But he notices that, amid the crisis, these friends instinctively prioritise their family “nesting” zones, leaving him feeling bereft. He begins to wonder: is a life like his sustainable, especially after a certain age? Has he been fooling himself? What does it really mean to live alone? Seeking perspectives on these questions, he roves from the TV series Friends to Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, from Frieda Fromm-Reichmann’s pioneering 1959 psychological study Loneliness to Hannah Arendt’s philosophical thoughts on friendship.

Daniel Schreiber beschreibt zwar einige Punkte des Alleinseins sehr treffend, schildert viele Bespiele aus der Psychologie und der Literatur. Doch vieles davon bleibt sehr oberflächlich. Immer wenn ein Thema interessant zu werden droht, geht er wieder auf seine persönlichen Erfahrungen ein. Zunächst fand ich das noch nicht besonders störend und dachte eher, dass die ein sehr persönliches Buch sei. Doch je mehr ich las, desto mehr ärgerte mich dieses Gejammere. Denn der Autor befindet sich eigentlich in einer sehr privilegierten Position: Er hat eine schöne Wohnung, einen Job, Hobbies und Interessen, denen er nachgehen kann, und nicht zuletzt kann er dank Homeoffice auf einer Insel überwintern. Außerdem hat er Freunde, auch wenn er sich laufend beklagt, dass diese zu wenig Zeit für ihn hätten, da sie alle in einer Beziehung wären. Mir kam das ganze irgendwann so vor, als würde er einfach einen längeren Bericht für seinen Therapeuten schreiben. In einem Podcast wurde das Buch empfohlen, weil es aufzeigen würde, dass man Freundschaften fälschlicherweise nicht so schätzt wie Liebesbeziehungen. Aber der Autor macht genau das. Er sagt, irgendwann seien alle Freundschaften nichts mehr wert, weil sich alle in ihren Partnerschaften und Kleinfamilien verlieren.I never made a conscious decision to live alone,” Schreiber says. Although he has had many partners, some of them long term, and even lived with two of them for a time, he is single at the time of writing, and can’t help but think that his state implies some kind of deficiency. Part of this he attributes to queer shame that he must have subconsciously internalized, and part to Pauline Boss’s concept of the “ambiguous loss” – missing what one has never had. Dieses Buch wurde in meiner Bubble hochgelobt und verehrt. Ich hatte hohe Erwartungen an den Essay von Daniel Schreiber. Allerdings konnte mich das Buch nicht so richtig überzeugen. Zum einen lag das sicherlich an dem teilweise sehr umständlichen Satzbau. Am Ende eines Satzes angekommen, konnte ich mich nicht mehr an seinen Anfang erinnern. Ich versuchte, die Worte aufzusaugen, sehr bewusst zu lesen, weil mich die Thematik persönlich beschäftigt. Mir war klar, dass ich einen Essay und keinen Roman lese. Trotzdem hätte ich mir oft einen Punkt anstelle eines Kommas gewünscht. Dazu kam, dass ich bei manchen Anekdoten die Pointe vermisst habe oder sich mir der Sinn dieser nicht erschloss. We are all fated to feel lonely at some point in our lives. It is an unavoidable, existential experience. And perhaps also a necessary one.” The joy of friendship cannot be located in an ideal. It does not materialise when the only thing being met is our own need for other people's attention. It does not transpire when we project our feelings and our unresolved conflicts onto our friends, or simply believe that the reason we know them so well is because they are so much like ourselves. The lasting joy of friendship if a by-product of giving, of gifting our attention. It is an experience of dissolving our barriers and occurs only when we succeed in broadening our own horizons and escaping the prison of our own problems and fears that we are so often trapped in. It materialises when we recognise the person in front of us in all their otherness. When we open ourselves up to their emotional reality, to their alternative view of the world. It emerges when we are there for someone else. Es werden einige Aspekte der Einsamkeit und des Alleinlebens aufgezeigt, die mir teilweise nur unterbewusst oder gar nicht bekannt waren. Das Buch regt definitiv zum Nachdenken an und ist eine Lobrede an die Freundschaft. Dadurch wird das Buch sicherlich nicht nur für Menschen interessant, die mit ihrem Single-Leben hadern, sondern auch für solche, die in einer Partnerschaft leben und ihre alleinstehenden Freund*innen besser verstehen möchten.

