Abstract
Three recent German novels, Juli Zeh’s Corpus Delicti, 2009, Zoë Beck’s thriller Paradise City, 2020,and Martin Schäuble’s youth novel Cleanland, 2020, present dystopian views of a future society based on a health system which, on the surface, is extremely successful but on closer observation represents the collapse of humanity. These novels represent a thoroughgoing critique of biopolitics as defined by Michel Foucault and radicalised by Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe. This article investigates their criticism of biopolitics in the light of the transformation of society due to COVID-19 measures, focusing on the situation in Germany, albeit largely applicable also to other european countries. To shed light on the changes in our conception of citizenship, it first presents an analysis of the shift in meaning of the concept of ‘solidarity’ as an example of discursive change and reflects on the role of literature for societal development. Against that backdrop, the article examines the conflict of interests that sees health and security pitted against freedom as presented in the novels and explores further key aspects: the media, manipulation and fear, the counterworlds both inside and outside the shiny world of these affluent societies, and the constructed opposition between humanity and health system. These considerations will lead in the conclusion to a discussion of biopolitics in the context of the COVID-19 crisis with regard to digital culture and citizenship.
Introduction
In the summer of 2023, as I finalise this article, COVID-19 seems to be a thing of the past. In that respect, life seems almost business as usual again. It is now the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the climate catastrophe that occupies the media and people’s minds. Many aspects of what happened only a short time ago when COVID-19 was presented by some as the greatest threat since the Second World War – among them the then German Chancellor Angela Merkel in a public address to the nation on 18 March 2020 – seem unreal and almost forgotten. However, in spite of a seeming ‘return to normal’ the resulting societal changes have not been reversed.
By analysing a discursive shift and three German fictional representations in relation to the virus crisis, this article sheds light on the changing attitude towards society, biopolitics and the relation between the state and the citizen in Germany. National specificities aside, many of the aspects discussed are broadly similar to developments at least in the European Union if not most of the countries of the western world.
The fear of infection was so widespread that in these regions the majority of people consented to giving up basic civil rights, a situation that was supposed to last only a few weeks but was extended in many countries in varying degrees to over 2 years. People who insisted on their fundamental civil right of physical self-determination and refused an insufficiently tested ‘vaccination’ 1 were prohibited from large areas of life, including travelling or going to restaurants, cultural events and entertainment venues. It was argued that this ‘vaccination’ offers partial protection, particularly against a serious course of illness, but the long-term effects of the ‘vaccination’ are not yet known and the protection is a matter of degree.
This article cannot discuss in depth the measures put in place in Germany, but it is necessary for the argument concerning the novels to establish connections between the juridic and political frameworks, the health situation, and the strategies employed to deal with the latter. According to the German constitution, protective measures have to be proportionate and commensurate. 2 In 2020, only about four percent of the intensive care beds available in German hospitals were used for COVID-19 patients. 3 By mid-October 2021, after more than eighteen months of the declared pandemic, about 94,000 people in Germany had died ‘with or of COVID-19’ 4 – which was mostly interpreted as ‘of COVID-19’ even though some specialists estimated that it was rather 20% of them who actually died of the virus. 5 Given the population of over 80 million and an average mortality age of above 80 years, even the total figure represents under 7% of all those who died during that period. Given also that the average age of those who died with a positive COVID-19 test corresponds to normal life expectancy, one cannot but wonder how much the virus was responsible for a premature death for most of them. 6 Without downplaying the tragedy of many dying of COVID-19, it is notable that there is never any mention of the remaining 93% of deaths. This gulf between the events and their perception, between fear and facts, is important to mention when trying to understand the related societal changes.
