenced by a scene that often occurs in French film. A young woman is leaning against the wall, crying, desperate. The big drama. Most of the time she wears an undershirt called simply Marcel ...
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: ... after the man's premiere?
MOSER: Yes, and the young woman slips down the wall in Marcel and has her hair in front of her face. In addition the many tears. And yet she is beautiful. I thought: That's love. Drama, pain, tears. The guts must come out, the heart must be on the ground, and someone has to step on it again. If it's just always calm and beautiful, it's not right. Then it's not true.
BERG: I believe that many women stand in the way of their own expectations. Just smart women. If they follow the biology that whispers to them, you need a man who is even more successful. He has to look good, he has to be intellectual and must and must. I've heard women say: I can only love a man wearing Budapest shoes.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Is not great love destiny?
BERG: Absolutely not. For many people, love is the only unknown quantity that can overtake one another. You have your life, you are alone, you have a mediocre career. So you're hoping for the lottery or the love that changes everything again. And that usually does not come.
MOSER: Because you're waiting for Budapester.
BERG: Forget the Budapest. Forget the lottery. Maybe just the habit is very nice. Maybe you learn to love this person. Maybe that's the big love, and she comes in flip flops.
MOSER: As in "The Man Sleeps," it's the fat guy. That's something I like a lot: the ode to the fat man. A man with a stomach is hard to describe without making a fool of him. My mother says I said at four that I'm going to marry a nice fat man.
BERG: Did you succeed?
MOSER: To my shame, I must confess that he was not fat when I married him.
BERG: You stole it.
MOSER: I can not cook, so it can not be me.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: What's so great about the fat man?
MOSER: A fat man gives me an elemental sense of security, trust. And I do not mean flabby. I mean a real belly, shape. The stomach has something strong. It is the feeling that something really substantial is there. Not a windy creature.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Steadfast, down to earth ...
MOSER: and above all, a connoisseur. A man with a stomach is someone who likes to eat, who likes to drink and who is not so busy with himself, with his figure, his health.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Can you imagine having a much younger partner?
BERG: If he's nice. When he is clean. Why not? It was 100 years standard for men to have younger women. , ,
MOSER: ... which is biologically completely idiotic.
BERG: Exactly. Younger men can better carry the shopping bags upstairs. But it's probably about sex. And later, say in 20 years. , , But what do we know, what is in 20 years. Sex is something like sneezing. That's what you do. But I find it insignificant and overrated.
MOSER: I have maternal feelings towards younger men. Recently, I had a 60-year-old visiting me. My 21-year-old son picked her up at the train station. And then this styleless woman said later, "I would not bump your son from the edge of the bed either." I was terrified.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: If you had a 21-year-old daughter ...
MOSER: ... no 60-year-old would have dared to come up with the bed edge set.
BERG: Oh, yes. They still say that.
MOSER: The mother's face?
BERG: Recently, all politicians were 30 years younger women in the newspaper. I think that's ridiculous. I do not want to be ruled by such men, because I think you can not control your sexuality.
MOSER: The stylish woman does not come into my house anymore.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: What are women looking for in young men?
BERG: If it's not about sex, then what older men are probably looking for in younger women: 25-year-olds may have something less solid, Rigides. They do not have that banker uniform yet, they are not that much on the career trip yet. Maybe you have more fun with them, can be silly?
MOSER: I have a friend who is 71 and does not look a day younger. And she has registered on a website for over 50-year-old, with unretouched photo, real age, has made it clear from the beginning: With me there is nothing to pick, I have no money, would like to have a steady relationship, but go out a bit and Sex now and then. It got offers from men between 25 and 48, that was the oldest.
BERG: And what did they want?
MOSER: She met with a few. She is relatively direct, immediately asked: Are you perverted? And one explained: No, but, you know, you do not ask me for anything. Young women stress, who want presents and going out and relationship.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: How do you deal with aging?
BERG: I do not care that much. But I would say the older the better.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: What's better? What is coming?
MOUNTAIN: relaxation. You no longer think that the world is all about you. Because you just do not care about the world. If you do not work in conventions, then there's nothing you can not do because you're older. I have very good friends who are 20 years older and whom I see are just as silly.
