The stranger

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Cover of an edition published by Gallimard

The stranger ( French . L'Étranger ) is a novel by the French writer and philosopher Albert Camus . It was published in 1942 by the Paris publishing house Gallimard and became one of the most widely printed French novels of the 20th century. It is considered to be one of the main works of the philosophy of existentialism .

content

The novel tells the story of an introverted man named Meursault. He has committed murder and is waiting to be executed in his prison cell. The action takes place in Algeria in the 1930s . The name Meursault is possibly derived from "Meurs, sot!", In German about "Stirb, (you) idiot!"

The novel is divided into two parts. The first part begins with the words: “Today mother died. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know. ”At his mother's funeral, Meursault shows himself without any emotion. The lack of sympathy was evidently mutual. The novel continues with a documentation of the following days of Meursault's life from a first-person perspective .

Meursault shows himself to be a person who lives without drive into the day, who is aware of the details of his surroundings, but accepts violence and injustice without emotion. Shortly after his mother's funeral, he begins a love affair, which is later cited as evidence of his emotional coldness. The protagonist is satisfied when his everyday life is as routine as ever.

His neighbor Raymond Sintès, who is suspected of pimping , befriends him. Meursault helps Raymond, a mistress, an Arab whom he pretends to be a former girlfriend to attract. Raymond presses and humiliates the woman. Meursault and Raymond later meet the woman's brother and his friends on the beach, and a fight breaks out. Shortly afterwards, Meursault meets another Arab from this group who pulls a knife when he sees him. Blinded by the glare of the sun on the knife blade, Meursault clutched a revolver borrowed from Raymond in his pocket, draws the weapon and kills the Arab with one shot. Without any particular reason he immediately fired four more shots at the corpse, which in court led to the exclusion of self-defense and unintentional manslaughter and ultimately resulted in the conviction as a murderer. Meursault's possible partial insanity after hours in the blazing sun is in the room.

The second part of the book covers the process. Here the protagonist is confronted for the first time with how his indifferent behavior affects people who fear God. He accepts the accusation that he is godless without comment and does not defend himself. He interprets his indolent [indifferent] behavior as a consistent approach to life. Meursault is sentenced to death by guillotine . When the prison chaplain tries to pray for him on death row, he bursts into anger, but in the end he becomes receptive to “the tender indifference of the world”.

Relationship to the complete works

The novel was written parallel to his philosophical treatise on the absurd in the myth of Sisyphus and developed in literary form the philosophy of the absurd , which is presented in an essayist manner . The novel The Happy Death, written between 1936 and 1938 and only published posthumously, served him as a quarry. The Stranger also has a close thematic relationship with the play Caligula (premiered in 1945) and the novel La Peste . This second novel, published in 1947, alludes to the five years older novel L'Étranger :

“Grand avait même assisté à une scene curieuse chez la marchande de tabac. Au milieu d'une conversation animée, celle-ci parlait d'une arrestation récente qui avait fait du bruit à Alger. The s'agissait d'un jeune employé de commerce qui avait tué un Arabe sur une plage. - Si l'on mettait toute cette racaille en prison, avait dit la marchande, les honnêtes gens pourraient respirer. Mais elle avait dû s'interrompre devant l'agitation subite de Cottard qui s'était jeté hors de la boutique, sans un mot d'excuse. »

“Grand had even witnessed a strange scene in the tobacco shop. Amid a lively conversation, the shopkeeper spoke of a recent arrest that had caused a stir in Algiers. It was a young trade worker who had killed an Arab on the beach. 'If you put all this rabble in prison', the trader had said, 'the decent people could breathe a sigh of relief. But given the sudden excitement of Cottard, who rushed out of the shop without a word of apology, she couldn't finish. "

- Albert Camus : La Peste , Folio Gallimard (56–57)

reception

The stranger was included in the ZEIT library of 100 books and also in the 100 books of the century by Le Monde .

The novels of several Algerian authors can be read as return coaches to the murder of the Arab in L'Étranger ; in their novels, white colons are killed by Arabs. Christiane Chaulet-Achour speaks of “renversement”. The novels are: Emmanuel Roblès , Les Hauteurs de la ville (1946), Mouloud Feraoun , La Terre et le sang (1953), Mouloud Mammeri , Le Sommeil du Juste (1955), Kateb Yacine , Nedjma (1956), Jean Pélégri, Le Maboul (1963). In 2013 , Kamel Daoud published the novel Meursault, contre-enquête as "hommage en forme de contrepoint" ("Appreciation in the form of a counterpoint") at a much longer time interval .

The writer Albert Wendt from Samoa discovered the novel The Outsider (the title of the British translation of L'Étranger ) at the age of 18 and was enthusiastic.

The American comic author Steve Gerber , who read The Stranger in college and found it to be a true revelation about his own life, described the novel as the most important influence on the comic series Howard the Duck and the character of the eponymous drake, which he and the Marvel artist Val Mayerik invented together in 1973 (see the 1986 film Howard - An Animal Hero , which was loosely based on the comic series).

In the novel Ce qu'ils disent ou rien by Annie Ernaux discovered the youthful protagonist the novel L'Étranger during the holidays and "swallows" him.