Against the backdrop of these numbers, a shift from a focus on civil rights towards a further developed surveillance state took place. The shift was incremental yet the development was not new; as early as 1992, Gilles Deleuze had observed a shift from Foucault’s disciplinary society to a ‘society of control’ (Deleuze, 1992). The new digital technologies have allowed institutions to be decentralised and citizens constantly to control themselves by measuring their life data instead of being subjected to direct institutional control. These mechanisms are clearly depicted in the three novels discussed. However, COVID-19 clearly caused a change in the general attitude towards biopolitics as defined in the introduction to this special issue, and it can be observed that large parts of the population are inclined to give up their rights for a more paternalising if not authoritarian state when feeling threatened. With regard to the novels in question, there is documented evidence of an interaction with biopolitical ideas. In the case of Juli Zeh, we know that she was conversant with Foucault’s and Agamben’s ideas while writing The METHOD; biopolitics was a concept that informed her work on the novel (Zeh, 2020: 91). A book by Agamben figures on the shelf of the protagonist Mia, a present from her brother, although Mia claims not to have read it (Zeh, 2009: 128).
Jürgen Habermas pointed in 1986 to the necessity of engaged, suspicious citizens for democracy and the rule of law; 35 years later such an understanding of citizenship was decried as right-wing propaganda, a conspiracy theory and behaviour that is lacking solidarity, by the media that promoted fear to create consensus, in alliance with politicians and scientists. 7 The media thus managed to strengthen its position while at the same time losing much of the trust of society, thereby undermining vital elements of a democracy. 8 Danielle Celermajer and Dalia Nassar (2020) have demonstrated that those Germans who protested against their government’s emergency policies are contrary to their presented media image legitimately concerned with maintaining a republican form of citizenship built on democratic principles and institutions, which are being hollowed out by government action. It is noteworthy that the then vice president of the German parliament, Wolfgang Kubicki, published in summer 2021 a book-length work decrying the repression of freedom and the undermining of the state of law through German COVID-19 political strategies (Kubicki, 2021).
Managing the care of those sick with the virus and protect the particularly vulnerable in the population is of course essential. Prioritising healthcare over an open society against the backdrop of the above officially provided statistics, however, is dangerous and against the fundamental and collectively agreed political foundation of the German state as an ‘open society’ after National Socialism (cf. Popper, 1945). The development away from such an open society represents a new relationship between the state and the individual and thus a new understanding of citizenship. This article will first exemplify the shift in question through the notion of solidarity before turning to three novels that fictionally play through the societal consequences of this new attitude.
‘Solidarity’ as an example of the discursive shift concerning citizenship
Developments in the concept of solidarity provide a useful example of how during the COVID-19 crisis societal attitudes shifted and systems were restructured. Hannah Broecker (2023) analyses the new political constellations resulting from the concept of solidarity being instrumentalised during the COVID-19 crisis in Germany, structuring the political landscape into a hegemonic and an antihegemonic discourse. The term ‘solidarity’ goes back to Roman civil law and implies the idea of a group of people pursuing common interests and fostering their cohesion (cf. for the term Krunke et al., 2020). It became a key term in the context of Marxism and working class struggles against capitalist exploitation. This leads to an inclusive dimension of the term but, as Broecker points out (Krunke et al., 2020: 159), every concept is by definition at the same time exclusive, delimitating the concept against others, so that ‘solidarity’ contains a potential contradiction. With Neoliberalism, the key position of solidarity in public political discourse waned. During COVID-19, the term was reactivated, first with reference to hospital care staff in the form of organised applause in the evening. A first shift took place when ‘social distancing’ and mask-wearing were associated with solidarity: solidarity referred now to isolation instead of to proximity and cohesion. This was extended to acceptance of the ‘vaccination’. ‘Solidarity’ now served to question the concept of individualisation of risks and responsibility, and ‘obtained the function to define and represent the discursive logic of the hegemonic discourse’ (Broecker, 2023: 163). This was then increasingly leveraged to exclude those who did not follow this hegemonic discourse: a divide opened up. Particularly the vaccination was constructed as a symbol of solidarity and its refusal as a threat to collective health. Ulrich Montgomery, the German president of the World Medical Association, coined the term ‘tyranny of the non-vaccinated’ (cf. Broecker, 2023: 164), inversing the logic and presenting those who refused to be coerced as perpetrators. From this perspective, it became possible to suspend constitutional rights such as the right to the freedom of movement (art.1), the freedom of assembly (art.8) or the right of physical integrity (art.2) and to brand critical voices against the hegemonic discourse as false and dangerous and consequently to exclude them from public media and platforms, thus also curtailing the right to the freedom of expression (art. 11; cf. Broecker, 2023: 164–165).
