Last but not least: Stranger than Business Class
Martin Suter’s weekly column on the managerial class, “Business Class,” is retiring after 15 years. Perhaps it’s time. When a satirist’s material turns into real-life satire, there’s nothing left to do.
Martin Suter's weekly column Business Class is retiring after 15 years. With a sharp pen, Suter, once a member of the manager class himself as an advertising copywriter and creative director, pursued the comic sides and abysses of the carpet floors and their main actors, the managers. His latest collection of columns, "Das Bonus-Geheimnis", has now been published. The bonus secret is apparently one of the great mysteries of business class, so well guarded that it could lead to marriage. The manager only reveals the amount of his own remuneration to his wife. Finally, the last words in the book come after 15 years of writing a column, and they lead to the big question of how many salted nuts are in a small bowl provided at the bar with the drinks. Is it 20 or less?
Suter's bizarre characters repeatedly testified to the banality of stupidity in the managerial class, an environment of apparently so inspiring and unbridled ignorance that it provided Suter with enough material for all his columns for a decade and a half. Often, however, it did not need his satirical exaggeration at all. "I sometimes had the feeling that things couldn't go on like this," said Suter last year in the midst of the financial crisis. "But I'm amazed that things have turned out so badly." The reality of business class has overtaken Suter, but he will remain its formidable satirist.
Suter's bizarre characters repeatedly testified to the banality of stupidity in the managerial class, an environment of apparently so inspiring and unbridled ignorance that it provided Suter with enough material for all his columns for a decade and a half. Often, however, it did not need his satirical exaggeration at all. "I sometimes had the feeling that things couldn't go on like this," said Suter last year in the midst of the financial crisis. "But I'm amazed that things have turned out so badly." The reality of business class has overtaken Suter, but he will remain its formidable satirist.
(Photo: Keystone)
