Janosch Schobin Zeiten der Einsamkeit. Erkundungen eines universellen Gefühls
[In Times of Loneliness. Explorations of a universal feeling]

Imagine an older man, let’s call him Egon, living in a big city in Germany until one gray October day they find him dead in his apartment. Cause of death: pneumonia; time of death: probably a few weeks earlier. We can only speculate as to what happened near the end. Was Egon so weakened that he no longer made it to the phone or no one heard him cry for help? It was only the mail piling up in the mailbox that tipped off his neighbors. Egon was buried in a row of nameless urns, and the pastor, who said a few kind words, spoke to an audience of zero. The authorities spent weeks trying to track down Egon’s son from a previous marriage who eventually lost a lawsuit to not pay the costs of the burial. In Janosch Schobin’s “Times of Loneliness: Explorations of a Universal Feeling” Egon is not a real person but a composite of many cases registered by the German authorities. He is also the prototype of an urban scenario described by sociologist Norbert Elias in 1982. In his work The Loneliness of the Dying, Elias analyzed how with the marginalization of religion the old rites of passage were gradually being abandoned and how a growing revulsion towards death meant that the dying were being left to their own devices. But what exactly is this loneliness that has evidently become a defining feature of late modern societies?

Schobin, a sociologist himself, who teaches at the University of Kassel, explores this question using seven other case studies of individuals living in Germany, but also in Chile and the United States, people he personally got to know in lengthy conversations. Among them are Pete, whom Schobin met at six in the morning (“when the city is still sleeping and belongs to the insomniacs”) on a park bench in New York City, or Marta, who runs a small butcher shop in Santiago de Chile. There is also Gisela, somewhere in Lower Saxony, who woke up one night and noticed that her son lying next to her was no longer breathing. While this may not be a representative group, united only by their loneliness, we, his readers, are lucky that Schobin found a language to communicate these individual fates without the statistics-laced jargon of his discipline. Schobin is a skilled storyteller, who paints an empathetic and multifaceted picture of this frankly rather bleak topic.

Schobin considers it historically notable that dropping out of society was not always perceived as bad or was at least viewed with ambivalence. His chronicle of loneliness, versed as it is in intellectual history, traces a line from Francis Bacon, Montaigne and Shakespeare to the nineteenth century of Oscar Wilde and the twentieth of Samuel Beckett and Heinrich Böll. The author shows that suffering from loneliness is perhaps just the little sister of the pleasure of solitude, which was long seen as something sacred if not the ideal state for creative minds accomplishing genuinely brilliant artistic or philosophical feats. I think we can safely assume that Egon, being too weak to call the emergency hotline, was hardly paying homage to the genius cult and its ascetic hermits. This, at least, is the conclusion we come to after reading Janosch Schobin’s essayistic but fundamental analysis of a feeling that will likely continue to dominate our society in the foreseeable future.