Tweets have a maximum of 140 characters. Literature fills entire books and libraries. What seems like a contradiction at first glance doesn't necessarily have to be one. Sometimes tweets and literature combine wonderfully and become Twitterature.
Whether Ovid, Goethe, Klopstock or Schiller: Many great poets in our literary history have tried their hand at two- to four-line poems and stories. Only in the case of the ancient and classical masters these are called elegies, epigrams or aphorisms, sometimes also limericks or haikus. But not Twitterature. At first glance it seems presumptuous to place Goethe, Schiller and Twitterature authors in one tradition. And by far very few internet poets can withstand this comparison. But some manage to turn the seemingly banal form of communication of tweets into an art form. Then tweets become Twitter nature. Then 140 characters become tweeted stories.
Anyone who has ever tried to write something meaningful, witty, or funny knows how difficult it is to find the right words. The danger of sounding trite, ignorant or meaningless always hangs over you like a sword of Damocles. It becomes even more difficult if you only have 140 characters for it - this section alone already has over 300 up to this point. So anyone who is able to express something in just a few words that is not banal, inconsequential or even completely unimportant is allowed rightly call yourself a writer.
“just setting up my twttr.”
Since Twitter's founding in 2006 and its first shaky tweets, the network has become a global phenomenon over the past seven years. Millions of people worldwide use it every day. Most of them are to share what they ate, who they met, what they bought, to get information or to show how great they look again today. Some others see the tweets as a literary and artistic challenge. For example, in 2009, two students from Chicago took on the challenge of tweeting important works of literary history in less than 20 tweets - i.e. 2,800 characters. Anna Karenina throws herself in front of the train after just a few hundred characters and not just several hundred pages. And James Joyce's real-time novel Ulysses also becomes a witty retelling of itself in the real-time medium of Twitter. Inspired by this, in 2011 Carl Hanser Verlag called on Twitter and literature fans to retell their own favorite book in a maximum of 15 tweets using #twitterature and looked for the most beautiful ones from that. And sometimes even entire literary festivals take place just via Twitter.
American Oceans Eleven director Steven Soderbergh is currently tweeting his novella Glue live at @Bitchuation for everyone to follow. In Germany, too, many artists use the medium as a creative stage. Above all, the author Anousch Müller, whose wonderfully melancholic, ironic chirping is already available to buy as an eBook.
So Twitter is capable of much more than one might think. As long as it has users who see and accept the artistic challenge in 140 characters, it is more than just a digital coffee party. Then it's a real-time think tank. And as is the case with think tanks: not everything that comes out of it should get a lot of attention. Much of this can easily get lost in the mountain of data on the Internet. But a few are worth highlighting. Because Goethe was just one of many writers at the time.
Here's a little Twitter sample for you:
1. “Anna Karenina” or “I have a friend who is a truck driver”? Number 2 of course!
(Source: https://twitter.com/Lelarh/status/394556242997571584 )
2. There is light there is shadow, how else did we play chess?
(Source: https://twitter.com/lrinaldetti/status/394122153505075203 )
3. Angela the people and questions
(Source: https://twitter.com/netzanalyse/status/393810627439104000 )
4. The rift runs between those who write and those who criticize.
(Source: https://twitter.com/Anousch/status/393664558877118464 )
5. Some people are so careful that they die almost like new.
(Source: https://twitter.com/nutellaundmett/status/393634475437195264 )
6. The Kindle is my spirit animal.
(Source: https://twitter.com/Anousch/status/393345894646427648 )
7. How dull it is to pause, to make an end. To rust unburned, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life!
(Source: https://twitter.com/nbanteka/status/393169154586320896 )
8.”People blow people. “It happens.” CLEAR HISTORY
(Source: https://twitter.com/Bitchuation/status/367396650483851264 )
9. New #Twitkrit: When trolls are trolled, a black hole forms.
(Source: https://twitter.com/twitkrit/status/282836429854355456 )
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Tweets have a maximum of 140 characters. Literature fills entire books and libraries. What seems like a contradiction at first glance doesn't necessarily have to be one. Sometimes tweets and literature combine wonderfully and become Twitterature. Whether Ovid, Goethe, Klopstock or Schiller: Many great poets in our literary history worked on two- to four-line poems