The counterhegemonic discourse focused on ‘solidarity’ as well; there were two approaches. The first opposes the implied reduction of the right to freedom of various kinds in the notion of solidarity on the hegemonic side. The second points to inconsistencies in the new solidarity discourse, insisting on classical leftist economic and societal perspectives and demonstrating that the hegemonic practices are far from being in solidarity with others. This position stresses that the measures drastically deepen existing differences, for example, the gap in wealth – also worldwide, since due to the measures hundreds of millions died of hunger, illness and poverty in the global South (cf. Broecker, 2023: 166–169). This point is also stressed by Kaltwasser (2023: 148–149).
Kaltwasser focuses on the antidemocratic use of language in the COVID-19 discourse in Germany with reference to Karl Popper’s open society (1945). Kaltwasser’s analysis notes ‘a radical departure from democratic principles, a progressive narrowing of the discursive space and a brutalisation of the discursive culture’ (Kaltwasser, 2023: 143). The German Ministry of the Interior did indeed develop in March 2020 a public communication strategy that explicitly wanted to ‘shock’ the population by activating emotions instead of communicating facts in the interest of creating acceptance for the ‘preventive and repressive’ measures – these are the terms used by the Ministry. 9 As Kaltwasser demonstrates, this strategy led to a dangerous split in society with an aggressive antidemocratic discourse of exclusion (Kaltwasser, 2023: 149–151). COVID-19 has in this respect accelerated an already existing tendency. This can be seen also in Levitsky and Ziblatt’s list of the reasons for the demise of democracy from 2018; they name the following four causes: (1) the rejection of rules for democratic processes, (2) the denial of the legitimacy of political opposition, (3) the willingness to tolerate violence and (4) the preparedness to curtail the civil liberties of anyone who opposes the elected government (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018). All four have figured prominently in the COVID-19 crisis.
The use of ‘solidarity’ and other discursive practices exemplifies the current societal shift away from an open society in Popper’s understanding as the universality of law and social participation, constructive discursive debates and a questioning of certitudes and authorities. This shift implies a concept of citizenship that is less about autonomous, self-responsible individuals and more about being subjected to a group with hegemonic ideas, practices and rituals.
Roberto Esposito’s (2011) analysis of biopolitics in terms of ‘immunity’ and ‘community’, that is, the drawing of a parallel between the body and the law by positing a communal body, sheds light on the dangers for democracy of pandemic government measures, in this case in Germany, to counteract the COVID-19 pandemic. The fear of being infected by outer elements, closing off the life of the individual and society, leads to self-destruction, as he demonstrates, a diagnosis that applies equally to democracy. The three novels this article focuses on in the following point their readers in precisely this direction.
Three contemporary German novels and the role of literature
In such a societal climate, fictional scenarios play a more important role than ever in society: they create awareness of risks for the future and illuminate the present. This is a typical feature of science fiction. Sherryl Vint (2021) not only demonstrates how science fiction offers visions of the possibilities of worlds organised differently, but also how it is currently changing due to artificial intelligence, climate change, genomic research and commodified biomedicine, and the accompanying anxieties. Literary representations, however, go beyond pure reflection and play an active role in shaping attitudes and developments, as I demonstrate through my notion of poetic thinking (for instance Pajević, 2023a) and as Vint argues as well. This is why this article refers to literature to better understand the societal tendencies promoted and corroborated by COVID-19.
The three texts to be analysed in the following are set in the near future. They are, however, not science fiction, since even though digitalisation plays an important role there is no focus on the technical side of the future worlds they portray, and virtually everything depicted is based on extant technology. Their concern is in any case less with the future, they deal instead with their present COVID-19 times, with changes in discourse and behaviour and in the legal framework. Both the digital technologies enabling these changes and the attitudes concerning the relation between citizen and state are key elements in these fictional societies based on current events.
