All Souls' Day (novel)

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Allerseelen ( Dutch : Allerzielen ) is a novel by the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom , published in 1998. The first novel after Nooteboom's successful novella The following story was received with particular attention, especially in Germany, as its location was the reunified Berlin and it addressed the relationship between Dutch and Germans and their different mentalities.

Berlin, Unter den Linden in winter

content

Arthur Daane, a 44-year-old Dutch documentary filmmaker, has lived alone since the death of his wife Roelfje and their son Thomas in a plane crash. The discontinuity of his job means that he stays in hotels and apartments of international colleagues all over the world. His own sparsely furnished apartment in Amsterdam mainly serves as an office. Berlin has a special attraction for Daane. The melancholy of the German capital, steeped in history, harmonizes with his own moods, and Daane thinks she can feel the vastness of the East in Berlin. His friends also live here: the Dutch sculptor Victor Leven, the German philosopher Arno Tieck and the Russian physicist and gallery owner Zenobia Stejn. Daane discussed with them all night long in Heinz Schultze's Palatinate wine village about Hildegard von Bingen , Hegel and Nietzsche , German history, the way of life and home cooking. Besides this triumvirate, only Erna has a strong meaning for Daane. She, who is Daane's oldest and best friend, always brings him back down to earth with her direct manner in regular phone calls.

For Daane, his work is primarily a livelihood. He is opposed to the laws of the market, which, in the opinion of television editors, require action rather than reflection. In his leisure hours he works on his own film project, his "collection" of seemingly incoherent scenes and film fragments, which he hopes will one day come together to form a whole. He wants to capture the things that are actually not worth the effort to be recorded: “The noise. That which nobody is concerned with. ”Erna, on the other hand, calls his work briefly and concisely“ muddling around ”.

When Daane arrives again in Berlin in a cold winter of the late 1990s, his arrival is accompanied by an unusual accumulation of accidents and deaths. A Salvation Army woman calls him in the snowstorm to take care of a drunk who is lying on the roadside. At an orphaned bus stop, he has the last conversation with an old woman who waits in vain and dies the same day. A policewoman trying to prohibit Daane from filming on a construction site causes an accident in the police car. In the evening, the former violinist Galinsky dies in the presence of Daane and his friends, sitting quietly in his regular place in Schultze's wine bar.

Café Einstein on Kurfürstenstrasse

But Daane also meets a young woman with “sparkling eyes” and “Berber head”, whom he anticipates in Café Einstein when he reaches for the daily newspaper El País , which she acknowledges with an evil look. When he later met her again in the streets of Berlin, he followed her to the State Library , where he spoke to her. He learns that her name is Elik Oranje, who was born in Spain to an alcoholic and an unknown father from the Maghreb . At the age of ten she came to the Netherlands, where she was raised by her grandmother. Now she is studying history and working on her dissertation on the Spanish Queen Urraca . But even when they get closer, Elik Arthur hides her injuries, which made her a loner, the origin of her facial scar and gives him neither address nor telephone number. When she comes into contact with him, she suddenly appears in his apartment, scratching the door like a cat. During an evening in the Hackesche Höfe , Elik Arthur gives an insight into the hidden part of her being. She seeks the challenge in a cellar bar frequented by skinheads , angrily dances to the music directed against her as a foreigner until she provokes a fight in which Daane is also injured before they flee.

Daane is traveling to Kyoto for a few weeks . There he films "silence" in the Buddhist temples and comes to again. But when he returns, Elik Oranje has disappeared. All she left behind was a farewell letter to his friend Arno Tieck, whose sender was her grandmother's address in De Rijp . Arthur Daane follows the trail that leads him on to Madrid , where he finds Elik in the National Archives. But even her first look makes it clear to him that he shouldn't have come. He learns that Elik noticed during his trip to Japan that she was pregnant. She aborted the child who was not meant to be a “surrogate child” for Daane's Thomas. The angry Daane replies that she has death around her and they part in an argument. Daane gets drunk that night and is ambushed by skinheads on the way home. When he was defending his camera against the robbery, they brutally beat him up.

