Departure (novel)

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Aufbruch is the third novel by the German poet and writer Ulla Hahn . It was published in 2009 as the second part of their strongly autobiographical series of novels, initially conceived as a trilogy , the first part of which Das Verborgene Wort (2001) had a circulation of over half a million copies by the end of 2010.

The heroine of the trilogy is Hildegard Palm (Hilla), a simple working-class child who grows up in a village on the Rhine north of Cologne. While Das Verborgene Wort mainly describes Hilla's childhood and secondary school time, Aufbruch spanned her time at high school through to the beginning of her German studies. The novel grants “a touching glimpse into the soul of a courageous and yet so vulnerable adolescent - and, with high spirits and a great epic temperament, paints a detailed moral portrait of the West German mid-sixties.” The human maturation process is described as an agonizing initiation with many setbacks. "I am concerned with the long road that we all have to go before we can become a truly adult, independent person," explains the author. Diving into her own past, from which she drew for this novel, was also painful. The third part of the trilogy ( Spiel der Zeit ) begins with Hilla leaving her parents' house, moving to a student residence in Cologne and falling happily in love for the first time in her life.

Ulla Hahn, 2009

content

Hilla's future seems to be mapped out: children, kitchen, church . But she dreams of leaving the village on the Rhine. Nothing can drive out the longing for freedom of the spirit in the child of little people. Unexpectedly, a new life is offered to her: Abitur, university studies, her self-chosen future lies ahead of her. It is the first day after the Christmas break in January 1963; the teaching staff of the Aufbaugymnasium decided to admit the seventeen year old to the current school year. On this day, the inquisitive "child of a proletarian " finally begins the long-awaited new life in which the simple truths of the parents no longer apply, in which the humpback while working in the paper mill is replaced by the freedom of words. German and Latin become her favorite subjects. In the subject of mathematics, however, it fails and can only meet the high school requirements with the help of tutoring. Hilla is also less lucky in love affairs, as in The Hidden Word . At the side of the rich chocolate manufacturer's son and geology student Godehard van Keuken, she temporarily gets to know the glittering contrasting world of the German economic wonderland, drinks champagne, tastes caviar, enjoys truffles, goes to the opera and sees Wagner's Lohengrin , but ultimately has to find out that she is for Godehard is only a stopgap for his fiancée, who died early of leukemia . It should be like another, a copy that is not allowed to develop a life of its own - intolerable for the increasingly self-consciously emancipating girl. When Godehard thoughtlessly referred to Hilla's parents' house as a “hole” after a visit from which he would get “his little wife” out, this aroused their proletarian pride. Hilla no longer wants to be bent and separates from Godehard.

The history lessons of her committed teacher Rebmann also contributed to her further emancipation. When he asked the class one day to ask their parents about the time of National Socialism in order to collect material for their annual work - a provocation that earned him the accusation of "well poisoner and nest polluter" - it surprisingly turns out that Hillas Grandmother hid a Jew who was abused by the Nazis in the “ Third Reich ”; a risky heroic deed about which she kept shamefaced silence and which Hilla's mother still accuses her today: “It could have sent us all to death.” Even this unique example of courage and compassion could not free the family from their petty-bourgeois prudence.

The words of the books, which Hilla “was previously forbidden to read in her strictly Catholic parental home, are now pouring into her with all her might. It reads all over the place through the great literature from Goethe to Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Thomas Mann . Hilla does not strive for the light-footed amusement of her peers. For her, freedom means, above all, a spiritual liberation from the narrowness of her conservative upbringing. ”However, that changes suddenly when one night on the way home from a festival of the Catholic rural youth she misses the last bus, lets herself be taken in a car and three Men being raped in a clearing. She, who until then had been admonished from all sides to watch out for her virginal innocence and not to gamble away her most precious “capital” lightly, suddenly becomes a sexual victim for whom a world collapses. Similar to the author herself, who describes the fatal effects of the act of violence, but not a word of the act itself, Hilla fails to speak for the first time. Just don't talk about the crime: “Worse than what happened was that it would come to light, that I couldn't keep it to myself, that it would be coaxed from me, even if this 'one' was just a piece of paper and a pen She doesn't even confide in her beloved younger brother Bertram, with whom she shares a love of the Latin language and talks about many of her worries and needs. Her shame is too great, her "excessive guilt", which she repeatedly reproaches for herself, "Hilla's self-guilt". She hushed up all traces of the act of violence, desperately tried to wash herself clean of the shame in the Rhine and armed herself against the unspeakable pain by killing it and developing an impenetrable "capsule" that cuts off all feelings. In order to fade out reality and create a new world, "a world of mildness, beauty, self-oblivion", she hides behind a "paper existence": under her Latin student name, she begins a fictional diary, the "diary." the Petra Leonis ", says it on the cover sheet" Beati Dies "(Happy Days) - and there" I threw off the burden of my real life and practiced the art of seeing things as they are not. "