Juli Zeh’s novel Corpus Delicti. Ein Prozess, from 2009, The METHOD in English translation, actually appeared first as a play that premiered in 2007. 10 It is, however, often presented as the paradigmatic book for the COVID-19 crisis and its topicality is underlined by Zeh’s publication, in summer 2020, of a book-length explanation of the novel, interpreting her own work and giving background information on her influences and intentions. 11 Zoë Beck’s Paradise City and Martin Schäuble’s Cleanland are both from 2020, the former appearing in late June, the latter in October. We can assume in both an influence of the first COVID-19 lockdown in spring 2020. Cleanland is clearly a reaction to it. This article pursues the following questions: how do German novels react to the initial unfolding of the COVID-19 events and what risks do they evoke? How do these representations depict the consequences for citizenship of such biopolitical measures that involve digital means of surveillance?
Given the aims of this article, dealing with three contemporary novels and their socio-political position in view of a current crisis, it will focus on plot and argument without taking formal aspects into detailed consideration. The novels represent very different genres and styles and address different audiences; Cleanland is a youth novel 12 and Paradise City a thriller. They nonetheless all deploy suspense and depict a conflict produced by outsiders confronting the general living conditions accepted by the majority.
The inhabitants of the future states in these novels lead what is in many respects a privileged life and are, by and large, depicted as contented citizens living in harmony with the system and their government, which ensures their material well-being and security. The population as a whole consents to giving up its liberties and embraces a surveillance society, plumping for security over freedom. The protagonists, however, move away from that consent and valorise human experience and freedom over the promise of perfect health. They enter into conflict with the state, which reacts with brutal suppression, such that these societies, far from being supposedly perfect social welfare states, are rather presented as dystopias. The people have paid for the highly developed health system based on prevention and surveillance with the destruction of what was so far considered the core of being human.
I will analyse the dilemma of interests that sees health and security pitted against freedom and humanity and explore further key aspects of the depictions in the novel: first, the media, manipulation and fear; second, the counter-societies both inside and outside the shiny world of these affluent societies; and third, the constructed opposition between humanity and health system.
The dilemma: health versus freedom
A health-based biopolitical regime has achieved much for each of the societies depicted in the three novels, such that the protagonists are in a dilemma, at least initially. In Paradise City, the investigative journalist Liina’s life depends on the admittedly fantastic healthcare of a state she attacks for its lies and other dubious practices; Liina calls it explicitly a dilemma (Beck, 2020: 78). Without the system’s secret experiment to implant in her a new heart cultivated from her own stem cells, she would have died years earlier, and without constant surveillance and medication, her life would be at great risk. But she has seen the world of the ‘parallels’ 13 and realised that the system’s version of the world is based on lies, injustice and hypocrisy. She learned early on that the system does not tolerate the truth and is willing to annihilate everybody who does not consent to its regimen. In spite of its achievements, she takes sides against such a totalitarian system and risks her life, while most of her colleagues are killed by the government.
Mia, protagonist of The METHOD, is herself a biologist with a privileged position within the system and, being a rational natural scientist, she has always supported the METHOD as a system based on reason and science, that is, on the principle of the well-being of the body. She chose that path due to her childhood experience of her brother being saved from leukaemia thanks to the METHOD’s health service. From that same encounter with the vulnerability of life, her brother drew a hunger for experience and the urge to live the life he has to the full, without fear of losing it. It took her brother’s death and the METHOD’s inhuman response to her need to mourn to bring Mia to the point where she could embrace her brother’s philosophy of life and see the flaws of the system. In her declaration of war on the METHOD, she withdraws her trust from a society based on fear of the human and having betrayed the mind to the body (Zeh, 2009: 186). Her dilemma is one of pure ratio against humanity. She says after her decision to revolt that she has now learned ‘to think with the heart’ (Zeh, 2009: 183).
