Farewell to the enemy
Farewell to the Enemies is the title of a novel by the German writer Reinhard Jirgl that was published in 1995 and was awarded the Alfred Döblin Prize in 1993 and the Marburg Literature Prize in 1994 .
Action overview
The main setting of the novel is a small town in the north of the former GDR , where two nameless rival brothers travel in the spring of 1992: the "elder" from Germany , the "younger" from his apartment in east Berlin . It is the place of her childhood with her foster parents, a refugee couple from the Sudetenland . Their mutual friend from Berlin recently sought refuge here after a failed marriage before she was murdered under unexplained circumstances. From this location, the two protagonists, supplemented or contrasted by the anonymous voices of the city dwellers, look back on their fragmentarily remembered stories of suffering in the enemy country, bound together by their childhood trauma and a chain of one-sided love relationships. This creates, compiled by various narrators with different levels of information, a fragmentary picture of existential human relationship problems, reinforced or evoked by the destructive repression of totalitarian systems.
The brothers
The "older one" (born 1953) and his four years younger brother come - after the escape of the father, who was burdened with an SS past, and the arrest of his wife, who was suspected of being an accomplice, on a February morning in 1957 (Chapter 7) and her briefing to a psychiatric clinic - to a children's home (Kp. 10) or a day nursery and are adopted after one year by a refugee couple (Kp. 12). This time of stability and family care with Christmas evenings and holidays together in the mountains or by the sea ends abruptly with the rehabilitation of the birth mother. After ten years, the brothers return to “that strange woman in Berlin” and live with her in a two-room apartment. Due to the emotional shock experiences, on the one hand the arrest and kidnapping of the mother and on the other hand the renewed separation of caregivers during the re-transplantation, the “older one” often feels “lost in the depths of loneliness” and unsettled in love relationships.
The older
He becomes a lawyer (cp. 4) and, with a clever distance from the political system, legal advisor in a hospital: “He knew that no life would be conceivable without compromise; so he submitted to the inevitable, to provide service to someone with his strength ”. The “younger” works as a mechanic and is characterized by his brother as follows: “[He] r always felt familiar & remained what he was: a worker in the East, with his own kind: soulful destroyers amid all of their self-made soulful lies ... .. ".
During this time, the "older one", in rivalry with his brother, begins a relationship with a woman whom he shares as a "vixen" because of the ambivalence he feels and because of her unsettling intention ("She needed me for the marriage") Children's eyes means: "The face of a white fox, amazed like the eyes of a child after a murder". He becomes more and more estranged from the “younger” and finally no longer speaks to him. But the brothers are still mentally and spiritually bound together, as the storyline demonstrates, due to the injuries they suffered together, the period of close coexistence and the fixation on the "woman". The process of dissatisfaction (“bad enough to have to endure my existence”) is outlined by the “elder” in his diary. In the last, interrupted entry (chapter 13) he settles accounts with the system and at the same time with his brother: "In a country like this, [...] where the one-twenty commandment & the only real danger is the constant invitation to sleep, he can Second hunger [...] for knowledge - only finding satisfaction in cannibalism. Missing own life must be replaced by another's life, the flesh & the desires of the neighbor in the enclosure of dying - and in this the spy takes - ".
The escape of friends and acquaintances increases his isolation, which is also the “assurance of his existence” (“I am persecuted, therefore I am.”). A crisis of confidence is the ultimate reason for his decision to leave the GDR: “ Back then he could have endured almost anything to get away. From here, from her. Something extraordinary must have happened between her and him ”. The "older one" makes hints of a "failure of the masquerade"; H. he notices or suspects a disguise of the woman, behind whose facade he obviously cannot see. He also speaks of the “demonic power to hurt oneself”: “And the words, the individual sounds - they were the salt, our own devils, who drove us out of our mutilated paradise ...”. Later on on his journey he will try to fathom these inner connections. The personal injuries and disappointments are apparently the trigger for his application to leave the West, which is approved in 1984. He promises his girlfriend, like his father before his mother, that he will make up for her, which he does not realize either.
