Like many of us, Eric Jarosinski first started tweeting as a way of avoiding work. It was January of 2012, and Jarosinski, an assistant professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania, was struggling to write a book. He liked his topic just fine: transparency as a metaphor in contemporary German culture. What he couldn’t stand was the language. His own sentences. They were long, complex, and dense with qualifiers: “somewhat,” “perhaps,” “not unlike.” A handful of fellow academics might read the final book, he figured, and it was hard to see them actually enjoying it. Each time Jarosinski sat down at his laptop to write, he started to sweat.
Tweeting felt different. He wrote his tweets on his smartphone, not on the laptop, where the book lurked. Over the next two years, tweeting almost thirty thousand times, Jarosinski developed a crisp, allusive, irreverent Twitter voice: “Signifying nothing is harder than it looks.” “At Starbucks I order under the name Godot. Then leave.” “First as tragedy. Then as farce. Then as tragedy-farce-banana smoothie.” “I love ü. And it’s just that simple.” His feed, @NeinQuarterly, carries the tagline “A Compendium of Utopian Negation.” For an avatar, he uses a cartoon of the German-Jewish philosopher Theodor W. Adorno. The cartoon depicts a dour-looking man with a monocle. A caption reads simply, “Nein.”
Jarosinski tweets in German, English, and a mix of the two. The effect depends heavily on the intimidating visage of Adorno. Sometimes Jarosinski goes along with the image, indulging a personal tendency toward despair, and sometimes he undercuts the image with bursts of silliness and romanticism. From time to time, he tweets about being in love with a woman who lives in New York. His fifty-two thousand seven hundred followers include frustrated graduate students, German-language learners, and the president of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves.
I met Jarosinski at a bar in Philadelphia to talk about Twitter. He is thin, with short, curly brown hair, and wore gray jeans, a black shirt buttoned all the way up, a black watch with no numbers, and black-framed glasses. “Right now, I wish I could speak a little more in tweet form, and a little more quotable,” he started off. “I’m not very good at that. I’ll try not to ramble. I get nervous when I start to talk.” But he went on to tell his story in thoughtful paragraphs. He had come here from teaching an evening graduate seminar at Penn on modern German drama. Jarosinski said that he enjoys teaching, but that this is his final semester at Penn. Last spring, he took himself out of consideration for tenure, after realizing that he simply hadn’t published enough research. He started calling himself a “#failedintellectual” on Twitter. “There is kind of an identity crisis that takes place when you’ve been part of a system for a very long time and then, all of a sudden, you see yourself without that,” he said.
The son of Catholic grade-school teachers, the third of six boys, he grew up in a small town in Wisconsin. He travelled to Germany for the first time in college, with a high-school girlfriend who had spent a year abroad there. He discovered a fondness for the language and went on to study in Bonn, Frankfurt, Freiburg, and Berlin. He got the job at Penn in 2007 and did work on the Frankfurt School of critical theory, analyzing the texts of Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer, as well as Marx, Nietzsche, and Kafka. But Jarosinski felt isolated in academia. He’d always been drawn to the radical, playful sides of German thinkers, but others tended to appraise their work with a heavy sobriety close to worship. Adopting the Twitter persona was “extremely liberating,” he said, because it helped him to remember what had attracted him to the Frankfurt School philosophers in the first place: their more literary works, especially their aphorisms. Adorno: “The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass.” Or, as one NeinQuarterly tweet has it: “ADORNO. German for YOLO.”
Jarosinski started talking about what makes a good tweet. “You’re trying to find a way to state contradiction. You’re writing a cartoon caption for a cartoon that doesn’t exist…. It’s the old Gary Larson trick,” he said, referring to the creator of “The Far Side.” “What you really need to do in a cartoon is set someone up for the moment that comes next, after that frame, but is not depicted.” Tweets, he has learned, work best in dialogue form, because dialogue helps readers imagine a scene. “An early tweet of mine would have said, ‘No bourgeois morality on the bus.’… The better tweet is, ‘Sorry, sir, no bourgeois morality on the bus.’”
A good day on Twitter for him is when he can discover “a new structure” that he can use over and over. “I guess I want to see myself as an aphorist,” Jarosinski said. “And not even a Twitter aphorist. I think we need to reestablish that as a profession.” He laughed. In his case, it’s not that farfetched. Two German publishers have asked him about writing a book of aphorisms, he said, and he’s putting together a proposal. Also, something interesting happened last summer. He had to do some research in Berlin, so he tweeted that he was embarking on a “#FailedIntellectualGoodwillTour.” He was joking, but “all of a sudden, all these German journalists were like, ‘Oh, you’re coming? Let’s do an interview.’ ” The prestigious weekly Die Zeit invited him to its office to participate in a staff critique of the paper. Normally, he would have panicked, but he tried to adopt some of the swagger of his Twitter persona. In front of the staff of Die Zeit, he opened a newspaper with a ceremonial flourish, frowned at it, looked up, and said, severely, in German, “Your articles. They are far too long.”
The meeting led to an offer for Jarosinski to write a weekly column of Twitter-length jokes on Die Zeit’s opinion page, the first of which will run on Thursday. He’ll also be writing longer pieces for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, as well as an article for Kursbuch, a cultural magazine founded by one of his favorite German writers, Hans Magnus Enzensberger. “I’m trying not to think about it too much, to be honest,” he said, grimacing. Despite his anxiety, Jarosinski said he’s finding that his Twitter style works beyond the hundred-forty-character limit. “You can build paragraphs with the sentences I’ve learned to write.” Having deconstructed his passions down to the size of a tweet, Jarosinski is building them back up again.
Illustration by Lucas de Groot.