Schilo in Cleanland has already been socialised in the new world, after ‘the great pandemic’, where health, or rather fear of disease, determines every aspect of life. She is used to that lifestyle and feels protected against the endless risks of infection, whereas anything else has always been presented to her as a miserable existence engulfed in suffering, danger and pain. Consequently, she is afraid of giving up the measures designed to protect against potential viruses, and of meeting others and the world directly. But then she realises that the system is hiding the truth: she encounters a cleaner, with whom the privileged classes cannot normally get in contact, and learns that other forms of life are not what she was told they are; her grandmother tells her about life outside of the Cleanland rules; her friend Samira’s brother, a child, is imprisoned for childlike offences against the rules of hygiene and this strict punishment puts his life at risk; her friend, who attempted to free her brother, is treated brutally for it and drugged to break her mind. The caring facade of the system crumbles and Schilo dares to take the step into an unfamiliar alternative world without strict biopolitical measures.
The media and manipulation through fear
Biopolitics always needs the support of the population. No system can function in the long run against the will of the people. As Aldous Huxley warned in 1958, the dictatorships of the future would be based on consent, partly achieved by drugs, partly through the subconscious by new techniques of propaganda in manipulative media – making the people love their new condition and feel genuinely happy with the oppressive regime (Huxley, 1958). This is clearly exemplified in the novels.
In weak moments, the journalist Liina in Paradise City sees that their fight is a lost cause since the government’s fake news controls the minds of the people, who are content with what they have, a clean environment, good food, perfect healthcare. As long as they do not oppose the system, they can do what they want (Beck, 2020: 173). In all three novels, it is almost impossible to reach the public with news the government does not approve of. The states have developed almost perfect systems of control, and no opposition is tolerated.
Fear is the bedrock on which these systems are built, and fear facilitates the quashing of civil rights in favour of surveillance. Out of fear, the populations in all three books willingly give up their freedom and embrace a control state in exchange for the security it promises. In the case of Cleanland, it is an event called ‘the great pandemic’ that triggered the development. On the back cover, the book is advertised as ‘The consequences of a pandemic consistently thought through’, whereas it rather depicts the consequences of the logic of lockdown. The trauma of mass mortality having caused extreme fear of infection, protecting oneself from any possibility of disease has become the absolute priority. People willingly forego most of their human relations and their freedom of movement for this promise of health. But having fled Cleanland, Schilo realises, ‘The laws of absolute purity promise safety but actually they only scared me’ (Schäuble, 2020: 192).
Kramer in The Method mentions that their perfect system is always susceptible to being seriously damaged or even destroyed by the slightest offence against the basic rules (Zeh, 2009: 36–37), which is why he states, ‘Anti-Methodism is a belligerent attack that we will meet with war’ (Zeh, 2009: 89). The fear of disease is systematically cultivated to make people obey the rules, and the METHOD also spreads fear of terrorist groups, which, it is suggested, are invented by the system to make people compliant.
The system of complete sanitisation has also created absolute dependence. Kramer explains that due to the measures imposed, people no longer have a functioning immune system. If sanitary security were loosened, there would immediately be an epidemic (Zeh, 2009: 233). The fear of infection has created its own condition.
Just as in the two other novels, in Paradise City surveillance is everywhere. Not only does the system monitor everybody with full CCTV-coverage, obligatory body testing and implanted chips, but the population also monitors itself, for instance through social networks, where information on every person is collected (Beck, 2020: 135–6). The state has absolute control.
The state in the three novels has become a regime that suppresses all criticism. The promise of a safe and healthy life in a society constructed on fear turns into fear and insecurity itself. The fear becomes a galloping obsession, with everyone developing a petty micro-focus on supposed health risk management at the behest of the governing power. It gains the dimensions of a collective paranoia with attendant scapegoatism.
Counterworlds
Biopolitical measures are usually introduced by painting a frightening image of the alternative, so that they appear as the only reasonable way forward. Counterworlds play an important role in the novels; the system is only locally fully developed. Outside the controlled high-tech centres with their seemingly perfect healthy and wealthy lifestyle, people are presented as living in misery and sickness, and it is believed that they are. However, things are seldom simply how they are presented, and the counterworld is vital to the system and sheds crucial light on it.