His life in Germany begins with unemployment and financial difficulties before he can work as a lawyer again. On a March morning in 1992 (Kp. 2), the now 39-year-old returned to the small town in search of his real biography, the closed experiences of the “woman” left behind in the GDR and his potential alternative life: “These 1, the I was looking for which there was only incoherent knowledge [...] This 1 is the summation of all my encounters ”. The intellectual research forms the surreal core of the novel: In an alternation of memory fragments and materials initiated by the brother, hallucinations and dream wanderings, e.g. B. through the " Kirke -Land" to the headland, he tries to get closer to his goal: "? Will I find here what I have been looking for for so long: the encounter with this 1 woman - this dark room of all my speech -" .
In an abandoned village in the overgrown former border area, he leaves the reader's field of vision, where the adoptive parents worked for a farmer after their escape and where he sees the roots of his development, the rescue from the children's home: “He was no longer a traveler [...]. There, in this slowly pale place, he would be, incompatible with himself and his images, 1 blind spot, 1 stain. That would stay ”.
The younger one
After the brother leaves, the “woman” becomes the friend of the “younger one”. Despite many rejections, she continued this one-sided relationship during her marriage to a doctor until she suffered mental illness. The younger boy describes her ambivalent behavior in a farewell situation in the subway as a split into two figures: “The other [...] turns her back on the scene with demonstrative indifference. The woman, however, looks over at me ”. Under pressure because of her contacts with the West and supposedly to protect her, he signs an obligation to work with the Stasi .
The “younger” follows the “woman” after her husband has ordered her to move to the small town and tries to resume the relationship, which she refuses vulgarly: “My age is enough for me = that! Pig I don't need a branch like you! Hastu ?! understood! 1 = for = always? yes ". A few days later, the “younger” crashes down the nearby cliff onto the beach and is seriously injured and admitted to the hospital (Kp. 1), where he tries to reconstruct her past in a fictional game with the help of his brother and in this context a virtual one Fight leads, at the end of which the "elder" murders him. As a listener to the voice of the small town citizens he disappears from the scene ("Maybe in the end we told you everything for free - you don't move [...] We could have told the whole story to a dead person ....." ) and withdraws into his world of thoughts in order to continue to remind his brother of his experiences or to unsettle him in the uncertainty about assumptions and probability. According to a saying that precedes the novel as the motto: "The eye will return to the places of its deceit." (After Samuel Beckett's "Mal vu mal dit")
The woman with the face of a vixen
The individuation of the “vixen”, like that of the two boys, is disturbed by a traumatic childhood experience (Kp. 8, 15): the sexual abuse of the father, who previously promised the girl a trip “to the lights”, and that for her approx. 10-year-old incomprehensible punishment for being exposed to the winter cold in front of the locked door. The feelings of guilt resulting from the rejection are later apparently combined with the accident at work of the 24-year-old in a shipyard, which turns the paraplegic into a lifelong victim. Her change begins with the death of her father (report vom Abschied, p. 7 ff.): The numerous male relationships in her unsteady life are burdened by changing feelings and a lust-hate rhythm, which not only affects them, but also them “Younger” breaks up. Symptomatic of this is her cry after falling on the escalator over the "younger" lying on the ground into the "depth of the shaft": "I've finally done something to you -".
After the "older" emigrated to the FRG and her disappointment with her friend and the dwindling expectation of being able to follow him, she married the senior chief physician of a Berlin clinic with corresponding connections in the GDR system and thus received a better standard of living (house with a garden instead of the one-room apartment on the fifth floor of an apartment building) as well as the opportunities to study history and hopes to be able to do research for her dissertation in western countries. She lives in socially privileged circles and has two children within three years. However, she continues her double existence: She continues her relationship with the “younger”, spends a vacation with him on Rügen (cp. 14) and at times writes daily to the “older”, who, however, rarely answers.
