“Between worlds”

A book by Julie Zeh and Simon Urban

by Tankred Schaer, Germany

(13 June 2023) (Edit.) More and more citizens are noticing that the major media as well as a considerable part of the political representatives are reporting or taking a stand on important questions of life in a more or less homogeneous way. In the question of war and peace, of Corona and health care, of education and child rearing, of gender and diversity – to name just a few current topics.

In Switzerland, too, many people no longer dare to say what they think if their thoughts deviate from “published opinion”. This is devastating for any democracy. Therefore, it is even more important to understand the mechanisms that lead to such dictates of opinion. Why does everyone in the public and in the media write and say almost the same thing?

The novel “Between the Worlds” (“Zwischen Welten”) describes how it is possible that only one opinion is represented and everything else is defamed. It reflects the rough and sometimes almost unbearable German “debate culture”, but more and more one understands how the “game" is working.

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To say it outright, this book should be read by anyone who is paying attention to how our political debate culture is increasingly disintegrating and who is horrified by how the mainstream media report on current events. In his Weltwoche Daily programme, journalist and publisher Roger Köppel laments the rampant moralism in the media. By this he means that journalists want to be on the right side of history, that ideology takes precedence over facts, and that journalists always know which way is the right way, whether it is current conflicts like the Ukraine war, gendering, or the climate crisis.

The book “Between Worlds” (“Zwischen Welten”) is written by the German authors Julie Zeh and Simon Urban in such a way that you don’t want to put it down from the first to the last page. However, it is not light fare – not because it is not easy and exciting to read, but because it challenges the reader to engage with the questions raised.

For example, our understanding of democracy. The protagonist Theresa Callies, an organic farmer in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, says: “That’s the understanding of democracy, isn’t it, the thing gets blown off if the majority is against it?” Have we already forgotten this lesson when we look at these simple connections differently today? That this question is answered differently by journalists and media professionals? These are questions about how our society should develop and the way we arrive at decisions that are supported by a majority of citizens. What role should the media play in this? What are the consequences of social media and political pressure groups?

What is the book about? 20 years after they had lost sight of each other, Theresa meets her former flat-sharing partner Stefan again by chance. Stefan is now head of the cultural editorial department of a major Hamburg weekly newspaper while Theresa has taken over her father’s cooperatively run farm in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and converted it to organic farming.

In the book, which consists of a dialogue in the form of emails and WhatsApp messages, we experience how difficult social dialogue has become in the meantime. Stefan has been “awakened”, so to speak, at the Paris climate conference. In everything he does, saving the world from rising temperatures becomes paramount to all other goals. Theresa must deal with bureaucratic obstacles, with the dry summer, with rising rental prices for agricultural land and with the fact that her economic existence is increasingly at risk, even though she is doing exactly what green politics demands today, practicing sustainable organic agriculture.

As the novel progresses, both protagonists come under increasing pressure. Theresa, because her financial leeway is exhausted. She wants to save the farm but finds herself caught between the arbitrariness of the authorities and nonsensical laws. Stefan gets into trouble because, despite his progressiveness, he still clings to certain journalistic principles, and he is pressured by climate activists to do propaganda journalism.

Is a catastrophe imminent? I don’t want to anticipate the end of the book. In any case, reading it left its mark on the reviewer. Perhaps one could say that one is literally jolted. Perhaps it is also because while reading the email communication of the two protagonists, we come to realise that there are many things we can no longer say openly in public. The taboo zones of political debate have become so big that we believe we can only engage in free debate on a limited scale. Now it is directly presented to us: someone dares to say and think in print what we are not supposed to say and think any more. This is liberating. But at the same time, the novel is also realistic. Reports are being distorted. The journalism of the old days seems to be passé.

For me, this great book is a successful and sharp-eyed analysis of a society in which everything is placed under the dictates of left-wing, “woke”, climate activism, in which free political debate is suppressed by powerful means.

(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)