Martin Suter: Rhyming in secret

Translation of a text from SPIEGEL 48/2018

The successful writer Martin Suter, 70, was registered on Twitter for just a few days when his channel was closed. He had saved his @martinsutercom account and twittered “even in secret / such things that rhyme totally” (channel description). The social media department of Suters Verlag Diogenes found the sudden poetic activity to be strange. Suter didn’t think much of social networks and hadn’t become conspicuous by rhymes. Diogenes assumed that someone else was impersonating Suter and reported the channel. Twitter deleted it without much demand — which is striking, at least in so far as Twitter finds it much more difficult to eradicate hatred against users. Suter wondered why his channel was no longer working and speculated: “Maybe tweets are not allowed to rhyme. Or maybe they don’t want an author whose last novel bears the suggestive title: ‘Allmen und die Erotik’ (Allmen and Eroticism)”. A hash tag formed around the suspension: #freemartinsutercom. Suter sent a short poem from the Twitter exile to a friend, the actor Moritz Bleibtreu, who spread it via his Twitter channel: “You block my account! I’m not writing any jokes! Is rhyming forbidden?” When Diogenes noticed that Suter really wanted to twitter himself, the publisher resolved the misunderstanding and Twitter enabled the channel again. Suter’s consolation: The back and forth should attract a few new followers.