Breathing swing

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Atemschaukel is a novel by Herta Müller published in 2009 , which was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in the same year . In it, Leopold Auberg, a seventeen-year-old from Transylvania , reports on his deportation to the Novo- Gorlowka labor camp in Soviet Ukraine . The persecution of Romanian Germans under Stalin is made visible in an individual story. The novel, published by Hanser Verlag , was shortlisted for the 2009 German Book Prize .

The main motives are hunger and homesickness .

Reading "Atemschaukel", Potsdam, July 2010

action

Seventeen-year-old Leopold Auberg is a member of the ethnic group of the Transylvanian Saxons and is deported by the advancing Soviet soldiers for labor service in the Soviet Union. When he arrived at the camp, he lived through five years of deprivation and hunger. Suppressed by the guards and the natshalnik (comparatively Kapo ) Tur Prikulitsch, however, he adapts himself mentally and physically to camp life and comes to terms with the circumstances.

Even after his release from the camp, Leopold is still under the impression of what he experienced there.

Emergence

The author collected the material in conversations with the poet Oskar Pastior and other survivors. In 2004 Ernest Wichner , Oskar Pastior and Herta Müller traveled to places of former forced labor camps in Ukraine with the support of the Robert Bosch Foundation .

Narrative structure

Traditionally in chronological order - with some flashbacks to the time before internment - the story of the first-person narrator Leopold Auberg is told from his internment in January 45 until his arrival at home in 1950, from a distance of more than 30 years. It concludes with a few chapters that outline life after returning from the labor camp and the flight to Austria. The novel is divided into 64 chapters. They are usually very short. At the beginning are the two longest chapters, in which the circumstances of the internment and the evacuation as well as the first strategies for survival are told. Forward and flashbacks are seamlessly inserted. In the flashbacks, two themes predominate, the family as well as the relationship between Leo and their individual members and the handling of his homosexuality. In the pre-fades there is only one topic, how camp life shapes the time afterwards.

Motifs

* Hunger / Hunger Angel

He is the main subject and influences the characters' action. The hunger angel is personified and given human characteristics (“Der Hungerengel amazed”, p. 251). The hunger angel must be imagined as a ghost that the starving man creates in order to be able to fight against him. The hungry angel, as the most frequently mentioned person, moves among other people, you can face him, deal with him or indulge yourself.

* Homesickness

Homesickness is the main theme in the novel. It is the reversal of the wanderlust with which Leo accepts the transport from Sibiu . While the 17-year-old metaphorically reduced the city as a “thimble, where all stones have eyes” and perceived it as a nuisance, in the camp the world of his childhood and youth became a place of life and longing. Again and again the sleepless hours in the night are filled with memories of home: the fear for the life of the relatives and the fear of being forgotten by them. Hunger forces you to think of the local, filling dishes. Every object can evoke childhood experiences like the weights of the cuckoo clock, which in their cone shape lead back to the local forests and their smells and to the hunting trips with the father. Homesickness and security lie in the grandmother's farewell sentence “I know you will come back.” In it lies the certainty that someone is thinking of Leo and counting among the living in their thoughts. It serves as a protection against any desperation during the camp and stirs up the fight against starvation, which many fellow prisoners are subject to.

Reviews

The language of this novel, which is ancient and sometimes clear, sometimes exuberant, preserves the lost world of the Austro-Hungarian language area, in which several languages ​​coexist: Yiddish, Russian, Hungarian, Romanian and German, according to Ina Hartwig . Müller's word formations such as “Eigenbrot” and “Herzschaufel” as well as “Atemschaukel” remind Hartwig of the early poetry of Paul Celan . Daniela Strigl emphasizes that Herta Müller has found literary images for the extra-linguistic in Atemschaukel , in a timeless study of the people in extremis , which is saturated with the experiences of the terrible 20th century. The complex relationship between memory and language is attested, says Michael Lentz .