When her husband loses his function as a trainer for Stasi doctors employed abroad as spies due to irregularities and his private life and that of his wife are no longer secured by relationships, she has to sign to stop her correspondence with the West (cp. 13) “Manic flood of images of the lonely” continues. In a letter she pleads for the help of the “older one” and complains about “her already vanishing identity”: “Better to belong to nothing, to become nothing, to be raptured, to be absent from oneself: Everything! Just not that sticky = tenacious withering- to equalize and drift while alive - and such a life of constant defense, of sysifos-like wrestling against such titanic pulling down [...] where nothing of the pleasurable, desirous and desirable wants to be found ”. Since a travel permit has now become impossible and the “older one” does nothing (“The knife that nobody suspected in his possession had done 1 cut”), she finishes her dissertation, limited to the GDR materials. Because of the limitation and reduced perspectives, she becomes increasingly depressed and after a breakdown she is taken to a psychiatric hospital. Her husband fears for his remaining position and puts his wife under pressure: she will only be released from the closed institution on condition that she disappears from Berlin, undergoes therapy, ends her contacts with the West and gives her children up for adoption. In return, the chief physician arranges a job for her, albeit below her academic level, in the university library in the small town: "-Nice far from the shot & in the middle of the dust: Frau = Dr. = hist = Kellerassi".
There she lives first (Kp. 11, 15) with the old people, whose address the "elder" gave her for emergencies, an affair begins with the married section director of the university, who promises her to take her to Sweden as his assistant and help her to study theology, her new area of interest. Soon after, the GDR system collapsed, the leaders were dismissed and replaced by those less burdened, and she was demonstrating aggressively against a new lecturer with a Marxist-Leninist past, which in turn led to the demand for therapy and the threat of admission to a mental institution Citing her medical records from the GDR era. She then moves into "Die Eiche", increasingly loses all support here in the pub, prostitutes herself for schnapps and gets drunk. The guests take advantage of the situation and make fun of the “[s] tuded” woman, “who knows everything differently & can do it differently”. She, in turn, finds the villagers "basically [...] puking right from the start" and dreams of the "West": "Get out of here, In the West, To Sweden, To the lights ". One morning, the not yet 30-year-old is found with her throat slit in a moat. The city is convinced of the innocence of its citizens: "It couldn't have been any of us".
The refugees
The adoptive parents of the two brothers fled the Sudetenland after the end of the war and were initially accommodated in a small village, where they worked as servants in a manor (Kp. 11). Because of his membership in the SS, the farmer is wanted by Russian soldiers and has to flee. The farmer's wife accuses the refugees of betraying him. They, however, suspect that it was the son-in-law (cp. 15): “We have nothing to complain about. Punish yourself !! God - ". In order to prevent her husband's “shameful relationship” with the farmer's daughter, his wife organized the move to the district town about 30 km away in autumn 1945, where they got an attic apartment in the goods handling department and a job with the Reichsbahn. As a conductor, however, the man continues to visit his beloved between his business trips. His wife gives up her hope of winning him back and shifts the focus of her life to maternal care: she takes the brothers out of the state homes and adopts them. In the small town, the refugee couple lead a withdrawn life with their small children, because despite occasional invitations and birthday parties with friends, they cannot find a new home. The city population with their reserve towards all strangers (“1 time refugee always refugee So much is certain”), however, cites the “idiotic = hope” of the two as the reason, “this resettlement is only temporary , soon we will soon be heading back home ” and speculates in the paradoxical reverse in understanding passive sympathy: "Maybe they could endure so much with such nonsense in the soul". For the woman, the children are family and home replacement for about ten years. After the brothers were taken away, she became even more lonely, like her husband, who often sat speechless in the dark apartment, much earlier (cp. 16).