Weiters führt der Autor aus, wie viele Probleme das Queersein mit sich bringt, was zwar an sich interessant ist, aber das hat eben in diesem Buch nichts verloren. Vor allem dann nicht, wenn das Conclusio dann obendrein auch noch ist, dass der Autor ohne Partnerschaft und Freunde dann doch wieder sehr einsam ist. Ja, you don't say. In this candid and moving essay, German writer Daniel Schreiber explores what it means to be alone in a society that idealizes romantic relationships. Schreiber shares his own fears and experiences as a long-term single gay man and links them to some of the world’s foremost writers and thinkers, such as Hannah Arendt, Annie Ernaux, Audre Lorde and Maggie Nelson. He also examines the role that friendships play in our lives and whether they can replace a need for romantic love. Daniel Schreiber is a Berlin-based essayist and biographer of Susan Sontag. These philosophical reflections on solitude and loneliness, coinciding with the first year of the pandemic, reveal his ambivalence about living alone and his frustration that the idea of the couple so defines society that anyone who does not fall in line is considered aberrant. Also, Schreiber, a gay man himself, writes poignantly about queer peoples’ experience of loneliness; as sadly this is all too often a huge, and sometimes devastating aspect of daily life for many queer people. He talks about how, throughout the 20th century, before the very recent liberations in western countries for LGBTQ+ communities, due to most societies oppression of queer people, the shame this caused led many to feel that they did not deserve to be loved, were unloveable. And sadly, how gay/queer shame is still very much a destructive force that affects all areas of the LGBTQ+ community worldwide. Schreiber has previously written a biography of Susan Sontag and several volumes of essays, and this is a work suffused with the essayistic sensibility. It blends passages of memoir with scholarly and literary references to explore the author’s existence as a single gay man who often feels he is living outside standard social models. In place of a primary romantic or domestic partnership, he has a wide network of friends. Whether or not they are in couples themselves, they provide him with all the human connection, fellowship, support and sense of meaning that he needs.People have always been lonely. They have experienced this feeling always and everywhere, and they have used all their strength to try to evade it. Loneliness is not a modern or even a contemporary phenomenon. No matter what our beliefs are about earlier eras and cultures, no matter what pastoral, religious and social idylls we project onto the past, loneliness is something that has always been recored in philosophy and literature.” Ich fand es sehr mutig und berührend, wie offen der Autor über seine privaten Erlebnisse und Empfindungen berichtet. Wie er sie in den Kontext der aktuellen Zeit setzt, aber auch ergründet, woher diese Gefühle kommen. Die Grundstimmung der Abhandlung ist bis fast zum Schluss traurig und betrübt, so dass es mir schwerfiel, daraus Hoffnung und etwas Positives zu schöpfen. Es hat lediglich etwas tröstliches, zu lesen, dass andere ähnliche Zweifel und Sorgen haben. Alone follows a “small” spirit itself; it takes only brief dips into its sources, and does not drive towards any climactic answer. Perhaps deliberately, it feels less than fully fleshed out. It also treads cautiously over another “grand narrative”: that of happiness. Schreiber mentions experiencing depression and other problems, but does not share these with us in depth. He tells us about joyful friendships based on food, gardening and laughter, but does not recreate them at length. The effect can be a little flat.

