MTTR

While in the office, Teresa Borsig finds out for sure: she is pregnant. She feels simultaneously attracted and repelled by the idea of having a family. The memories of her own childhood are full

of distance, discipline and beatings. Urged by nurses in the abortion clinic to swallow the pill, Teresa refuses to go through with it: she wants to be a mother after all. Can she fulfill this role while lacking a mother of her own?
The health care system takes in the pregnant woman as it once did her parents. Efficient. Cold. They only want what’s best for her. And isolate her baby in a warming bed. Will her infant survive? Doctors and nurses talk about but not with her. Teresa screams. She shouldn’t take herself so seriously, the hospital says. »MTTR« recounts the effects of German post-war education, recounts the inability of baby boomers to show emotions, and if they do, it’s only through substitute actions: Purchase, correction and concern. Every dialogue is an act of spitefulness. You almost don’t notice it, because file-gray emotional temperature and gross ineptness are everyday life in Germany. Will millennials, like Teresa, reproduce this?

Julia Friese lives in Berlin and works as a freelance cultural journalist. Her column »gedanken zum gegenwärtig*innen« was awarded the International Music Journalism Award in 2021. »MTTR« is her literary debut.

MTTR: Mean Time To Recover or also Mean Time To Repair (abbreviated in each case MTTR) is defined as the average repair time after a system failure. This indicates how long it takes on average to recover the system. It is therefore an important parameter for system availability. (Source: Wikipedia)