In The METHOD, the plot is limited to the realm of the system. Only rarely does the no-go area of a river figure, nature as danger zone, where Mia’s brother enjoys life. Yet Zeh also co-authored a film script based on the novel, which she calls a radical development of the plot. In this script, the METHOD rules only in one city, fortified against its suburbs, where people live freely but in misery – they are huge slum areas. The City is dependent on these outer areas for food, but the hygiene rules in the city have also caused immunological and genetic degeneration, resulting in weak and impotent citizens. Their children, who are supposedly exclusively fertilised in vitro, are actually from embryos smuggled in from the suburbs (Zeh, 2020: 193). The hygienic and supposedly healthy life of the METHOD has made their citizens incapable of procreation and dependent on the allegedly unhealthy people outside their world.
In Cleanland, most inhabitants have been so brainwashed with fear of anything outside their city area that it would never cross their mind to want to venture anywhere else (Schäuble, 2020: 107). In spite of her apprehension of the non-sanitised area (Schäuble, 2020: 105) and with the help of a controller-disrupter, Schilo discovers an area with her cleaner Toko where people meet who normally cannot. In other words, they can have contact with people from outside their social class, as for instance, Schilo and Toko do, or Cleanland people can have contact with someone who is not their sole registered friend. For the first time, Schilo sees a derelict school building from before the great pandemic. It has tables for 30 people in one room with no particular sanitisation, and door handles that used to be touched by everybody. She is disgusted and irritated (Schäuble, 2020: 113–114) and when she actually sees people kiss, she faints (Schäuble, 2020: 111).
When she meets people from the Sicklands organisation who help her counter the Cleanland suppression, it takes her some time to adapt and accept that people shake hands or drink from the same bottle, for instance (Schäuble, 2020: 158, 161). And her perspective needs to change since a Sicklander tells her she is safe because her controller is out of action (Schäuble, 2020: 160). People in the Sicklands claim that protection is needed only in case of fatal diseases (Schäuble, 2020: 164). Initially, it is difficult for Schilo to get used to the Sicklands. On the train that takes her there, crammed and without sanitisation or air-conditioning, she misses her protector (Schäuble, 2020: 193–194). She needs time to free herself of her fear. The book ends with her meeting her grandfather (Schäuble, 2020: 195) who was said to have died but, in reality, left Cleanland for a free life in the Sicklands, which are not sick but simply like our world before COVID-19.
The experience of the counterworld in Paradise City makes the adolescent Liina understand for the first time that her world is based on lies. The people who live outside the cities are called ‘the parallels’ (Beck, 2020: 181) and they do not want to be part of the surveillance system. There is little information on them in the city; only clips and images of a train-station junkie scene from former times are used as illustrations. As a result, people imagine the parallels as miserable wretches, unhealthy, stinking and drug-addicted, despising the world and therefore responsible for diseases which would be extinct without them (Beck, 2020: 125). When leaving the city, Liina switched off her ‘smartcase’ so that she could not be tracked and took her bike to visit the area since it is not served by public transport (Beck, 2020: 126). Data reception is blocked in these hinterlands (Beck, 2020: 131). The parallels mistrust the city people, but apart from that, they are normal human beings, just living without the modern facilities. Cut off from the electricity network and all infrastructure, they have to live completely self-sufficiently and, with a dearth of normal healthcare, quite a few are indeed ill. Nonetheless, they are willing to tolerate these hardships to preserve their self-determination and to avoid being blackmailed by the system (Beck, 2020: 181–183).
These so-called parallels are later then driven away, into the Alps where they can hardly survive. Liina’s friend Simona admires Martha, the leader of the parallels, who takes care of the vulnerable. Simona wants to change things for the better, from within the system. When she reaches a position of power, she asks Martha to direct an institution in which the system allows the parallels and ill people to live, those whom her own KOS health app system with implanted chip would otherwise kill. They are officially declared dead and brought to this institution. Simona programmed the system inhumanly, purely with the criteria of health and productivity. She tries to correct her mistake, since it causes the deaths of those deemed incapable of leading a healthy life (Beck, 2020: 258–269). At this point we are in the territory of literal thanato- or necropolitics, to use Agamben’s (1998) and Mbembe’s (2003) terms.