Classification and analysis
Historical context
Jirgl's novel with the ironic title can be assigned to the group of " Wenderomane ": The framework story takes place in 1992: It is the time after the end of the GDR regime and the beginning of reorientation (farewell to the enemies). From here the protagonists try to work through their biographies in post-war history. In a typical family constellation, the citizen who is dissatisfied with the social conditions and who has emigrated to the West faces the citizen who has been blackmailed into working with the Stasi. This polarity is deepened by the contrast between the intellectual loner and the worker involved in the system: In the fratricidal struggle, the men traumatized by their childhood experiences compete for a woman who breaks between the fronts in the conflict between rejection and adaptation. Neither of them succeed in building a community or family with her.
Using the example of this triangular relationship and its personal environment, an atmosphere of uprooting and homelessness, isolation and strangeness in the new environment as well as the lack of prospects for people as a result of the Second World War and the totalitarian systems emerges . In cycles of repetition, the same existential human problems emerge again and again, new enemies replace the old ones and the victims become self-centered perpetrators from their inability to develop love relationships. Examples of this are the men who leave their wives behind in threatening situations and save themselves (the “older one” follows the pattern of his father) and the traumatic childhood experiences and the loss of caregivers (adoptions of children).
Assemblies
Jirgl uses the assembly technique in his novel : the action generally follows the research and reconstructed relationship over the four parts and sixteen parts, from the approach to the brother's farewell by the “vixen”, but is not narrated chronologically without gaps but is made up of individual key situations that are discovered during the investigation and faded in as retrospectives: typical moments that bundle the stages of development. Since the events are reproduced from the perspectives of various narrators with their feelings and memories, the reader receives a fragmentary, mosaic-like picture.
- In the representations of the protagonists, documents are inserted in italics: Quotes from a. the brothers, the wife, but also other characters such as the screaming old peasant woman and her daughter, entries in the diary of the “elder” from the time before he left Berlin and letters from the “wife” she sent him to the West. With the help of these materials, the brothers characterize and analyze each other on the basis of their shared information: the experiences of childhood and adolescence, the time in Berlin when they were still exchanging their thoughts with each other until the "elder" broke off verbal communication who, however, lets the “younger” read his diaries until his departure, as he suspects with intent as the “last possible form of speaking to [him]”, since they are open on the desk. The letters of the “Vixen”, some of which are sent daily to the West and written “with all the manic flood of words of the lonely”, are important materials for expanding her portrait.
- In a section of the 9th Cps. the “older one” develops a parody of the publishing house from a consideration that the “younger one” could process his experiences with the “woman” in a script in a literary way . In the form of a dialogue between the “editor” and the “lady chief editor”, who destroy the brother's work with a slap (“You just can't let these Zonis write any texts […] their prayers & whine numbers”) he leads his Brotherly fight continues.
- Excerpts from a book about the death of a conquistador , the readings of the brothers' youth, which is read by the “older” on the train, are faded into the remembered life story as a parallel plot: The march of the Spanish conquerors begins with a show of power and illustrates the brother's path through the City to the apartment of the "woman" ("! Land grab.! This city is occupied".) The wanton killing of an Indian forms the background of the mother's arrest: "Arbitrariness without responsibility". The decision of the “older one” to leave the country is mounted with the end of the “great time of conquests”, although the “promised land” has not yet been found (Chapter 9). The dependency of the “younger” on the woman who humiliated him at the end of his vacation on the Rügen is linked to the arrest of the military leader and his mutilation as well as his agony on the stake (Chapter 14). The failed attempts at reconstruction, symbolized by the woman's photos and letters lying around on the floor of the train compartment, and the subsequent path through the impassable no-man's-land to the empty homestead are reflected in the escape of Padre Ignacio Ximenez, who survived the Conquista, through the death landscape of the swampy jungle thicket, in which he got lost with the rest of the troop: "Everyone knows there is no escape, no survival for us."