Daane survives the injuries. He unwillingly wakes up after a near-death experience in a Madrid hospital. His Berlin friends visit him there, bring Schultze's Palatinate sausage with them, and the silent Victor dances a tap dance at his sick bed, which Arthur understands as a ritual invitation to get up again. He learns that a young woman has also been watching his bedside who said she was leaving for Santiago . But when Arthur, still physically damaged, is released from the hospital and leaves Madrid in his old Volvo, he drives past the junction to Santiago and follows the road north.

shape

Although in many reviews as a historical novel , artist Roman , romance or big city novel called, prevails in All Souls episode form, are interwoven in the reflections and observations and provide only a loose plot braid. The cinematic means of the protagonist Arthur Daane are also reflected in the novel, which not only plays with the vocabulary of the film, but also with virtual camera positions. Roland H. Wiegenstein summarized Nooteboom's technique: “He assembles close-ups and medium-long shots into the long shots. A cameraman who works with words instead of lenses and films. "

The authorial narrator , who tells the novel in the third person, but from Arthur Daane's point of view, is interrupted in several places by a chorus in the first person plural. He offers a second narrative perspective and observes people from a non-human point of view, albeit in a mere spectator role without being able to intervene: “And who are we? Let's say maybe the choir. Any registering authority that can look a little further than you, albeit without having power, even if it is perhaps the case that what we are pursuing only comes into being when we look. ”The choir refers to its role models from the classical theater of Sophocles and Medea des Euripides to Shakespeare's Heinrich V. At the same time, he is reminiscent of the modern angels from Wim Wenders ' film Der Himmel über Berlin . It is up to the choir to conclude the novel with a long advance notice - "You mustn't make any promises of our four words." - Four closing words: "And we? Oh we ... "

interpretation

Berlin

The cordoned off Pariser Platz in 1964

Allerseelen's Berlin is a city that has “suffered a stroke”, the “consequences [...] of which are still visible”. The wall becomes a “scar that would be seen for a long time” and which later finds its echo in the scar of Elik Oranje. “Anyone who was sensitive to it could almost physically feel the break.” But at the same time Berlin is also a work of art waiting to be designed. The Pariser Platz is the division of "a vast empty space, [...] as an early Mondrian ". The vastness of Berlin is reminiscent of pictures by Caspar David Friedrich that Daane visited in Charlottenburg Palace . Their total lack of irony, which at the same time attracts and repels him, their pathos becomes Daane the symbol of the German soul, of which he always emphasizes to his Dutch friends: "I like being there, they are serious people."

Daane cannot explain to himself "why this secret love was now for Berlin of all places and not cities in which it was more pleasant or more exciting, such as Madrid or New York." All he knows is: "I'm a bit reluctant everywhere." And it is precisely this feeling that seems to suit him particularly well to Berlin, because in this city “one's own melancholy apparently entered into a connection with another, more recalcitrant and dangerous element, which one could perhaps also call melancholy,” but from the The history of the city came from “the wide streets through which entire armies could march, the pompous buildings and the empty spaces between them” and the numerous perpetrator-victim relationships that had developed in this city, “a memento in which one could spend years This mood that connects Daane with Berlin finds its expression in the time of day of twilight, the twilight, when large parts of the novel play en. "[T] he unspeakable charm of light in the dark," seduces the filmmaker into capturing it again and again on celluloid for his "collection". In an interview, Nooteboom confessed about his own relationship with Berlin: “I like the provisional. I am a master of provisionality. That is precisely what connects me with Berlin. "

In Allerseelen , Berlin is also the city of tension between east and west, north and south, present and past and the border area between these opposites. The contrasts are reflected in the different nationalities and characters of the friends and especially in the figure of Elik Oranje, a woman who has a man's name, a first name from the Balkans and the last name of the Dutch royal family , who was born in Spain and is now studied in Germany. Nooteboom shows in his novel “[t] he entire human race, seen through the prism of Berlin”, a big city that can become a “village on the tundra ” in winter , a “niche” in which one can both keep something and can discover something hidden.