In the novel, an alternative to the German system exists in the ‘Fennoscandinavian Alliance’, which has a conventional health system, in other words, people who want treatment receive it, but there is no surveillance – or at least not yet, it is said, as when they too buy the KOS system, Liina will have to flee once again (Beck, 2020: 278).
All three texts present life within the system as comfortable, as long as one does not object to being controlled and unfree. Life outside the system, however, involves hardship and a risk of falling ill, but the protagonists opt for the latter nonetheless.
The priority of health as collapse of humanity
The decision to opt for a life outside the system stems from the main characters’ realisation that the system does not allow for what they consider real life and freedom. From their point of view, biopolitics has reached an intolerable point, where the price for health security is simply too high since it implies the loss of basic freedoms and the removal of fundamental human experience. Once they come into conflict with the system, in other words, when a situation or desire that runs counter to the rules arises, they are suppressed and either revolt or flee suppression. Even if within the system there is human interaction, it is presented as lacking key aspects of humanity. The system is also flawed since it is based on lies and deception.
In Cleanland, for the sake of the prevention of illness, people are separated and live without any physical touch. Schilo is not allowed to have more than one friend or to love anyone who does not belong to her social class. Her grandfather left the family to live in freedom, free of fear, and her grandmother cannot speak openly with her. In Schilo’s friend’s Samira’s family, normal human interaction is brutally suppressed by the authorities. At the end of the novel, having become aware of the inconsistencies and brutalities of the system, Schilo asks herself: ‘What do I want from life and what am I prepared to give for it?’ (Schäuble, 2020: 194). She realises that her former secure but curtailed life does not correspond to how she wants to live. Human life is more than absence of illness.
In Paradise City, Simona had the best intentions when she developed the health system KOS, an algorithm based on pure ratio but flawed since its sole criterion is the healthy and productive human being. Once people no longer correspond to this definition, the algorithm follows thanatopolitics, considers them useless and kills them (Beck, 2020: 269). Simona’s wife becomes a victim of her system: ‘I wrote a programme that would kill the woman I love because it considers her life not worth living. Liina, what have I done!’ (Beck, 2020: 270). The government, then, does not flinch from murdering anybody who undermines this system, since its power is based on it and it can draw profit from it. With the help of algorithms and surveillance, the human idea of preventing suffering and illness has turned into its inhuman, totalitarian and suppressive opposite.
In The METHOD, Mia undergoes a process towards self-determination. In the best sense of Enlightenment, Mia escapes her nonage but for that very reason is an intolerable danger to the system. Kramer is convinced that the METHOD’s idea of man is superior to all others since it is based on the body and for him it is the body, not the mind, that makes all humans equal (Zeh, 2009: 180). This focus on the body is dangerous, as Zeh demonstrates. We have to ask whether the biomedical promise of a world without illness leads to a world that substantially diminishes humanity, or, with Volker Roelcke’s words, whether it leads to a ‘substantial shift in the valuation of human beings, away from unconditional respect for integrity towards principled consent to the availability, manipulability and also usability of human life’ (Roelcke, 2003: 123). Zeh’s intention with the book was exactly this: to criticise the contemporary tendency of an economically and biologically determined idea of the human (Zeh, 2020: 99). She challenges her readers’ own tendencies to collude in the demise of their society.
In Mia’s brother’s philosophy – he studies philosophy, a humanities subject as opposed to the natural science world of the initial Mia and the METHOD – humans need to have experiences, an insight he gained from his own illness. He is therefore not content with mere existence, he wants to actively forge and live his own life in all its dimensions. This is what he calls ‘love’, and he opposes it to the logic of security, which suppresses such forms of life (Zeh, 2009: 90–95). And when Mia finally takes sides and fights the system, she completes her declaration of resistance by saying that only now does she understand what it means to live (Zeh, 2009: 187).