The theme of the erosion and dissolution of existence even before death in a lifelong process of dying pervades the novel as a continuous series of motifs : Further examples are the horses burning in the minefield of the border area (Kp. 6) or the surreal scene (report from the father) in the dilapidated house where the voice of the father, who cannot die, speaks the words from the oven: "For more cruel than death is [...] the center of the explosion of memory". This also applies to his sons.
Narrative form
Expressions of the groping search of the two main characters for lost time are their representations, recalled in retrospect, in the first-person form (e.g. "Report on the farewell") and in the linguistic style that characterizes the mental state of the speaker. This means: From their perspective , the reader alternately accompanies the individual characters (generally narrated in the Er-form ) during their activities, follows the statements of those present in the scene, sometimes in verbal speech, as well as their perceptible reactions and experiences the main character's reflections. By superimposing the various pieces of information, the author gives a multi-perspective insight into the processes and the inner world of the main characters and thus enables the descriptions and positions to be compared.
The author uses his own notation with the meanings listed in the appendix to the novel in order to reinforce the language of the characters: z. B. for the conjunctions (u, od, &), numerals (1 killer, I slightly different guess) or the punctuation (!,?, .....)
Perspectives
The plot is presented from three different perspectives :
- from the perspective of both brothers in mutual infiltration (see below: construction of memories)
- and the anonymous we choir.
The group speakers (“The communal I of the Filzlatschen”) represent the voices of the small town people (“Our little town here in the north”) and, like an echo, give the “younger” as their contact person (Kp.3) the stories, e.g. B.- the “woman” and the refugees again, mixed with observations, rumors and judgments: “We think she probably never saw through this intrigue that she got into by marrying the elderly man with this rich doctor in East Berlin! could she have eaten the wisdom with spoons & be smart as she wanted ”. So they view the suffering of the "woman" in a mixture of pity and malice. They feed their comments from the repertoire of popular wisdom (“Nature gets its right and what hits the bars on the first side That balances them out again so much is certain”) and generalities (“1samkeit & unhappiness are like Siamese twins"). Sometimes they change their ratings depending on the situation: In the fight against the “bigwigs” in Berlin and the relationship felt, the “tramp & hooker” becomes “our [] Schann Dark ”. When criticizing grievances, they justify themselves by the historical development that they cannot influence ("The peace = actually we never had that" We don't like to talk about it) as whose victims they see themselves ("Who has practiced friendship & solidarity with us We were locked up here like prisoners of war for forty years. ”Accordingly, when they attacked a home for asylum seekers and were beaten up themselves, they looked for the culprits in the outside world: With the strangers who didn't fit in and dragged the misfortune into the city : "What we warned for 1 peaceful spot on earth, here Until the border opened [...]". They want to restore their little idyll ("We are decent people") and warn: "We will fight back, as long as all strangers are gone!"
The brothers rate the city and its inhabitants quite differently: "They had to [...] under the compulsion of their crowd, fill the ranks & the floor with applause in this age-of-the-mob at the most recent fair of the masters for the pogroms of tomorrow". They link this mass behavior with the leitmotif of enmity (title): The “younger” lets the brother see the changes in the facades and shop signs, the range of goods, the empty factory buildings, the drunk unemployed “Nothing here has changed; there is always the threat of suffocation, the small town always breathes at the end [...] The age-old enmity has broken out in the heated plastic vapor of this novelty here (he thought) ' Not fear, but brutal violence [...] Enmity, released like packs of malicious dogs [... ] because they had recognized in him the stranger, the other, to whom the mistrust was always directed & from whom all evil was to be expected as from the plague of the Middle Ages, enmity, as only one life can be hostile to the other. "
Construction of memories
The virtual journey of the "elderly" to the historical locations symbolizes at the same time a hike in search of the stages of development and determining factors of his biography. In doing so, he learns that, as when looking at the stack of photographs in a stopped train, the images complement or cover each other in different combinations and the remembered contexts shift and the gaps are filled with his imagination. The pattern of the fragmentary, accidental and aimless in the flow of life and in the hardly decodable human relationships wandering around he discovered again and again on his paths. B. in new towers: “The secret code of the floors. Every concrete tower is a bundle of encrypted messages, a few scraps of incessantly flowing, disturbed texts, without origin, aimlessly like the singsong of people singing about their fear in the dark cellar, available at any time & without time: bit pattern of the helots ”.