WOMAN: Mrs. Berg, you had a bad car accident years ago. Was that an incision for you, according to which you now evaluate externals differently?
BERG: I was 29 and still young for our company. I could not really let go yet. That's all nicely patched up, 16 operations later. But before that it looked so bad that kids who saw me on the street began to howl. One eye was here, the other there, all the forehead gone, nose gone. At that time I was not ready to say: Phew, I do not care. That was very difficult.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Are you vain?
BERG: Strangely enough, after that I became more vain when I was in front of the accident. The ladies I like abound in France and Israel. Beautiful old ladies who paint and dye their hair. And not to the elevation, but simply for yourself. I just hope that I will always have enough money for a well-groomed appearance.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Does not money endanger your character?
BERG: I think that money is relaxing. I have seen the most terrible feelings of hatred among one another in the poorest countries, they have half killed themselves there. Money makes good feelings. The theater director René Pollesch says: "The best moments of my life are bought."
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: I do not think so.
BERG: Sounds provocative, but it's true. I had really nice moments in beautiful hotels, not in pitiful bunk beds where bugs crawled over me. And it was not great to sleep on a park bench. I have no good memories of it.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Can you buy love?
BERG: To a certain degree already. Or let's say money makes it easier, too. When people have financial problems, they begin to argue. Like animals in the cage. It does not help to have no money. This is especially true for the age. Getting old, really old, with physical deficits and so, that's only with money.
MOSER: I have a good role model in my mother. With her, I never had the feeling that you are finished at some point, that the possibilities become less and nothing happens. I've always looked ahead: When I'm only 15, I understand the world, then I have life under control. And then it will be more and more years. 40, 45 I think is not bad. I feel like more and more freedom is coming.
BERG: All these expectations are gone: I have to arrive well, I have to look great, otherwise I will not get any admiration. You do not have to be constantly available.
MOSER: Recently I talked to an elderly woman, moaning a bit: children, parents - two generations tugging at each other. How old I was, she asked. "46 - Strenuous Phase - 60 is really a good age." She also aired that. I looked at them and thought: Yes, you can look forward to it.
The authors
Sibylle Berg, 47, raised in the GDR, emigrated to West Germany at the age of 18. She worked as a gardener and truck driver, among other things, before she left the trail of emotional devastation in 1997 with her first novel "A few people seek happiness and laugh at death". She is considered a provocative, complicated author with a very unique style of speech. Her current novel "The man sleeps" (310 p., 19.90 euros, Hanser) tells of a woman in "middle years", the full-time writing instructions, occasionally takes younger lovers and regularly fails to become part of a couple , Then she meets the person she just calls the man. And knows how rare it is "that two recognize themselves with the same tiredness and the desire not to die alone". On a Chinese island, where the two are looking for change on vacation, where luck was already found this time, the man is lost. Just like that, despite his massive and sluggish body. Only Sibylle Berg can tell a love story like this, with misanthropic images of a bad world in which one has to cling to his life. And in which there is hope for hold, when her heroine on the arriving ferry says, "to see a giant, whose hair glowed red in the last light of the sun". The author lives in Zurich with her boyfriend.
Milena Moser, 46, a trained bookseller, yoga fan and Swiss Bestselling Author ("mare's bite"), lived in San Francisco for eight years and returned to Switzerland in 2006. Her novels are sometimes more murder stories, sometimes city guides, sometimes yoga book - pointed, self-deprecating, with a lot of traction and a few paragraphs later surreal coated. Hero of her new novel "Wannabe" (464 p., 21.50 Euro, Nagel & Kimche), which will be released on February 8, is the successful writer Mimosa Mein. Her novels have earned her the reputation of leading the life of an eccentric and sophisticated vamp. She is soon put on the jury of a casting show: "Switzerland is looking for the SchreibStar". Ten candidates compete for the title, including a woman who reminds Mimosa strangely of a man who disappeared without a trace many years ago.Milena Moser lives with her second husband and the younger of her two sons "completely unglamorous" in the countryside near Zurich.