Reading experience

Ina Hartwig reports that with Herta Müller's "Conjuring poetic power in unhappiness" the reader has reached her own limit. This poetic power lies, among other things, in the fact that Müller created a danger zone with the metaphor of the hunger angel, because, according to Hartwig: "The hunger angel must be imagined as a ghost that the hungry man creates in order to be able to fight him." - only that the survivor has to find out that the hunger angel has taken possession of him forever, a stranglehold, according to Hartwig, which means that Leo will no longer be able to give his heart to anyone. Hartwig sees the Atemschaukel as a challenge and as a "difficult and beautiful gift."

expenditure

Research literature

  • Laura Laza: Herta Müller's breathing swing . Reflections on the poetics of the novel. In: reflections. Journal for German culture and history of Southeast Europe. Issue 2.2015, Volume 10 (64), Munich 2015, ISSN 1862-4995.
  • Unni Langås (2013): “Always guilty. Herta Müller's novel Atemschaukel - a report on trauma. ”In: Poetry and dictatorship. The writer Herta Müller , edited by Helgard Mahrdt and Sissel Lægreid, table of contents of the volume (pdf), Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013, ISBN 978-3-8260-5246-0 , pages 149–170.
  • Emanuelle Prak-Derrington (2013): “Language magic and language borders. To word and phrase repetitions in Herta Müller's breath swing . "In: Poetry and dictatorship. The writer Herta Müller , edited by Helgard Mahrdt and Sissel Lægreid, table of contents of the volume (pdf), Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013, ISBN 978-3-8260-5246-0 , pages 133–147.
  • Olivia Spiridon (2013): “From Fact to Fiction: Herta Müller's Breath Swing .” In: Herta Müller. Politics and aesthetics . Edited by Bettina Brandt and Valentina Glajar, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln 2013, ISBN 978-0-8032-4510-5 , pages 130-154. Reading sample for the volume (pdf) Reading sample contains: table of contents of the volume; Introduction by Bettina Brandt and Valentina Glajar; Chapter 1: Allan Stoekl: Herta Müller. Writing and betrayal; Chapter 2: Herta Müller's Nobel Prize Speech. Translated into English by Philip Boehm.
  • Boris Hoge (2012): German Victims, Russian Perpetrators: Absolute Victim Status in Herta Müller's "Breath Swing". In: Ders .: Writing about Russia. The construction of space, history and cultural identity in German narrative texts since 1989. Heidelberg: Winter 2012, pp. 209–235.
  • Bettina Bannasch (2011): "Zero - A Gaping Mouth: The Discourse of the Camps in Herta Müller's Atemschaukel ", in: Other people's pain: narratives of trauma and the question of ethics , edited by Martin Modlinger and Philipp Sonntag, table of contents of the volume (pdf), Lang, Bern, ISBN 978-3-0343-0260-9 , pages 115-144.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Interview with Herta Müller at: Literature in the foyer - SWR television on the novel "Atemschaukel" on YouTube (14:09 minutes)
  2. Herta Müller: Breathing swing . Munich: Hanser, 2009, back of the title page.
  3. a b N.N .: “Herta Müller, Atemschaukel” , manuscript of a lecture in the Lüneburg Literary Society. V. on March 1, 2010
  4. Gisela Horn: "Atemschaukel", Herta Müller (2009), 2010, Handout Universität Jena ( Memento from August 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ^ Ina Hartwig: Shortlist German Book Prize. The hero is called Hungerengel , Frankfurter Rundschau , October 12, 2009
  6. a b Ina Hartwig, "A hero named Hungerengel", in: Ina Hartwig, The secret compartment is open. Über Literatur , S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 2012, ISBN 978-3-10-029103-5 , pp. 97-100, revised version of their review in: Frankfurter Rundschau , August 21, 2009
  7. Daniela Strigl, At Zero Point of Existence , in: Literatures , October 2009 edition, pp. 68–69
  8. Michael Lentz, Herta Müller's Atemschaukel , in: Textleben: about literature, what it is made of, what precedes it and what follows from it , S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2011, ISBN 978-3-10-043934-5 , p 243-250, p. 250.