Construction method
In the 12th chapter, the “elder” sketches his method of construction: “I was no longer looking for smooth speech, I was looking for stuttering [...] the singularity of images [...] The sum I was looking for, I would find it alone in your own head. So I had to keep searching outside for their correspondences, for the individual images, knowing that this work would never end ”. He describes the remembered situations as “monsters, story-particles between the stories” and compares the research with the work of paleontologists in excavating bones and the composition of a skeleton and their search for the “ missing link ”. For research into his life story, the bone fragments correspond to cited sentence fragments and words: “The power from the presumption of words […] That was the nonexistent that existed between inside and outside, the inter-zone of the words that came from? Who knows where, this u the distortions u the dreams: the monsters for I day! These images would give me a different knowledge than that which behind the repetitions of everything that has already been seen and heard a thousand times can no longer be perceived for a long time. "
This non-fixability of reality corresponds to typical features of the postmodern novel and corresponds on the philosophical level to aspects of constructivism or radical constructivism , according to which an objective world is not recognizable in subjective perception. In Jirgl's novel, the inconceivability of the action increases in the solipsistic perspectives of individual constructions, which can lead to cognitive loneliness, but are linked to one another through the correspondence of thoughts in a complementary feedback process (see two “worldview” interpretations ).
Feedback
Integrated into the perspective preparation of the story is the rival attempted reconstruction of reality by the brothers. Both do not simply present their reading of the events, but act like directors, similar to the author, who stage their duel on the novel's playground. In order to explore the brother's motives and actions, try to empathize with him or to guide his thoughts and paths of memory. In this context, the “younger” confesses: “[I] I followed him, secretly, sometimes very far on his paths through thoughts & places of experience that I also knew, only mostly from another, darker, less realistic side (always had to I […] still try my own inventions, bring out my own ideas - & - again, realities on credit […]) them, his ways that I knew, as I knew their letters [...] his ways were mapped out; brightly lit by the reflection of our, my and his, past also the found objects, which now [...] got their own speed ”. And the “older one” imagines (chap. 5) that the brother had to see the scenario of desires with his words and pictures in dreams (“so I will let him say everything I say about it”), and He wants to infiltrate into his ego, which is dependent on his knowledge, and change it: "[I] will spoil everything in him with my I and will make him the product of my images, depending in perfection on my knowledge."
The two strategies build on one another: the basis of this struggle through infiltration is the common information base through the bondage of the early years of deprivation. In this way, the “younger one” can fall back on his brother's knowledge as if in a feedback process: “And what memories I give him of those days, weeks inside this house with its narrow, high corridors and dormitories” “he told me later”. Likewise, the “older” tries to compensate for his deficits with the experiences of the “younger” and to learn more about the unfamiliar nature of the “woman”.
The fratricidal struggle
The author increases the principle of complementary constructions (report of speaking) in connection with the rivalry of both for the "woman", because the central aspect of mutual interest in the brother is the question of one's own identity and the status in relation to the mutual friend .
The mutual occupation begins with the “elder” having his brother fall on the steep slope (Kp.1) and spending it in the sick bed as a silent and bandaged victim: “I let him come closer to the edge. [...] Let him look down. [...] let [the overhanging clod of earth] break off. […] Sounds that he might stammer […] I want to keep it that way. [...] I let him wake up in the hospital of a small town in the north of the country [...] Izig had the ability to hear & remember, in his darkness in his pain ”.