This transformed Mia ‘can now think with the heart’ (Zeh, 2009: 183) and considers Kramer’s moral actuary with contempt when he explains that personal mishaps such as Mia’s loss of her brother should not be confused with a political problem: no system, he explains, has a lower error rate than the METHOD, and a few victims must be tolerated; dissatisfaction with the existing situation, however, causes millions of deaths once per era (Zeh, 2009: 183). Mia withdraws her trust and support from such a functionalistic worldview based on surveillance and fear and turns openly against the METHOD (Zeh, 2009: 186–187). She understands now that the fixation on the body and health undermines human relations and that a state built on such principles leads to the collapse of humanity.
Conclusion
All three novels present biopolitical dystopias of paternalising states focusing on health, supported by digital surveillance and an ideology promoted by fear of illness that leaves the citizens without any autonomy. Zeh’s novel stands in the context of her general concern about the growing fixation on the body in our society and fears for humanity and solidarity when a spurious notion of health is made the main criterion (Zeh, 2020: 92).
Alongside the novel, Zeh published a political essay on how the state creates the fear of terrorism to increase biopolitical power at the expense of civil rights (Trojanow and Zeh, 2009). For her, the state’s task is to keep people from harming each other; the relation of one individual to itself ought to be of no concern to it. The right to do harm to oneself is an essential part of personal freedom (Zeh, 2020: 93). Otherwise, our society’s vision of humanity is at stake, but in her view, due to the commercialisation of our society, we are already at a point where most people think it normal to subsume human beings under criteria of efficiency and optimisation (Zeh, 2020: 94). Beyond this commercialisation, it is more the atomisation of society under the pretext of uniting individuals through social media and smart phones that dispels all real unification and keeps people drip-fed by industry and international finance.
Health is the key factor in biopolitics: a healthy person is functional in the economy or in war, the health industry itself is one of the biggest economic powers, and health – or rather fear of illness, pain and death – is a very powerful tool of manipulation, for economically motivated lobbies and the state alike. During the COVID-19 crisis in Germany, a virus was instrumentalised for the transformation of society, an economic transformation towards much greater inequality and a political transformation towards what is, in biopolitical terms, a far more controlling state. That is clearly depicted at least in Cleanland and The METHOD; in Paradise City, the development is triggered rather by an environmental catastrophe but the results, based on health policies, are the same. Of course, these novels are no documentations of the COVID-19 crisis, they are fictional accounts with implicit and speculative parallels to real-life events. As such, however, they draw the readers’ attention to potentially damaging consequences for citizenship in the traditional sense within a liberal democracy and an open society. Many citizens, out of fear of illness, have willingly given up fundamental civil rights, such as the right to freedom of movement, assembly and expression. Huxley’s prediction of future dictatorships being based on consent, partly achieved by drugs, partly by manipulative media (Huxley, 1958), is close at hand. All three novels point the readers to this danger.
The COVID-19 discourse threatens to throw the achievements of a democratic open society overboard with little consideration or consultation. If one examines the flows of money and power in the social and political transformations accompanying COVID-19, they are about the new all-powerful resource: information. In Germany after 1945, many people were relatively cautious about sharing their data. The attraction of entertainment through social networks and smartphones has undermined this reluctance to be monitored. The fear of terrorism enabled further steps towards full control. The fear of the virus convinced the majority to let go of other rights. Even if many people feel that their rights were pushed back only for a limited time in exceptional circumstances and have been re-established, a precedent is set and the barrier to overcome for further limitations in the future is now much lower. Attitudes about state authority have changed and when another emergency can be convincingly presented, people who are not democratically elected can much more easily take control, whether it is the WHO or industrial lobby groups.
Prepared and supported by digitalisation, ideas about citizenship and the relation between the state and the individual have been transformed into clearly more authoritarian and controlling mechanisms. Time will tell if this tendency is irreversible. These contemporary German novels remind us of the consequences of current priorities and of what there is to lose, or, to quote from Cleanland once more: ‘What do I want from life and what am I prepared to give for it?’ (Schäuble, 2020: 194). 14