Strollers

Arthur Daane corresponds to the literary figure of a flaneur , strolling through the streets of Berlin, receiving impressions and processed into reflections. He not only observes with the eye, but also with the camera with which he records his perceptions. Nooteboom refers to Walter Benjamin : “At some point Arthur wanted to do a program with Victor about Walter Benjamin, which he wanted to call“ The Soles of Memory ”after a quote from Benjamin about the flaneur, with Victor then playing the role of a Berlin flaneur should have taken over, because if anyone was walking on the heels of memory, it was him. ”The conversation between the four friends is also characterized by“ strolling thinking ”, in which a specific subject can lead to rambling philosophical discourses that are“ en passant ” be dealt with in Schultzen's wine bar.

Nooteboom put it in an essay about the flaneur in 1995: “Flaneurs are artists, even if they don't write. They are responsible for the maintenance of the memory, they are the registrars of the disappearance, [...] they are the eye, the protocol, the memory, the judgment and the archive, in the stroll the city becomes aware of itself. ”And he referred Already here on Benjamin: “In his soles, so Walter Benjamin, are their memories, the things that everyone has already forgotten because they are of no use. He is the utterly useless and at the same time utterly indispensable passer-by, his work consists of what others miss ”.

Disappear

Sigüenza, in the center the cathedral

The Roman Catholic Church commemorates the souls of the deceased on All Souls Day . “The dead wait for that all year round.” But for Arthur Daane they are constantly present, his dead wife and son as well as the dying who are already accompanying his first steps in wintry Berlin. Daane depresses “the unmovedness of the world”, “the traceless disappearance of memories”, which “has been denied everywhere.” With the camera, he fights against this disappearance: “I want to preserve the things that nobody sees, that nobody looks at, me wants to keep the most ordinary things from disappearing. ”His struggle is without illusions, but that doesn't make it any less heroic. He defends the filmed memories against a robbery with no regard for his own life. What remains is a "man in a pool of blood who clasped a camera in his arms".

Arthur Daane's longing to keep things from disappearing with his camera finds its counterpart in Elik Oranje's research on Queen Urraca: “It should be an act of love, she will save this woman from suffocating oblivion”. Both obsessions shut them off from the world and ultimately lead to the fact that they cannot get close to each other. Arthur Daane moves in a gray area, an intermediate realm between life and death. “The filmmaker is in absentia”, as his friends scoff, and later: “You're not there any more”. All the steps in the novel lead him down, to Elik's room in the basement , to the subway , to Sigüenza Cathedral . Daane films his own shadow, thereby becoming part of his “collection”, “a footstep in the snow”, “[e] in part of all this disappeared.” The filmmaker disappears into his own work.

Position in Nooteboom's factory

Rüdiger Safranski

For Nooteboom, who traveled to numerous countries as a travel writer , Berlin has always been a fixed point of his work. In 1963 he reported there from the VI. Party congress of the SED . From the beginning of 1989 to June 1990 he lived in Berlin on a scholarship from the Berlin artist program of the German Academic Exchange Service and experienced firsthand the political upheaval and German reunification. He reported on this time in his collection of essays, Berliner Notizen . The volume was awarded the first literary prize on October 3rd in 1991. He also returned to Berlin again and again later, and so the transcript of a speech published in 1997 also bears the title Return to Berlin .

In addition to the Berlin reference, parts of the whole Nooteboomian cosmos can be found in Allerseelen , from the detour to Santiago , which Daane does not take in the end, the trip to Japan to the poems from the Litany of the Eye . In the Friends of Arthur Daane he set a literary monument to two of his own friends: the philosopher Arno Tieck is a portrait of Rüdiger Safranski , "who can explain the most complex philosophical questions so beautifully that I can understand them for at least ten minutes." Victor Leven, the “pre-war revue artist” with the thin “mustache of a David Niven ” is an alter ego of the Dutch artist Armando . Arthur Daane himself is Nooteboom's image and counter-image at the same time: he is taller than Nooteboom and twenty years younger, which, according to Ulrich Greiner, sometimes means "Daane is a little wiser than he deserves."

reception

Allerseelen , like most of Nooteboom's publications, has received the greatest attention in the German-speaking world since the success of his novella The Following Story . Nooteboom's reputation only reached England "in the form of a distant rumor", as Hugo Barnacle put it in his attempt to bring the English translation of All Souls' Day closer to the British . Berlin as the venue aroused particular interest in Germany. The novel was largely received extremely positively in the German-language feature pages, with striking praise as well as differentiated reviews.