In return, the “younger one” (cp. 2) determines that the brother travels back to the East and tries to put together his past from scraps of memory in the stationary train, ultimately in vain: “[S] o he could have spoken in his silence [... ] I let him see the landscape of the early years again [...] I let him send his thoughts ahead to Berlin, hours away. [...] and in his fantasy I let him visit the woman [...] again after 8 years in his dream of reappearing with her for years. "
The dominance of the elderly
This technique of expanding information through empathy with the other person is developed by the “elder” into a weapon of humiliation of the rival and at the same time to stabilize his self-esteem. But he also wants to find out something about the brother's intimacy with his former girlfriend. Accordingly, he constructs the visit of the “younger” to the “vixen” (“This is how I let this evening [...] end”) as a humiliating experience: The woman accuses him of “stupid imitation of [s] a brother” (“! Werd finally grown up ") and the rival enters the now free space, which he cannot fill with his person:" At this moment he felt for the first time the certainty that he was an unnamed borderline that surrounds the spaces of his youth, had now exceeded [...] and felt that he was entering a no man's land ”. He must have felt like a “thin double made of dry skin” and “saw the enormous space between him and her - but the space was now free ; Nothing in between, not even the ghost of the other brother's gestures and words ”. But he cannot fill this field with an independent personality. The “older one” closes the scene with the words: “(I don't let him see the contempt in her look) […] Od everything was completely different. ? Why should he not notice anything .....: It would not have helped him, one way or the other. ”Because after his departure, according to his version,“ for him, my brother, “the disappearance” should begin. [...] rather, he should see his surroundings and their center - the woman he believed he could now '' reach '' - vanish in a slow, painful fading [...] and at the end of this slow maddening, tearing apart, he would become himself = stay behind ". As an extension of these mind games, which also reflect one's own existence (Chapter 9), he imagines (Chapter 13) that the relationship on the part of the woman was initially only a substitute act of a sexual nature, mixed with humiliation, hatred and provocation, and that his brother, when she rejects him ("Forget me. I was never there for you.! Never"), through his knowledge of her plans, pressures her to marry the "bigwig"), to have the opportunity to come to him, the "elder", in the West.
The limits of words
With his interpretation, the "older" activates the wound of the "younger" to be occupied by the brother and to be treated as a replacement copy as his successor, but he knows of the substantial alienation of the two who initiated the break, and He knows the interest of the “older one” in finding out something about the “woman” and her love life (“allowing her body to appear”) during his absence: “He wanted to experience the 'woman' through me. My words, from his speaking, should speak [for him] the secret [...] That they [= the words] had to experience when they, 'coming from outside', approached the woman 'as close as he could never get': I, coming from his words, should experience this closeness that a love had to encompass. ”He senses that in his brother there was“ always the opposite of a lover ”. The “older” tries to explore these emotional deficits by adopting the borderline experiences of the “younger”, for example in the metaphor of “playing with the hands incessantly & with increasing height of the stairs with increasing speed” and the following fall of the two: “ There it was again: the longing to fall [...] this moment of feeling 1-sounded [...] and above all the pure heaven consciousness - "
The “younger” wants to reverse the instrumentalization, step out of the brother's shadow, be accepted by him as a person and force him to resume communication. That is why he sends him through the stages of the jointly suffered and closely linked past, lures him to the hospital and thinks up a murder scene that would free him from the tormenting memories at the same time, by trying to do that deep in his flesh to reveal the hidden secret of the desire of the “woman”: “I speak. That night he will commit a grandiose theft, an unheard of border transfer. And will have succumbed to this great emotional error. Through my killing, d. H. going through my revealed wealth of speaking - standing there yourself. […] In the infinite proximity to the contours of his desire. He has to detach the skin from everything. Tear down. Open my body [...] To finally set free, to reveal + to make it speak: The secret The desire of words to speak. To come into being. The knowledge from the dark realms of the words, […] In the center of the blood + the darkness of the woman . ”But with this the“ older ”falls into his trap and only gets his own, the“ younger ”implanted words, i. H. rediscover his limited experience but never achieve his goal of understanding the friend through the knowledge of the brother: “If I speak, I will speak to him. [...]. He is with my saying that he gives me, they want to achieve [...] and it should [...] his speech from my speaking [listen ... s] hould it the fascination of these words, the promise of the woman to speak, if he does not recognize the words as his own and takes them to be “ a voice from the darkness of death ”, then he would be “ trapped” himself.
