In uncharted territory before our time: In the second half of the 2010s, the internet chaos still seemed sorted. The corona pandemic and it’s upheavals had not yet made the outside world and its protagonists impossible. Along with the photo crap on Instagram and the Chinese comrades’ backfiring weapon for the intellectual destruction of the West’s defenses, the dance missile Tiktok, which was launched in 2016, there were still a few upstanding people who salted the internet via Facebook with sometimes straight sentences.
One of them is Gerhild Pfister, a Viennese woman in her late 40s who didn’t get vrey far with her art this-that. On the other hand, the cancer metastases in her kidneys are advanced. Which doesn’t exactly lead the jobless full-time ironist and two-and-a-half-wave feminist with an integrated anti-Semitism detector to hold back in the comment battles: “When are you wax paper Nazis finaly going to wrap yourself up and roll towards the organic waste bin?” This is what the main character teases constantly in the novel “The Parcel Delivery Man” by Richard Schuberth,which is not named after her.
The postman,Haydar,a lackey for a Polish Amazon subcontractor,is only allowed to enter the action late and at Gerhild’s invitation for fellatio. The death row candidate, permanently intoxicated by LSD and mushrooms, is not far removed in real life from her distinctive, riot-addicted online presence. So whether Haydar is being kicked out by his shady boss for disrupting the company’s peace or whether the son of communists who have fled Iran (“He has really passed every test. He hardly shows any misogynistic tendencies, hates Islam and actually every religion, is refreshingly apolitical, pees while sitting down, and his anti-Semitism does not exceed the average level, actually it hovers well below it.”) before the polemicist flees is therefore unclear.
Gerhild also manages to escape from the largely anonymous and very non-committal chatterbox for a while, closes the facebook tab and writes a last-minute social report first about migrant Amazon servants in Vienna and then about local Islamism in order to sell the texts to all sorts of media, the products of which are still being felled by Freund Baum. Some things you want to have printed on paper – what woudl print media be without the obituary page?
Under the so-called social media, the muses are silent: Gerhild’s opponents are simulated in a double sense. Thier statements and replies are r