At least she now shows a certain understanding of her father, even if she defends herself internally, who has also cut himself off from the outside world and crawled into his work: On a long walk to the Rhine, the first that Josef Palm in undertakes his life with his daughter, he tells her how he suffered from his father's suicide and when he tried to acquire knowledge through books, just like Hilla today, was almost crippled by his stepfather. Although Hilla secretly gets 1000 marks from her father on this occasion for studying in Cologne and the pastor can arrange a room for her in the catholic dormitory in Cologne, although things seem to be developing entirely in Hilla's sense, the rape has her Life torn and divided into a time “before the clearing” and a time “after the clearing”. Hilla succeeds only very gradually in repressing the trauma she has suffered. She cannot overcome it. Especially not when she tries to bury herself in her German studies , especially since she is at first quite perplexed and lonely in the face of the elitist world of the detached professorial university business with its musty atmosphere and the repellent technical jargon.

reception

Pia Reinacher (FAZ) sees Aufbruch primarily as a development novel and a carefully compiled social study that understands how to vividly demonstrate the role of German women in the Adenauer era and the German economic boom. Even if she gently criticizes Hahn's occasional exuberant love of storytelling or criticizes the fact that the story now and then sinks into the trivial, she ultimately considers Aufbruch to be a very solidly composed novel that succeeds in making the agonizing generation conflict of the time authentic and comprehensible for modern readers to make: “ Aufbruch is a mixture of development novel, self-questioning epic, social and contemporary history - whereby the slight tendency to read should not be suppressed. Much is embellished a little, others stylized, an occasional excessive joy of storytelling is carried forward by the author in some passages almost uncontrollably. And yet, picture by picture, a faded epoch is brought onto the reader's canvas. The exact description of the milieu is due to the craftsmanship of the writer. Ulla Hahn has undoubtedly researched extensively, compiled a lot of ethnological, sociological and historical material and translated it into powerful scenes. [...] It should not be kept secret that this six hundred-page novel could have used a few cuts. The contours of some scenes would have become sharper, some is drowned in the rippling river of the novel. A few scenes of this educational and fateful novel are etched in the reader's memory. [...] With these scenes Ulla Hahn subtly and energetically depicts the painful attempts of the parents' generation to refuse to talk about the past and the stubborn demands of the children for memories - also symptomatic of the sixties - and does not hide how Parents and children were mutually helpless. "

Judith Luig (taz) accuses the author of clinging too much to her autobiography and of wanting to knit her own legend of saints. The "strangely untouched" contemporary witness and model student Hilla does not really gain a life of its own. In contrast to the first part of the trilogy, the linguistic style is often too artificial instead of artistic or too flat, especially when it comes to the amorous aspects of the story.

Susanne Mayer (Die Zeit) describes the awakening as an "educational miracle story from post-war Germany", a remarkable story of ascent into a privileged world, which is always most convincing where you can feel the doggedness that such a development demands, and always palest where it is appear as a mere historical collection of material that tries just as hard as it is in vain to become a living panorama of time.

Small historical mistakes

On page 297, a party in 1964/65 is described, at which the song "Beautiful Maid" was played and sung by the guests. This is not possible in terms of time. This Polynesian folk song only became so popular in 1971 through Tony Marshall that German listeners were able to sing along with it (hit record. Deutsche Chart Singles 1956–1980. Hamburg 1990, p. 136).

On page 333 it is mentioned that Hilla fantasizes about “jumbo jets” in her diary. But the first aircraft to be called a jumbo jet, Boeing 747, didn't hit the market until February 9, 1969.

expenditure

Sound carrier

filming

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The well-known poet Hilde Domin was also called (after her marriage) with her real name Hilde Palm. Since her biography shows some parallels to Ulla Hahn's (born in Cologne, feminist, SPD member) and since Ulla Hahn gave the eulogy for her colleague in 1992, when Hilde Domin was awarded the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize , it can be assumed that that Ulla Hahn wanted to honor her namesake by choosing the name of her protagonist or even to suggest that she regards her as her role model. There is also another allusion within the novel to the fact that there is a connection between Hildegard Palm and Hilde Palm, alias Hilde Domin: In Latin classes, Hilla Petra calls herself Leonis (stone of the lion) and uses this pseudonym to write her later diary Beati Dies (Happy Days). This in turn is reminiscent of the family name Hilde Domins: Her Jewish father was the Cologne judicial officer Eugen Siegfried Löwenstein (1871–1942).
  2. ↑ The blurb of the DVA output
  3. ↑ MDR, FIGARO, broadcast on December 1, 2009
  4. ↑ Ulla Hahn herself revealed in an interview that she, like her protagonist , was once a victim of rape and that it took years to allow the memory of the fatal event to be remembered. That's why she kept rewriting this chapter of her novel before it got its current form.- Cf. Pia Reinacher, “Brave Latins come everywhere”, in: FAZ, October 14, 2009.
  5. ↑ See Note 1 (see above).
  6. ^ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 14, 2009
  7. ↑ the daily newspaper, October 14, 2009
  8. ^ Die Zeit, December 3, 2009
  9. ↑ Departure , IMDB entry