In the first novel by the only 16-year-old author Anne-Sophie Brasme with the title Respire (German translation: See you sleeping ), the protagonist discovers Camus' novel in a bookstore and identifies with Meursault.

The German writer Uwe Timm published a short story entitled Der Freund und der Fremde , in which he u. a. describes how he discussed Camus' novel with Benno Ohnesorg as a schoolboy .

Adaptations

  • The stranger was founded in 1967 by Luchino Visconti with Marcello Mastroianni in the leading role filmed . The American film State of Mind from 2003 is also based on the novel, as is the film Fate by Zeki Demirkubuz (2001).
  • The protagonist Meursault plays a role in TC Boyle's novel World's End , in which one of the main characters always refers to him and compares himself with him.
  • The British band The Cure processed the plot of The Stranger in their song Killing an Arab .
  • The American band Tuxedomoon processed the plot of The Stranger in their song L'Etranger .
  • The lyrics of the song Algeria by the Irish band JJ72 are based on The Stranger .
  • On the occasion of Camus' 100th birthday, Der Fremde was also published as a graphic novel : Jacques Ferrandez, Der Fremde - Die Graphic Novel - based on the novel by Albert Camus - based on a translation by Uli Aumüller , Jacoby Stuart publishing house 2013 (French original edition at Gallimard), ISBN 978-3-942787-21-5 .
  • The British composer Susan Oswell wrote a commissioned symphony Choréografic - Der Fremde based on motifs from the novel, which premiered on October 16, 2015 at the Trier Theater (choreography: Rosamund Gilmore ).

See also

literature

Primary
Secondary
  • Emmy Greuter: The strangeness in the work of Albert Camus (= Diss. Phil. University of Zurich 1963).
  • Brian T. Fitch: Le sentiment d'étrangeté chez André Malraux, Sartre, Camus et Simone de Beauvoir. Paris 1964. (Bibliothèque des Lettres Modernes, 5)
  • William Wolfgang Holdheim: The miscarriage of justice as a literary problem. Comparative analysis of a narrative topic. de Gruyter, Berlin 1969
  • Peter V. Zima : The indifferent hero. Text-sociological studies on Sartre, Alberto Moravia and Camus. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1983. 2., verb. Trier 2004. (Literature, Imagination, Reality. Volume 33)
  • Klaus Heitmann : Camus' “Stranger” - an offer of identification for young readers? In: Romance journal for the history of literature. 1983, pp. 487-505.
  • Eberhard Schmidhäuser : From crime to punishment. Albert Camus' "The Stranger". A way out of the absurdity of human existence. Verlag Müller, Heidelberg 1992. (Series of the Juristische Studiengesellschaft Karlsruhe, issue 202)
  • Margot Fleischer: Two absurdities: Camus' “Caligula” and “The Stranger”. An interpretation. Königshausen & Neumann Würzburg 1998.
  • Kathrin Glosch: "Cela m'était égal". On the staging and function of indifference in 20th century French literature. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2001
  • Wolfhard Kaiser: L'Étranger - The Stranger. Interpretation aid German - French. Stark Verlag 2001 ISBN 3-89449-542-1 .
  • Brigitta Coenen-Mennemeier: Existence and the absurd. Sartre's La nausée, 1938 and Camus' "L'étranger", 1942. In: Henning Krauss (Ed.): French literature. Volume: Wolfgang Asholt (Ed.): 20th century: Roman. Stauffenburg, Tübingen 2007, pp. 219–268. (Stauffenburg interpretations)
  • Christof Rudek: The indifferent. Analyzes of the conception of characters by Dostoyevsky, Moravia, Camus and Queneau. Erich Schmidt, Berlin 2010. (= Wuppertaler Schriften. Allgemeine Literaturwissenschaft, 14) ISBN 978-3-503-09896-5 .
  • Klaus Bahners: Camus, The Stranger. Interpretation. In: King's Explanations . 61. C. Bange, Hollfeld 2016, ISBN 978-3-8044-2018-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Christiane Chaulet-Achour: Albert Camus, Alger L'Étranger et autres récits. Atlantica, Biarritz 1998, p. 102. On p. 109 the author writes: “L'Arabe vaincu de L'Étranger , l'Arabe confondu avec le soleil, l'Arabe que l'on oublie sitôt le meurtre accompli devient, dans Nedjma , vainqueur, agissant et présent. "
  2. ^ First edition in 2013 in Algiers by Editions barzakh, edition in France in 2014 by Actes Sud, ISBN 978-2-330-03372-9
  3. ^ Albert Wendt: Discovering "The Outsider" In: Adèle King (Ed.): Camus's L'Etranger: Fifty Years On. Macmillan, Basingstoke 1992, p. 48.
  4. ↑ Schroeder, Darren (2001): Steve Gerber: An Absurd Journey Part I , SilverBulletComicBooks.com, June 7, 2001
  5. ↑ Annie Ernaux: Ce qu'ils disent ou rien. Gallimard 1977, folio no. 2010, p. 32.
  6. ^ Anne-Sophie Brasme: Respire (= Le livre de poche. 15364). Fayard, Paris 2001, p. 140.
  7. ↑ Uwe Timm, Der Freund und der Fremde , Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2005, pp. 64–67, 91–95 and 128–129