Slupetzky sat at his old typewriter and looked through his skylight into the brilliant blue New Year’s sky. The year that had just begun made him think of a fundamental problem—the birth of a living being. The most elemental event in a person’s life was their birth. He was therefore convinced that all the problems in this world could be traced back to a single problem: the Midwife Problem.
When they came into the world as human beings and were born, they were received in every civilized culture by a complete stranger: the midwife. The first person who welcomed them into this world, who took them in their arms, who touched them, whom they felt and smelled, was not their mother and usually not their father, but a woman they would never encounter again. When this person shortly afterward handed them over to their mother, they already experienced their first loss.
It didn’t matter whether their mother was loving or unloving afterward—they mourned this loss in any case. The “un-binding” therefore occurred not only unconsciously from their mother but above all, already consciously, from their midwife. As soon as they were born, they found themselves in double exile. Thus, they had lost their home forever. It lay not only as an unborn embryo, unreachably, in their mother’s uterus, but as an already-born person, irrevocably, in the arms of their midwife.
From that moment on, they were all on a quest without ever being able to find. All that remained for them in this world was an insatiable longing that could never be fulfilled. This was the reason for all conflicts and every war in the world.
Slupetzky sighed. They were all merely searching for a re-connection to their first love. If humans could once become aware of this insatiable longing and eventually learn to accept it, perhaps it would be possible to overcome all conflicts and wars. With this insatiable romantic thought, he set off into the new year.
—
Vienna Calling 