Description

I'd rather die than not kiss. The title reflects both the topic and the design of the Corona diary. News experiences, conversations about life and death, about coping strategies and the fear of death, about supposed knowledge, rebellion and helplessness in the face of the regulations and the increasing number of deaths worldwide.

In a world increasingly out of joint, with the shifting of borders - the virus knows no borders - the records, dating daily, are also an attempt to counter the deadly numbers and an opponent you can't see. Structuring time, with a self-determined rhythm of daily routines, even if it may seem pointless...

The most general becomes visible in the most individual

It all started with the Leipzig Book Fair this spring, will it be canceled or not? Contradictory reports gave me no peace, I looked for information and clues on the internet and in the media. Something was in the air that couldn't be grasped, couldn't be understood, couldn't be seen: the virus.

Memories of my childhood during World War II rose to a feeling that something was imminent to protect against, that was coming, that was always there but couldn't be seen: the war.

What was happening around me? What changed every day? what happened to me For my orientation and as a daily reference point, I began to keep a journal. I started a new sheet every morning, collected throughout the day, sometimes finishing the page around midnight.

I was out and about on my bike every day, mainly shopping outdoors at the weekly markets, collecting what I saw and heard, fragments of words, conversations, moods, observations, accompanied by an almost unreal bright spring sky. I phoned friends and siblings, researched on the Internet, followed the daily press, listened to the radio, spoken news and comments were closer to me, the images in my head were more comprehensible than the illustrations on television.

Literary texts came back to me that tell of an attitude to life in the border areas between a visible now and an incomprehensible future that has already begun. About Doris Lessing's novel memoirs of a survivor, in which the first-person narrator observes from her quiet apartment how life in the city gradually collapses, the food supply, the transport system, the communication systems.

I originally wrote the diary just for myself; I sent the finished page to a friend who wrote every day. I was afraid I would bore him or even bother him. But the fact that he waited for the diary page every day confirmed what Theodor Adorno said: The most general becomes visible in the most individual.

Reviews and press:

Weser courier:

Your [Inge Bucks] notes are (...) an important testimony that lets the initial phase of the pandemic pass by in the reader's mind as if in a time lapse. more

colorful and inside:

here it goes to the video contribution of buten and inside.

KULTUR.NETZ – magazine of the verdi. (Culture magazine of the VS Lower Saxony/ Bremen) 2020 Issue 3:

"The general becomes visible in the most individual things,” Adorno tells us. He would have appreciated, if possible used, Inge Buck's personally made armor against an invisible enemy. more