Cees Nooteboom's German publisher Siegfried Unseld placed Allerseelen in a row with great role models as soon as it was published by writing that in the novel he offered himself "orientation, cleverness and entertainment to the great strollers of our century: Egon Friedell , Franz Hessel , Arthur Elösser , Walter Benjamin “. Joachim Sartorius shared this assessment and made a reading recommendation: “All Souls' Day is Nooteboom's most personal book, which has something to say about his belief in art, about the fears and joys in life. If you are looking for a great metaphor for the mysteriousness of all individual lives, you have to read this novel. ”On the subject of the big city novel, Wolfgang Hädecke judged :“ All Souls is one of the most important Berlin novels of the century ”. Rüdiger Safranski, himself portrayed in the novel, also emphasized that it was “the Dutchman Cees Nooteboom, who wrote the best recent Berlin novel”, “but also one great, narrative developed meditation on time and transience”. From Rolf Brockschmidt's point of view, Nooteboom was “in top form in the Berlin Passages [...], the language flows loosely in artful sentences that Helga van Beuningen congenially translated into German. He enchants the readers, surprised by the leaps of thought, while the philosophical debates of the friends are often a little cumbersome. " Allerseelen is" a novel that invites you to pause. [...] A novel of great seriousness, coupled with subtle humor. "

However, the novel also met with criticism. For Verena Auffermann acted Souls "of everything and nothing, from the void in itself, the nature of love, farewell and death." But they concluded: "All Souls has good passages and great weaknesses. Nooteboom stretches his text, even if one likes to listen to the (self) conversations. The book is too thick for a little story [...], the novel the attitude of changing philosophers did not agree with "Christoph Bartmann was:". It is eaten much more talk and in between vigorously geleitartikelt in the novel All Souls "Nooteboom was. “A master of intellectual sentimentality.” Thomas Poiss criticized: “Figures like the participants in the round table remain flat. [...] They are masks whose contributions to conversations are hardly individualized through life stories, so that the quartet's dialogues resemble an upscale get-together ”. For him, Elik remained “a woman without a scent, reduced to the scar and her will.” The trick of “looking at the world from the point of view of the dead at the same time” revealed for him “the technical deficits of the novel. A book that transfers the functions of the authoritative narrator to the hereafter cannot adequately organize its material in this world. "

On the other hand, in the eyes of Claus-Ulrich Bielefeld in Allerseelen the narrator and the essayist Nooteboom played "light-handed and with a wink". He concluded: “Cees Nooteboom exposed the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, past and reality, he let us take part in his search for lost time in an allusive and witty way: a great reading adventure.” For Ulrich Greiner , Cees Nooteboom with Allerseelen "wrote another great and rested, European and cosmopolitan novel". The book is at the same time a Berlin novel, a historical novel and a romance novel and “a win. For a moment you are able to face the passing of time without feeling the curse of impermanence. "Lothar Schmidt-Mühlisch judged:" Cees Nooteboom's most recent novel Allerseelen is even more consistent, more pressing, more painful than most of his Books already did before: He goes through the world and desperately tries to get a picture of it. "The novel is" not a romance novel, but a discourse about the inability of people to live with their conditions. "

As already Nooteboom's previous publications brought the sales figures of the German translation Souls on the bestseller list of the mirror , the novel on March 29 held on July 5th 1999th

literature

Text output

  • Cees Nooteboom: All Souls' Day . Translation by Helga van Beuningen. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-518-39663-3 (the page numbers given refer to this edition)
  • Cees Nooteboom: All Souls' Day . Abridged reading by the author. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-455-30467-2

