When I ate schnapps cherries with Hitler
When I ate Schnapskirschen with Hitler is a youth novel by Manja Präkels , which was published by Verbrecher-Verlag in 2017 and has won several literary prizes.
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The book describes the youth in the East German province, in which the first-person narrator Mimi Schulz repeatedly has to deal with right-wing radical youth. The plot is told in flashbacks in four parts, which stretch from the GDR period through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the first few years after the fall of the city to the present.
Mimi and Oliver are friends with neighbors in a small town on the Havel, who have become increasingly alienated with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Mimi has to watch as Oliver radicalizes himself in the right-wing milieu, leads a rampaging youth gang under the nickname Hitler and controls the local drug trade.
Form and language
The novel is told chronologically from the perspective of the protagonist Mimi, who looks back on formative events from her childhood and school days in the former GDR . The language of the novel is paratactic throughout ; In other words, the author prefers simple sentences and avoids subordinate clauses or complex and nested sentence formations. Through the use of language and style features that have developed in the GDR vocabulary or come from the local dialect , as well as terms from youth and colloquial language, the language of the novel appears authentic .
Background information
Right-wing riots in Hoyerswerda and Rostock-Lichtenhagen
In 1991 right-wing extremists pelted migrant homes with incendiary devices in Hoyerswerda . Vietnamese , among others , but also migrants of other origins lived in one of these homes . The riots in Hoyerswerda lasted a week. All of this was reported in the media and the fear of right-wing extremists in Germany was heightened by this event. This story has a strong influence on the novel, as it took place around the same time as the novel tells about (1991). The right-wing extremists who appear in the novel, u. a. Oliver and his friends may have taken this as an example and the hatred towards the migrants was significantly increased by this event.
The racist attack by right-wing extremists on the sunflower house in Rostock-Lichtenhagen in 1992 is mentioned in the chapter “Lying down” on page 151. This supports the description of the Nazis in the book and also in relation to Oliver ("Hitler"), whose cruel actions are mentioned in the previous section.
Dr. Hieronymus Gaul
Dr. In the book, Hieronymus Gaul is the editor-in-chief of the newspaper that Mimi works for. He appears selfish and is feared by the employees. The editor-in-chief embodies the superior Alexander Gauland of the Märkische Allgemeine , for whom Manja Präkels worked. Since Hieronymus was a saint and Gauland is now part of the AfD, the name Hieronymus Gaul could be interpreted as "holy Gauland" for the right-wing political scene.
Krischi & the attack on the wolf cave
Manja Präkels dedicates her novel to Ingo Ludwig, who was seriously injured by several right-wing skinheads in a Brandenburg discotheque in 1992 and died from his injuries. The character Krischi, who comes from her novel, which is brought closer here, has often been to pubs and was killed by the Nazis there (see pp. 147–148 in the book). The statement on the 1992 case was published by the Brandenburg Office for the Protection of the Constitution in 1994 , it reads: "He was brought to a motor vehicle by several young people who belong to the 'right-wing' scene He then died in hospital. The death can clearly be traced back to injuries sustained when he fell down stairs. " Manja Präckels probably embodied the late Ingo Ludwig in the character Krischi.
Awards
For her novel, Manja Präkels received the 2018 Youth Literature Prize, the 2018 Anna Seghers Prize and the 2018 Kranichstein Youth Literature Scholarship .
expenditure
- When I ate schnapps cherries with Hitler . Berlin: Verbrecher-Verlag 2017. ISBN 978-3-95732272-2
- When I ate schnapps cherries with Hitler . btb paperback, 2019. ISBN 978-3-442-71786-6
Web links
- Kees van Eunen, Kersint Lorenz: When I ate schnapps cherries with Hitler. Didactic . Goethe Institute of the Netherlands, Amsterdam [around 2019]
- Youth literature award for novel by Manja Präkels. Manja Präkels in conversation with Andrea Gerk Deutschlandfunk.de, January 4, 2018
- Dieter Wunderlich: Manja Präkels: When I ate schnapps cherries with Hitler. Detailed table of contents and text analysis
Individual evidence
- ↑ Through the area | Manja Präkels | Four thousand hundredths | The podcast label. November 7, 2019, accessed April 20, 2020 (German).
- ↑ When I ate schnapps cherries with Hitler - LinksLesen. Retrieved on May 24, 2020 (German).
- ^ Fatalities of right-wing violence in Brandenburg | Amadeu Antonio Kiowa. Retrieved April 20, 2020 .
- ^ Verbrecher Verlag - good books. Retrieved April 20, 2020 .