Abandonment

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Absaffel is a trilogy of novels by Wilhelm Genazino , parts of which were published in 1977, 1978 and 1979.

In Frankfurt am Main, Abschaffel, a 31-year-old bachelor, sits at the desk of a large haulage company and, as deputy head of the “collective exit” department, assembles wagons for goods transports to western German cities. When the young man, son of a retired Mannheim employee, did the sedentary job for thirteen years after dropping out of high school, he was ripe for a cure.

Psychoanalysis

The fears of a bachelor are discussed. The attending physician Dr. Haak initially spoke of a successful treatment of the "comprehensive lack of exercise", but the destructive word psychoanalysis only occurs at the end of the trilogy, when the "sources of mental events" are discussed. Ward doctor Dr. Buddenberg, Absaffel's psychotherapist at the Sattlach health clinic, puts it in his mouth in the final discussion. The doctor thus advises the patient of further necessary treatment in Frankfurt am Main. As a result of weeks of diagnostic discussions in the clinic, in the opinion of the doctor, Abaffel has “a kind of delusion of impairment ”. For years, the patient's job was under-challenged and the patient still hasn't moved far enough away from his parents in Mannheim. So far the patient has tried in vain to accept the marital misfortune of the mother.

It suits such a panorama of the soul that Abaffel does not succeed in keeping a woman. He doesn't want to take a closer look at it. If you look back on the sexual adventures of the protagonist, his work colleague Ms. Schönböck is out of the question because - although she is helpful in an emergency - she is too superficially after a man. The 36-year-old goldsmith Margot would have been the woman, but she leaves Abaffel because after a while he shows himself indifferent. During the cure stay in the third book, the reader hopes for a happy ending. Dagmar, the clerk from Delmenhorst , could become the woman after Abaffel's demanding choice. All omens indicate a happy ending, but abolition proves to be inconsistent.

content

About the three books:

Abandonment

Abandonment wants to be for itself. That doesn't work properly. Now and then he needs a woman. Once he has three at the same time. He keeps the women - an employee, a student and a pharmacist - away from each other with a fine web of lies. The student finds the skin disease in the genital area attractive and stays with the young woman for a while. He immediately quiets the pharmacist, irritably chatty, for any length of time by leaving one of his middle fingers in the vagina. The odor fetishist Abaffel does not wash the finger in question for more than a day afterwards.

On the one hand, he is drawn to abandonment in the brothel, but on the other hand the thought of visiting the brothel repels him. But if Abaffel wants to go to the brothel, then he goes too. In that case, only the accompanying circumstances need to be sufficiently bizarre. The imaginative protagonist constructs the latter. He doesn't choose any of the numerous Frankfurt brothels, but takes a Mannheimer. He visits this after a short Sunday visit to his 70-year-old parents in Mannheim. Abolition is not a driver. The spicy thing: he also lets his unsuspecting mother pay for the tram ride from his parents' apartment to the brothel.

The annihilation of worries

Abaffel wants to make friends with Hornung's work colleagues. It turns out that the 28-year-old chain smoker Hornung, who has only recently been employed in the company's warehouse department, is deeply in debt. Company boss Ajax keeps the new one, a family man with two children, anyway. On his own initiative, Abschaffel seeks out his colleague among his family in his new apartment in Höchst and is consistently disappointed - also by the apathetic wife and the children who watch TV.

Abandonment can no longer stand in the shipping company. As a new source of income, he envisions the pimp profession . A single prostitute should endure him. To search for them, he allows himself three costly attempts, all of which get stuck in the beginning.

During a birthday party among work colleagues, Abaffel is insulted by Hornung. Absaffel leaves the party and, as a punishment, sleeps at the speed of an express train with the suddenly no longer cautious Ms. Hornung. For the latter, too, revenge is the “motive for crime”.