Secondary literature

  • Iris Hermann: Limited visibility and mediality in Cees Nooteboom's novel “Allerseelen” . In: Journal for Literary Studies and Linguistics 39 (2009), No. 153, pp. 156-170.
  • Matthias Keidel: The return of the strollers . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2006, ISBN 3-8260-3193-8 , pp. 169-194

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), p. 228
  2. ↑ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), p. 126
  3. ^ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), p. 67
  4. ^ Roland H. Wiegenstein : A book of parting . In: Frankfurter Rundschau , March 6, 1999
  5. ↑ See the section: Keidel: Die Wiederkehr der Flaneure , pp. 170–172
  6. ^ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), p. 65
  7. ↑ See the section: Keidel: Die Wiederkehr der Flaneure , pp. 187–190
  8. ↑ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), p. 412
  9. ↑ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), p. 437
  10. ↑ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), p. 35
  11. ↑ a b c Herbert Van Uffelen: Where is the wall? Berlin in the more recent Dutch-language literature . In: Wilhelm Amann, Gunter Grimm, Uwe Werlein (eds.): Approaches: Perception of Neighborhood in German-Dutch literature of the 19th and 20th centuries . Waxmann, Münster 2004, ISBN 3-8309-1408-3 , pp. 189-208
  12. ↑ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), p. 11
    Keidel: Die Wiederkehr der Flaneure , p. 192
  13. ↑ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), pp. 36-37
  14. ↑ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), p. 37
  15. ↑ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), p. 74
  16. ↑ See the section: Keidel: Die Wiederkehr der Flaneure , pp. 190–193
  17. ^ A b Volker Hage , Claudia Pai and Michael Schmidt-Klingenberg: Berlin - a slow drama . In: Der Spiegel . No. 25 , 1993 ( online ).
  18. ↑ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), p. 151
  19. ↑ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), p. 33
  20. ↑ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), p. 9
  21. ^ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), p. 23
  22. ↑ See the section: Keidel: Die Wiederkehr der Flaneure , pp. 170–182
  23. ↑ Cees Nooteboom: The Soles of Memory . In: Die Zeit , No. 49, 1995
  24. ^ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), p. 433
  25. ↑ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), p. 80
  26. ↑ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), p. 308
  27. ↑ a b Lothar Schmidt-Mühlisch: Whoever doesn't cry has no genius . In: Die Welt , February 20, 1999
  28. ^ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), p. 424
  29. ↑ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), p. 410
  30. ↑ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), p. 103
  31. ↑ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), p. 353
  32. ↑ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), p. 91
  33. ↑ a b Thomas Poiss: And us? Oh, we . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , March 23, 1999
  34. ^ A b Rolf Brockschmidt: Report from a city with a stroke . In: Der Tagesspiegel February 21, 1999
  35. ↑ Rachel Salamander : In the Circle of Friends of Poets and Thinkers . In: Die Welt , November 11, 2006
  36. ↑ Nooteboom: Allerseelen (2000), p. 22
  37. ↑ a b Ulrich Greiner : Dead souls do not sleep . In: Die Zeit , No. 9, 1999
  38. ^ "His reputation takes the form of a distant rumor over here." In: Hugo Barnacle: A modern Dutch master . In: The Sunday Times , January 13, 2002
  39. ↑ Keidel: The return of the flaneurs , p. 170
  40. ^ A b Joachim Sartorius : Cees Nooteboom: "All Souls" . In: Der Standard , October 30, 2004
  41. ^ Wolfgang Hädecke: Traveling without luggage . In: Sächsische Zeitung , 6./7. March 1999
  42. ^ Rüdiger Safranski : Time and Reality . In: Die Welt from August 14, 2004
  43. ↑ Verena Auffermann : The widower and the girl . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , March 6, 1999
  44. ↑ Christoph Bartmann: Journey without luggage . In: Die Presse , February 20, 1999
  45. ^ Claus-Ulrich Bielefeld: A nation that stretches and stretches . In: Tages-Anzeiger , March 20, 1999
  46. ↑ Fiction . In: Der Spiegel . No. 27 , 1999 ( online bestseller list).