Die von mir (IH) übersetzten Passagen im New Yorker lauten im Orginal:
At a dinner in his honor, Sloterdijk surveyed the scene with a Dutch friend, Babs van den Bergh. “Do you think I should read out the letter?” he asked. In his hand was a note from Chancellor Angela Merkel praising his contributions to German culture.
“You really shouldn’t read it,” van den Bergh said.
After our lunch, Sloterdijk was going to see the country’s current President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
Most Germans think of health care, education, and other basic services as rights, not privileges, but the F.D.P. has argued that the country’s welfare state has become hypertrophied, a view close to Sloterdijk’s own. “It creates a double current of resentment,” he said. “You have the people making money who feel no gratitude in return for all they give in taxes. Then you have the people who receive the money. They also feel resentment. They would like to trade places with the rich who give to them. So both sides feel bitterly betrayed and angry.” Sloterdijk argues that taxation should be replaced with a system in which the richest members voluntarily fund great civic and artistic works. He believes that this kind of social web of happy givers and receivers existed until around the end of the Renaissance but was then obliterated by the rise of the European state. He gets excited about the profusion of philanthropic schemes emanating from Silicon Valley and sees in them an attractive model for the future.
This profligacy makes Sloterdijk hard to pin down. He is known not for a single grand thesis but for a shrapnel-burst of impressionistic coinages —“anthropotechnics,” “negative gynecology,” “co-immunism”—that occasionally suggest the lurking presence of some larger system.
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