Aline and the invention of love

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Aline and the Invention of Love is a Swiss novel by Eveline Hasler from 2000. It describes the life of Aline Valangin (1889–1986), who emigrated and refugees in Zurich and later in Zurich during the time of Italian fascism and German National Socialism temporarily sheltered her summer house La Barca in the canton of Ticino .

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Depending on the edition, the novel has a good 230 pages and is divided into 25 chapters. At the end of the book Eveline Hasler adds a Bibliographical Note , in which she lists the literature she has used.

Eveline Hasler uses Aline Valangin's diary entries in her novel and works with a framework and flashbacks. In the first chapter she describes how the 13-year-old high school student Luca can look over the wall of the La Barca estate in the village of Comologno for the first time and learns about the visitors Aline, the wife of Vladimir Rosenbaum, is receiving. It is predominantly emigrants from Germany and Italy, writers and artists who are persecuted by the regime and who are given shelter in the villa for a few days in the summer. In flashbacks, the author reports on Aline's youth and her encounters with Sophie Taeuber and Hans Arp , the Zurich Dadaists and the psychoanalysts of the Swiss scene at the time such as CG Jung towards the end of the First World War.

Among her guests, with whom the sexually completely unbound Aline also had erotic relationships, was James Joyce , but not Kurt Tucholsky . Some chapters deal with Tucholsky, who was also received by her after 1932, and with whom she had an in-depth conversation on a long drive about her short love affairs with other guests such as Ernst Toller , Walter Helbig and the politically active writer Ignazio Silone . Aline later describes in her diary every characteristic of her guests that is noticeable to her. Tucholsky, for example, is described by her as a deeply desperate person and listless frequent eater who cannot adhere to a prescribed diet and no longer sees any perspective for himself.

In other chapters of the book, prominent artists who frequented the house at the time, such as Max Bill , the dancer and choreographer Marietta von Meyenburg and the sculptor Hermann Haller, are described in the manner of snapshots . At the same time, Eveline Hasler keeps telling anecdotes from village life and the family of the young Luca, who is now slowly maturing, also belongs to her guests for a time and sees a lot of the free, independent life of the artists.

But not only Tucholsky, but a few years earlier Karl Helbig and the Italian writer and doubting communist Ignazio Silone take up more space in Hasler's fictional design of Aline's biography, because Aline falls violently in love with Silone in the winter of 1930/1931 because she is one feels spiritual kinship. He reciprocated the feelings of the bourgeois rich woman, and that changed her completely free life until now, as Silone told her about the conditions in Europe from his point of view. But his life also changes while dealing with Aline; he leaves the Italian Communist Party . Her marriage to Rosenbaum is a sideline, as her husband spends less and less time with her, has to work hard as a criminal defense attorney, wants fame, and how she is not averse to affairs. At a meeting between Silone and his predecessor at Aline's, Paolo Rossi, the two of them share their erotic experiences with her and come to the conclusion that Aline has just as much the right to be as free as men in choosing her partners. Many men desire Aline, visit her, but after the affair with Silone she keeps her distance for the time being.

After January 30, 1933, the carefree life of Aline and Wladimir Rosenbaum came to an end, and there was also anti-Semitism in Switzerland. So-called frontists insult and attack the two on the street. As a result, they come closer to each other again. After the seizure of power by the Nazis, many cultural workers have to leave Germany; some end up in La Barca as guests of the Rosenbaums. Eveline Hasler describes the comic pages of the exiles, their quirks and eccentricities . In the 1930s Aline found writing and was able to publish her book Tales from the Valley in 1937. She had one of her last love affairs described in Hasler's novel book with Rudolf Jakob Humm .

The voyeur Luca, who is already known from the introductory framework and has meanwhile almost grown up, watches life in Barca with longing. He is invited by Aline to a costume party and can dance the sweets with her . But at this festival, in a dissolute and erotically charged atmosphere, the Viennese lawyer and writer Walther Rode dies . Aline is deeply shaken and hallucinates . After Rode's death, she is viewed with suspicion by the residents of the village of Comologno. After the beginning of the Spanish Civil War , Aline's husband Wladimir Rosenbaum is in custody. He is accused of illegal trading in two used Swissair aircraft , which could be used as weapons of war, for Republican Spain. He loses his license to practice law and so Aline and Wladimir, whose marriage has not been a long time, are financially ruined. But both start a new life. Aline now lives with the composer Wladimir Rudolfowitsch Vogel for a while, Rosenbaum divorces Aline and later marries two more times. The beginning of the Second World War surprises Aline and her friend Vogel. Out of sheer carefree happiness in love, they had not taken care that money and food would become scarce. Vogel had a German passport at the time, so he was threatened with deportation and had to be hidden. Aline writes newspaper articles and a book: Village on the Border , which was only published by Limmat Verlag in 1992 .

Luca left Comologno in 1939 at the age of twenty-one and studied in Geneva. In 1986, as a newspaper editor, he found out about the death of Aline, who was 97 years old. While researching an obituary, he interviews various people from the Rosenbaums' environment. The old cook Maria from Barca tells him that three people are lying in the Rosenbaums' grave: Aline, Wladimir and Wladimir's third wife Sibylle Kroeber (note: Sibylle Kroeber only died in 1997.)

Reception and review

In 2000, SWR 2 recorded the almost 40-minute radio play The Signora, her Palazzo and the music based on the novel. This radio play was then also released as a CD version.

Sybille Birrer condemned the novel in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on January 9, 2001. She considers the novel to have failed because “the emotional high points in Valangin's life turned Hasler into literary platitudes”, and “the exhaustive depiction of the social environment leads to it purest name dropping ". In addition, she “only repeated or paraphrased the biography published by Peter Kamber in 1990 (The Story of Two Lives. Wladimir Rosenbaum and Aline Valangin )."

expenditure

  • Eveline Hasler: Aline and the invention of love . Nagel & Kimche, Zurich 2000, ISBN 3-312-00269-9 .
  • The Signora, her Palazzo and the Music Radio play based on the novel "Aline and the Invention of Love" by Eveline Hasler . Ed. Isele, Eggingen 2000, ISBN 3-86142-204-2 (audio book - directed by Günter Maurer, narrator: Bodo Primus, Andreas Szerda, Doris Wolters and others).
  • Eveline Hasler: Aline and the invention of love. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 2007 (2nd edition 2010), ISBN 978-3-423-20955-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Aline and the Invention of Love. 16th chapter.
  2. ↑ Aline and the Invention of Love. 20th chapter.
  3. ↑ Report on Sibylle Rosenbaum-Kroeber on the ticinARTE website .
  4. ↑ Niklaus Starck : Under the Ticino sun - a guide to special tombs . Publishing house porzio.ch, Breitenbach / Ascona 2013, pp. 40 and 45
  5. ^ Audio play database : The Signora, her Palazzo and the music. hspdat.to  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / hspdat.to  
  6. ↑ The worn out knitting pattern. Eveline Hasler describes Aline Valangin's love life. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, January 9, 2001, p. 56.
  7. ↑ Quoted from: Eveline Hasler: Aline and the invention of love. perlentaucher.de.