Lassalle (Stefan Heym)

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Lassalle is a novel by Stefan Heym about the chairman of the General German Workers' Association , Ferdinand Lassalle , which was published in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1969 and in the German Democratic Republic in 1974. The work combines historical facts and inventions of the author. Because the SED found the portrayal of Marx and Engels as provocative, they prevented the publication of the novel in the GDR. When Heym did it in a West German publishing house, it had him fined 300 marks .

action

In 21 chapters and two postscripts, the novel tells of Lassalle's rise to the position of workers 'leader and chairman of the first German workers' party, the ADAV. Flashbacks show episodes from Lassalle's life from around 1861 until his death in 1864.

Lassalle must bundle the various currents within the workers' movement and, in particular, appease the revolutionary forces within the party. He finally manages to take the lead in the movement. A highlight of the novel are his negotiations with Chancellor Bismarck . This embodies the type of reactionary Prussia , in whose atmosphere the workers' leader met with political opposition from the establishment on the one hand and opposition on the other for racist reasons. This is what it once said about Lassalle: He was the Eternal Jew, summer model 1864, always on the move, condemned to search all his life. Lassalle goes on agitation trips through the Rhineland and repeatedly has to deal with his compromised health.

The description of Lassalle's affair with a so-called half-Jewish daughter from a better family takes up a lot of space. Helen von Dönniges is already the fiancée of Yanko von Racowitza . That doesn't stop the politician from having a love affair with her. Helen decides to leave Yanko and marry Lassalle. The groom and the bride's father Wilhelm von Dönniges then resist and Yanko finally challenges the revolutionary to a duel. In the end, Lassalle dies after a bullet hit him in the abdomen during a duel.

interpretation

If you look at Heym's work in the GDR, Lassalle stands out as the first novel that criticizes undesirable developments in the workers' movement and at the same time deals with anti-Semitism . Lassalle appears not only as a politician, but also as a Jew willing to assimilate , whose origins and partial Jewish identity are documented in an abundance of places.

The rejection of Lassalle as a Jew can be shown particularly clearly in the comparison with Marx and Engels. Heym added to the GDR edition of the novel, among other things, text passages from the correspondence between Marx and Engels, which make them appear as anti-Semites. Karl Marx, who was himself a Jew and was baptized at the age of six, criticizes Lassalle's righteousness (initially without any anti-Semitic aftertaste) ; his stuck in the 'speculative term' , but just a few lines later called it derogatory Itzig . For Engels, Lassalle is an insecure friend, and in the future a pretty sure enemy . He discovers in him a strange mixture of frivolity and sentimentality, Judaism and chivalry and derails completely when he writes: The L (assalle) has apparently been ruined because he does not get the person [Helen von Dönniges, his beloved] into the pension immediately threw it on the bed and took it on, she didn't want his beautiful ghost, but his Jewish thong.

Heym used the novel as a medium to project criticism of real socialism into the figure of Ferdinand Lassalle. The common Jewish origin was an incentive for Heym to deal with the workers leader and to use his biography to uncover early mistakes of the workers movement. In an interview, Heym said: Maybe there is actually a relationship. He was a Jew and a revolutionary. I am a Jew and a socialist. He was a colorful personality. [...] He seemed like a fallen angel to me.

Other characters from Heym's novel were not only Jews, but also socialists , critics , revolutionaries , prophets , outsiders , dissidents , idealists and outcasts: for example, Ethan in The King David Report , Ahasver or Karl Radek .

literature

Primary literature
  • Lassalle. Novel. Berlin, Neues Leben, [Munich, Esslingen 1969] 1974.
Secondary literature
  • Hutchinson, Peter: Dissident for life. Würzburg, Königshausen / Neumann, 1999.
  • Neubert, Werner: The sense for the essential. [To: Lassalle]. In: Neue deutsche Literatur, 22 (1974), H. 8, pp. 140-142.
  • Nolte, Jost: A Lassalle novel. Trivial infiltration of socialist realism. In: The Month, Vol. 22, 1970, H. 257, pp. 103-107.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stefan Heym: Obituary. Frankfurt [Munich 1988] 1990, p. 736
  2. ↑ On the responsibility of the culture department in the Central Committee of the SED : Herbert Krämer: A thirty-year war against a book. On the publication and reception history of Stefan Heym's novel on June 17, 1953 , Stauffenburg Verlag, Tübingen 1999, ISBN 3860570692 , pp. 122–124
  3. ↑ Lassalle. Novel. Berlin, Neues Leben, [Munich, Esslingen 1969] 1974, p. 308.
  4. ↑ Lassalle. Novel. Berlin, Neues Leben, [Munich, Esslingen 1969] 1974, p. 366.
  5. ↑ Lassalle. Novel. Berlin, Neues Leben, [Munich, Esslingen 1969] 1974, p. 367 f.
  6. ↑ Lassalle. Novel. Berlin, Neues Leben, [Munich, Esslingen 1969] 1974, p. 368.
  7. ↑ David Binder, Interview for the International Herald Tribune, quoted in n. Hutchinson (1999), p. 117