Ways out
Ausege (in the original: Labyrint ) is a novel by the Dutch-German author Elisabeth Augustin , which was published in 1955 and first published in 1988 in German translation .
action
Shortly after the end of the Second World War , three German emigrants travel from Amsterdam to the North Sea . Marianne and Paul had already sought refuge from the National Socialists in Holland in the mid-1930s , while Viktor, Marianne's childhood sweetheart, only slipped into their homes during the German occupation. This trip aims to bring the reconciliation between Paul and Marianne as well as achieve their solution from Viktor. However, the two men get into an argument. Marianne, on the other hand, is driven by premonitions and demands the immediate return home in order to look after her daughter Dorle. However, this has disappeared without a trace. In the face of possible death, all three review their lives. In a mosaic of memories, reflections and visions, in which the boundaries between life and death, reality and dream shift against each other, they search for their guilt towards the dead.
background
In this novel, Elisabeth Augustin also dealt with the death of her own mother in the Sobibor extermination camp and asks about the possibilities of surviving after the experience of the Shoah . She started working on this piece when she learned of her mother's death. The German publisher Lisette Buchholz made a note of the author's name as early as 1982 before founding her publishing house in view of the extensive Berlin-Amsterdam exhibition. She later got in touch with Elisabeth Augustin, so that 33 years after its first publication the work was also published in her mother tongue.
A special characteristic or stylistic device of Elisabeth Augustin is the complete absence of commas that separate main and subordinate clauses , or other separators such as a dash or a semicolon . This accelerates the speed of the thought process, but also makes it difficult to understand some sentences a second time: “What is the value of a love, I think the one that wants to be answered that calculates its statements. One has to love and not care what becomes of it and how the other behaves. Plants Animals that you love give you love in return, be it in their own way that is not recognized by many. I think those who expect love don't know what love is. They always need proof and if they don't hear an echo then they are sorry that they called out, then their love turns into indifference or hate. "
expenditure
- Elisabeth Augustin: Labyrint, Amsterdam 1955
- Elisabeth Augustin: ways out . With an afterword by Pascale Eberhard. persona verlag, Mannheim 1988, 225 pages, ISBN 3-924652-10-4 .
Reviews
- "In the field of tension between authentic narration and associative-visionary world of words, Elisabeth Augustin develops an idiosyncratic attempt at liberation from the traumas of her own history. By experiencing history as an individual fate, the desperate attempt is expressed here, immediately after the war as a survivor of horror to cope with the ultimate loss of loved ones and move on. " (Kerstin Reimers, LISTEN )
- "Right from the start Elisabeth Augustin virtuously built a world of signs in which there was no end to references. None of her characters lived a 'real' life anymore. It was after 1945, and every bit of the present was linked to 'earlier' life is questionable at any moment. In order to structure that, Elisabeth Augustin uses a method that was very modern in the 1950s, multi-perspective narration ( Andersch , Böll , Frisch etc.) " (Alexander von Bormann, who hear )
supporting documents
- ↑ Viktor, ways out. Mannheim 1988, p. 140.
- ↑ http://www.personaverlag.de/seiten/titel/augustin_auswege.htm