Loneliness is bad for us: the US surgeon general has suggested it can cause a person as much damage as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It has increased alarmingly in many societies, especially following the pandemic and its regimes of isolation. Yet there is no shortage online of inspirational quotes about the creative and restorative powers of solitude, ranging from Edward Gibbon’s wry “I was never less alone than when by myself” to the catchy, unattributed “Sometimes you’ve got to disconnect to introspect”. For a more hard-boiled existential take, we have Orson Welles: “We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.” For anyone who wants to read and think about loneliness, this is the holy grail. Olivia Laing is such a masterful writer. Her reflections on the psychology and psychoanalysis of loneliness are as deft as they are enlightening. And her shedding light on the art and lives of queer artists such as Klaus Nomi, Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz, who at some point were almost forgotten, is a joy. Throughout her essays Laing makes clear that even though loneliness is debilitating and makes us feel unlike ourselves, it’s very human, too. Daniel Schreiber trägt viele philosophische Betrachtungen zum Thema Freundschaft und zum Alleinsein zusammen, die definitiv zum Nachdenken anregen. Auch beschreibt er, mit welchen Methoden er gegen seine Einsamkeit ankämpft. Diese sind aber sicherlich nicht auf jeden Menschen übertragbar. There are times in life we all encounter crushing loneliness, regardless of how many friends we have and whether we’re in a romantic relationship or not. One of these times comes when somebody we love dies. In her autofictional novella, Norwegian writer Ørstavik tries to come to terms with the loneliness of anticipatory grief. She has moved to Milan to be with the man she loves, only to find out he has cancer and less than a year to live. Ti amo chronicles the daily life of someone who can’t talk about what’s going on inside her to anyone. It’s a gripping book, and impossible to forget.The fact that this was written by a single gay man of my age gave this book an extra dimension for me. But to say that this book is only relevant to gay men would be a disservice. I think that many people can relate to the thoughts, feelings and experiences shared in this book. Due out next month, this novel follows an unnamed girl who flees from a colonial settlement in 1600s Virginia to make her way through the forests and rivers of North America. Groff turns the ideological underpinnings of classic Robinsonades deftly on their head. During her fight for survival the girl comes to an understanding of the natural world and her life within it which is a rare testament to the spiritual upsides of loneliness that we can only experience when we are alone. Wolf is the German writer I love most. In this autofictional novel from 1987, she chronicles a day she spends by herself in a little house in the East German countryside trying to make sense of two competing events in her life: the risky brain surgery her brother undergoes that day and the nuclear meltdown in Cernobyl a few days before. It’s a difficult book at times because Wolf is grappling with something that our psyches usually don’t allow us to see: how helpless we are in the face of fateful events beyond our control, and how catastrophically we are thrown into history. Accident is so inspiring because Wolf knows that we have to deal with that fact alone – and gives us a hard-won example of how to do just that. Meiner Meinung nach, ging es in diesem Buch gar nicht so sehr ums Alleinsein. Eher um Gärten, Freundschaften, die Abwesenheit von romantischer Liebe und Corona. Ja, es war die Pandemie, die dazu geführt hat, dass sich Daniel Schreiber so allein gefühlt hat. Er war immer nur im Home Office, hat andere nur auf Spaziergängen mit Abstand getroffen und ewig niemanden umarmt. Natürlich fühlt er sich da einsam.

Ich habe in der letzten Woche die zwei mir verfügbaren Daniel Schreiber Hörbücher regelrecht fieberhaft durchgehört. Von daher ist meine Meinung von diesem Buch auch stark von dem Vorgänger "Zuhause" geprägt - zu "Nüchtern" kann ich in diesem Kontext leider nichts sagen, da ich dies noch nicht gelesen habe. I personally feel that Hanya Yanagihara is our Tolstoy. In a way, all three of her novels deal with people going through their lives alone. This theme is most pronounced in A Little Life. Yanagihara rigorously examines how it is possible to lead a life shaped by trauma, and whether an almost perfect adopted family can change the daily encounters with the psychological and bodily consequences of that trauma. It’s a novel of an intensity beyond compare. But can you really live a good life alone, without a romantic relationship? How sustainable is a model like that? And how do you learn to live with being alone without it hurting, without lying to yourself? These were the questions that I didn’t know the answers to when I started writing my book, Alone. But I knew that I needed to find them. Some of the answers I found in literature – in a wide array of essays and novels, it turned out. This is a small selection.

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But it’s not all centred on the pandemic. The very essence of Friendship is a key theme. Schreiber looks at how friendship has been portrayed throughout literature and philosophy. We hear from Nietzsche, Sappho, Jean-Paul Sartre and Arendt amongst others. Also dieses Buch ging sowas von am Thema vorbei, das Buch verdient einen Rant/Aufregerpost. Vermeintlich soll dieses Buch Einsamkeit und alleine sein entstigmatisieren und normalisieren. Ich habe so viele positive Stimmen vorab gelesen, dass ich mir doch einiges erwartet habe. Stattdessen bekommen wir eine absolut selbstbeweihräuchernde Erzählung eines sehr privilegierten Menschen.