Farewell to my parents

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Farewell to the Parents is an autobiographical story publishedin 1961 and one of the main works by Peter Weiss . The occasion of the text was triggered by the death of Weiss' mother in December 1958 and his father in March 1959 "the realization of a completely unsuccessful attempt to live together in which the members of a family had stayed together for a few decades".

content

The narrative begins with an account of the death of the parents, which is the reason for recapitulating the childhood and youth of the first-person narrator. From a very early age, the narrator felt like an outsider. The tense father-son relationship in particular proves to be formative: “The father's never tiring energy paralyzes the activity of the dreamy, sensitive boy. He cannot decide to pursue a practical career, fails as an apprentice in a department store and as a volunteer in his father's office. ”The narrator wants to become an artist. But even "attending the art academy [...] only proves his inability to live on his own." After returning to the house of his parents, who had emigrated to Sweden, the narrator suffers a life crisis and falls into a "state of mind." deranged ”. In Sweden he worked as a laboratory technician for two more years before a vision made him leave.

Literary form

Although written down without paragraphs and seemingly without interruption, "the story shows from the first sentence on that it [...] is not intended to clarify the situation, but is already the confidently formulated result of a previous inner coping process." According to Arnd Beise , the narrator draws on a regularly repeated narrative scheme: “As a rule, the narrator approaches a thematic block through an associative transition, then abandons himself to the remembrance of individual events, before he summarizes the sequence, a reflection of the reported or its contextualization [...]. ”Through the technique of linking precise memory images with passages of retrospective reflection, Peter Weiss achieves a narrative condensation that gives the childhood and youth story an exemplary character beyond the individual case.

Radio and film editing

Radio play director Karl Bruckmaier produced a 292-minute radio version of the story Farewell to Parents for Bayerischer Rundfunk in 2013. The speaker was Robert Stadlober . The broadcast dates of the three-part, unabridged audio version were April 12, 19 and 26, 2013 ( Bayern 2 ).

Austrian-born Astrid Johanna Ofner made her debut as a feature film director at the Locarno Festival on August 10, 2017 with the contribution Farewell to Parents According to Weiss' autobiographical story .

expenditure

  • Peter Weiss: Farewell to my parents. Narration . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1961.
  • Peter Weiss: Farewell to my parents . Philipp Reclam jun., Leipzig 1980. (Bibliophile edition as Leporello.)
  • Peter Weiss: Farewell to my parents. Narration (= Suhrkamp BasisBibliothek. 77). 7th edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-518-01700-5 (commented by Axel Schmolke).

literature

Essays
  • Christof Hamann : Subject staging and ideology criticism. Writing processes in Peter Weiss' “Farewell to Parents”. In: Hansjörg Bay, Christof Hamann (Ed.): Ideology after its 'end'. Social criticism between Marxism and postmodernism . Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 1994, ISBN 3-531-12626-1 , pp. 294-316.
  • Michaela Holdenried: Messages from a stranger. Identity, language and fiction in the early autobiographical writings “Farewell to Parents” and “Vanishing Point”. In: Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss , Jürgen Schutte (Ed.): Peter Weiss, life and work . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-518-04412-5 , pp. 155-173 (book accompanying the exhibition of the same name, Akademie der Künste (Berlin) , February 24 to April 28, 1991).
  • Tanja van Hoorn: Peter Weiss '"Farewell to Parents" and Marguerite Duras ' " The Lover ". Two models of autobiographical narration. A contrasting comparison. In: Michael Hofmann, Martin Rector, Jochen Vogt (eds.): Peter-Weiss-Jahrbuch, Volume 10 . Röhrig Universitätsverlag, St. Ingbert 2001, ISSN  1438-8855 , pp. 75-102.
  • Ingo Irsigler, Kai Sina: Farewell to my parents. On the generation concept in prose texts from the 1960s. In: Gerhard Lauer (Hrsg.): Literary scientific contributions to generation research . Wallstein, Göttingen 2010, pp. 132–162.
  • Jürgen Schutte : “Childhood no longer exists.” Comments on the autobiographical discourse in Peter Weiss' “Farewell to Parents”. In: Irmela von der Lühe, Anita Runge (Hrsg.): Change of places. Studies on the change in literary historical consciousness; Festschrift for Anke Bennholdt-Thomsen . Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 1997, ISBN 3-89244-254-1 , pp. 334-345.
Books
  • Nils Göbel: “We cannot invent a form that does not exist in us”. Genre issues, intertextuality and language criticism in 'Farewell to Parents' and 'Vanishing Point' by Peter Weiss . Tectum-Verlag, Marburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-8288-9278-1 .
  • Axel Schmolke: The constant work from one situation to another. Structural change and biographical readings in the variants of Peter Weiss' “Farewell to Parents” . Dissertation . Röhrig University Press, St. Ingbert 2006, ISBN 3-86110-414-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Gert Woerner: Farewell to the parents. In: Kindlers Literature Lexicon. 3rd, completely revised edition. Edited by Heinz Ludwig Arnold. Volume 17 Vil-Z. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2009, p. 301.
  2. ↑ Peter Weiss: Farewell to the parents. Narrative. In: Peter Weiss. Prosa 2. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991 (Peter Weiss. Works in six volumes. Ed. By Suhrkamp Verlag in collaboration with Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss, 2), p. 59.
  3. ↑ Peter Weiss: Farewell to the parents. Narrative. In: Peter Weiss. Prose 2. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 139.
  4. ^ Gert Woerner: Farewell to the parents. In: Kindlers Literature Lexicon. 3rd, completely revised edition. Edited by Heinz Ludwig Arnold. Volume 17 Vil-Z. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2009, p. 302.
  5. ↑ a b Arnd Beise: Peter Weiss. Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart 2002, p. 215.