When Abaffel can't get out of bed one morning because of severe back pain, Ms. Schönböck turns out to be a helper in need. The car owner drives the patient to Dr. Wägele to Eschborn . The new patient becomes the orthopedist Dr. Schmücker transferred. Abaffel, the sensitive and difficult patient, does not want to be mothered too much by Frau Schönböck at home. Mrs. Schönböck understands and withdraws. The patient breathes a sigh of relief. The orthopedic findings are: premature osteoporosis with spondylarthritis . Abaffel is allowed to take a cure for six weeks.

Wrong years

Far away from the big city in a wooded area, the patient spends a quiet time together with around two hundred other patients in the “ Psychosomatic Clinic Sattlach” in his single room. The taciturn Dr. Buddenberg just listens. In the one-to-one meetings, Abschaffel asks himself: How much do I tell him? After all, the patient goes out of himself and does not save with verbose reports from the nursery.

At the end of the cure, Abschaffel doesn't even want to think about Frankfurt. He'll probably go to the brothel next. Dr. Buddenberg's observation of Freud's “brothel and mother” complex surprised and disturbed Abaffel. In the absence of witnesses, the patient engages in tirades of hate against the mother.

Quote

  • "But the office wasn't a place for secrets."

Self-testimony

In autumn 1989 the author spoke to Joachim Feldmann and Rudolf Gier about his text at the bay window .

shape

After reading the first book, the impression arises that Abaffel only has outside work in mind. In all intercourse with one woman after another, our hero masturbates incessantly. Such experimental overexploitation on one's own body is exploited in a brutal and comedic way. Absaffel masturbates twice in quick succession at home and goes to the bed of a prostitute as a well-paying guest as quickly as possible. The woman doesn't like the customer's failure at all and has to help manually. To this professional endeavor, abolition feigns incomprehension. He lies to the lady - something like the motto: Today I no longer understand my body. It has always worked so far.

In the course of the second book, the reader is a little surprised to note that the employees of the shipping company are expected to have a lot of professional skills. Abolition always masters the requirements without great effort. The boss of the company - called "Ajax, the white whirlwind" by the subordinates - can make self-imposing decisions and mark the Good Lord (the apprentice can be slapped by the boss), but he always remains discreetly in the background. The reader does not hear of any harassment against disapproval from the direction of the company management. The haulage business always runs like clockwork in Absaffel's sphere.

Some of the narrator's observations are best reproduced. For example, he keeps workers and employees neatly apart during the cure. The former are awkward and the latter see the sanatorium as their new company, in which they have to position themselves and prove themselves as die-hard opportunists.

reception

  • Krauss registers Absaffel's “merciless penchant for introspection” and takes pleasure in passages that describe everyday misery. What is meant, for example, is one of the many “grotesque” analyzes of things in the trilogy - here; two stamps lie close together in the drawer. Genazino's paratactic style suits the reader. Krauss praises this description of "everyday life in the big city", but the whole thing makes an "overloaded" impression. In addition, Kraus does not want to read “poetized psychoanalysis”. The subject is the parent-son relationship; the adolescence of a 31-year-old is designed. In this context, Stockinger speaks of the "invention of parents" and even extends the parent-son relationship as a constituent for Wilhelm Genazino's oeuvre.
  • Comments on the three novels
    • “Abolition” was discussed: by Jochen Schmidt on May 20, 1977 in the “ Deutsche Zeitung ”, by Stephan Reinhardt on May 21, 1977 in the “ Frankfurter Rundschau ”, by Jürgen Wallmann on June 12, 1977 in the “ Tagesspiegel ” by Lothar Baier on July 23, 1977 in the " Süddeutsche Zeitung " and by Volker Hage on November 22, 1977 in the " FAZ ". Investigations can be found in Mechthild Curtius-Helbach (" Psyche ", 1979, no.3), Marion Heister (European university publications, series 1, Frankfurt am Main 1989) and Karina Gómez-Montero (Cologne German Studies 40, 1998).
    • “The destruction of worries” was discussed: by Stephan Reinhardt on May 19, 1978 in the “ Zeit ”, by Jürgen Wallmann on May 21, 1978 in the “Tagesspiegel”, by Jürgen Schmidt on May 27, 1978 in the “ Stuttgarter Zeitung ” , by Marianne Zelger-Vogt on June 16, 1978 in the " Neue Zürcher Zeitung ", by Volker Hage on July 29, 1978 in the "FAZ" and by Lothar Baier on September 23, 1978 in the "Süddeutsche Zeitung".
    • “Wrong years” was discussed: by Stephan Reinhardt on October 10, 1979 in the “Frankfurter Rundschau”, by Jürgen Schmidt on November 10, 1979 in the “Stuttgarter Zeitung”, by Uwe Schultz on December 14, 1979 in the “Deutsche Zeitung” ", By Jürgen Wallmann on February 1, 1980 in the" Rheinischer Merkur ", by Ulrich Greiner on February 9, 1980 in the" FAZ "and by Werner Schulze-Reimpell on September 20, 1980 in the" Stuttgarter Zeitung ".