He explains this difference between the experienced, non-communicable feeling and the verbal, thought transference with the metaphor of the “word [it]” (“flesh + figure of a woman ”) that became “flesh” in “the shadowless night” : “Mine Words that are out of his words are not my flesh. [...] The word is left behind ”without being able to absorb and pass on the secret, the knowledge. The "younger one" imagines that his brother will now see his untied face with the "nakedness of the injuries", i. that he looks him in the eye and recognizes him as a person on whom he depends in this situation: "As long as he kills, he is now my instrument". He could despair over this mistake (“A murderer being caught in a murder”) and “I keep the severed part of my body to himself. Take it with you on your journey ”. For him this means: “[M] a presence in his presence. […] It goes on".
So the “younger one” as an instructor continues the memory journey of the “older one” to the real roots of their common life, the nameless village, and lets him reflect: “? Perhaps (he considered) my assumptions actually came true;? Perhaps they all had -That really happened. So much uncertainty - so much guesswork. ? Perhaps my guesses rose with their brilliance of probability - just out! My wishes that the past might be bright and the people in it would have been worried about their actions, so that nothing would be lost, so that, more alive than stone, something of it - of all things! me - would be retrievable. Nothing but wishes, maybe, u Carelessness distributes the events with the hand of chance [...] Apart from nothing, nothing remains (he thought), and everything becomes narrative .....:? But maybe (I still let him guess) That I is another, I somewhat different guess,? I again try to get the image of the woman with the face of a white vixen out of the darkness ..... "
literature
- Böttiger, Helmut: fallow sites . Laudation for Reinhard Jirgl on the award of the Georg Büchner Prize 2010.
- Hörisch, Jochen: Heart of Darkness . Neue Zürcher Zeitung , May 13, 1995, p. 33. http://www.uni-protocol.de/buecher/isbn/3423125845/
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jirgl Reinhard: Farewell to the enemy. Dtv 1998, p. 303. This edition is cited.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 261. Here as in the following, according to Jirgl's own spelling.
- ↑ a b c Jirgl, p. 29.
- ↑ a b Jirgl, p. 139.
- ↑ a b Jirgl, p. 158.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 73.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 195.
- ↑ a b Jirgl, p. 194.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 30.
- ↑ a b Jirgl, p. 31.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 309.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 310.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 321.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 10.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 269.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 305 ff.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 312.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 319.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 281.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 160.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 192.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 202.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 205.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 267.
- ↑ a b c Jirgl, p. 131.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 132.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 296.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 299.
- ↑ a b Jirgl, p. 121.
- ↑ a b Jirgl, p. 192.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 87.
- ↑ a b c Jirgl, p. 35.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 54.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 247.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 287.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 94 ff.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 99.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 7 ff.
- ↑ a b Jirgl, p. 320.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 105.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 264.
- ↑ a b c Jirgl, p. 233.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 130.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 305.
- ↑ a b c Jirgl, p. 22.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 43.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 43.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 105.
- ↑ Jirgl, pp. 92, 93.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 145.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 140.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 141.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 142.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 112.
- ↑ Jirgl, pp. 112, 113.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 224 ff.
- ↑ Jirgl, pp. 15, 154, 183.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 32.
- ↑ a b c Jirgl, p. 73.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 74.
- ↑ a b c Jirgl, p. 76.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 142 ff.
- ↑ a b Jirgl, p. 147.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 226.
- ↑ a b Jirgl, p. 227.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 159 ff.
- ↑ a b Jirgl, p. 227 ff.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 225 ff.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 229 ff.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 228.
- ↑ Jirgl, p. 228 ff.