In 2011 the trilogy was selected for the reading festival Frankfurt reads a book .

literature

Text output

First editions
  • Wilhelm Genazino: Abandonment. Novel. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1977 (the new book 85)
  • Wilhelm Genazino: The annihilation of worries. Novel. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1978 (the new book 104)
  • Wilhelm Genazino: Wrong years. Novel. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1979 (the new book 127)
Used edition
  • Wilhelm Genazino: Abandonment. The annihilation of worries. Wrong years. Carl Hanser, Munich 2011 (special edition of the 2002 and 2004 editions for Frankfurt reads a book 2011 ), ISBN 978-3-446-23710-0
Other issues
  • Wilhelm Genazino: Abandonment. A trilogy. With an afterword by Dolf Oehler: The small room, the world. (Pp. 481-491) Rowohlt, Reinbek 1985 (rororo 5542)

Secondary literature

  • Hannes Krauss: People - things - situations. Wilhelm Genazino's abolishing novels. P. 11–19 in: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Ed.): TEXT + KRITIK. Journal of Literature. Issue 162. Wilhelm Genazino. April 2004. Richard Boorberg Verlag, Munich, ISBN 3-88377-755-2
  • Claudia Stockinger: Life is an (employee) novel. Wilhelm Genazino's Aesthetics of Repetition. Pp. 20–28 in: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Ed.): TEXT + KRITIK. Journal of Literature. Issue 162. Wilhelm Genazino. April 2004. Richard Boorberg Verlag, Munich, ISBN 3-88377-755-2
  • Gero von Wilpert : Lexicon of world literature. German authors A - Z. 4th, completely revised edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-520-83704-8 , p. 190, 2nd column, penultimate entry

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ The established literary historiography does not yet take notice of the later Büchner Prize winner Genazino in 1994: For example, he has no entry in Wilfried Barner's 1,116-page literary history of the present ( History of German literature from 1945 to the present. CH Beck, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-406-38660-1 ).
  2. ↑ "Dr. Buddenberg ”may remind some readers of the“ Buddenbrooks ”and the“ Zauberberg ”.
  3. ↑ The non-psychoanalyst among the readership “understands” the fuss only after Dr. Buddenberg's explanation at the end of the trilogy. The doctor says to Abschaffel: "So you go to the brothel because only there you can hate your mother." (Edition used, p. 533, 5. Zvo)
  4. ↑ One should consider that Stockinger's statement could only apply to works published before 2004.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Edition used, p. 406, 12. Zvo
  2. ↑ Edition used, p. 549, 17. Zvo
  3. ↑ Edition used, p. 548, 15. Zvu
  4. ↑ Edition used, p. 178, 16. Zvo
  5. ↑ Interview with Wilhelm Genazino: " Half of humanity consists of clerks "
  6. ↑ Krauss, p. 12, 21. Zvo
  7. ↑ Krauss, p. 12, 12. Zvu
  8. ↑ Krauss, p. 15, 15. Zvo
  9. ↑ Krauss, p. 15, 6th Zvu
  10. ↑ Krauss, p. 16, 10. Zvu and p. 18, middle
  11. ↑ Stockinger, p. 22, middle
  12. ↑ Stockinger, p. 22, 17. Zvo
  13. ↑ Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Ed.), P. 100 right column below to p. 101, right column above