Babel (novel)

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Babel is a 2019 novel by German author Kenah Cusanit .

Cusanit, who has so far emerged as a poet and essayist , portrays a real person from contemporary history in her prose debut, the architect and archaeologist Robert Koldewey , who directed the “most important excavation adventure of the Germans in the Orient ”, the uncovering of ancient Babylon . Outwardly reduced to a few hours a day in 1913 and a minimum of plot, the novel is all the richer in thoughts that the author knows how to combine "with a light hand in the narrative flow". Babel was shortlisted for the 2019 Leipzig Book Fair Prize.

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The German archaeologist Robert Koldewey , who had been the excavation director in Babylon for a decade and a half , was forced to take a break on a hot day in 1913. He interprets the severe abdominal pain as appendicitis, his medical knowledge dictates that he rest, and so he remains on his couch for hours, letting his thoughts wander. On the one hand, they apply to his colleagues, especially their health, on the other hand, to his clients and financiers, the confused competencies and specifically the pile of unanswered mail on the table in front of him. What also worries him is the problem of how the archaeological excavations expected in Berlin (no less than 500 boxes with tens of thousands of colored relief bricks) should be transported there, to what extent a possible war would endanger this and what role the English Ms. Bell could play whose visit he looks forward to. What preoccupies him no less are the profound ideological consequences of his actions: It is true that he is welcomed that he is exposing the cradle of civilization; However, the fact that it "undermines" the historical foundations of the Bible at the same time creates upheavals, including the Babel-Bible dispute . Again and again this morning, however, he is thrown back on himself, on his illness and the forced rest that he is fighting, sometimes with gentle means (foot bath), sometimes brutally (castor oil).

The second part of the novel begins with Koldewey taking heart and setting it in motion. The reason is the news that Ms. Bell was "spotted near the tower". Perhaps because it actually affects his heart too , he does not want to leave the encounter with her to the messenger of the news, his servile assistant Buddensieg, and goes to meet her himself. On the way there his thoughts wander again, this time more stringently. He remembers his last long stay in Berlin in 1909. At that time he had barely recognized the city. In a few years she had completely changed. Everything had been dug and built around and around, much had been electrified and motorized. The association that Berlin could become the “third Babylon” (after Rome ) was formally imposed on him. On the other hand, his private audience in the city ​​palace with Kaiser Wilhelm II , who saw himself as a hobby archaeologist and promoted German interests in the Orient from his own coffers, seemed like an anachronism . - The novel ends with Koldewey reaching the goal of his march: the remains of the foundation of that biblical (thought by many to be fantastic) Tower of Babel , part of his own excavations. The (historically guaranteed and momentous) meeting with Gertrude Bell , a woman with many facets, is left out by the author.

Main character

Sigrid Löffler considers it a clever choice to focus on a historical figure who, like Gertrude Bell and other characters in the novel, may be “potentially world-famous, but largely unknown” . She sees Robert Koldewey drawn as a “brilliant and weird excavation manager”, as a “nerd with quirky humor” and “gifted hypochondriac ”, in short as a “comical hero” - attributes that other critics also assign to him. Ijoma Mangold emphasizes that a multitude of very different virtues were required that Koldewey had to bring with him or acquire for his "deed of the century": systematic diligence and Prussian efficiency, eccentricity and belief in one's own superiority, tenacious patience and diplomatic skill.

Cusanit, who believes she has come “very close” to her protagonist after reading thousands of letters, names three qualities that she has come to appreciate in him: his exploratory spirit, his hypochondria and his urge to be an “overview fanatic” even in his day to get a grip on knowledge that was exploding in all directions (which he did not quite succeed in doing). What she also wanted to show was the dichotomy between external mandate and his own claim that Koldewey got caught in: In Berlin , in competition with the British and French, he was expected to achieve the fastest possible success, presentable “trophies”; his ambition, however, was to excavate ancient Babylon , as he once found it, as a whole city over an area of ​​no less than 10 km².

shape

Babel is not a historical novel ; almost all reviewers agree on that. Some specify what he is “missing”: “tasty fables”, for example, “epic delicacies”, “episodes full of punch lines” and “orientalist heroic legends”. What the reader can expect from a formal and stylistic point of view is described as follows: a “finely ramified essay on culture, in which one rubs one's eyes at how easily and almost unnoticed it changes genre ”; a "just as instructive as entertaining, sometimes hilarious Babel - Rhapsody "; " Meandering sentences, essayistic excursions and suddenly flashing bon motes "; a "literary language whose strength lies in increasing ambivalences and ambiguities"; a text "full of false floors, every observation of the novel about its subject is always an observation of one's own role as an observer".

Suggestions

As a studied ancient orientalist and ethnologist , Cusanit is a specialist. Originally she wanted to become an archaeologist herself , but dropped out of this course. The fact that the intensive research work in the archives necessary for the novel gave her great pleasure is explained by the fact that her former career aspiration now “wanted to live out differently”. Although her protagonist Robert Koldewey comes from the same small town as she - Blankenburg in the Harz - she only became aware of him during her studies when, standing in the Pergamon Museum in front of the Ishtar Gate , she wondered how this had got there. As one of her early inspiration Cusanit calls the reading of the GDR - comic series Digedags .

Features criticism

“A book of its own could have counted solely on the coexistence and opposition of the most varied of Berlin's ambitions,” states Fridtjof Küchemann (FAZ) and adds three other thematic complexes with similar potential, which the novel all connects with one another. Paul Jandl (NZZ) agrees and judges with reference to the title: If the Tower of Babel is “possibly just a symbol for the wrong idea of ​​a vertical story”, Cusanit, on the contrary, emphasizes the parallelism of “conceptual evolution” and posits the " codes of science, religion and art" in a "grandiose, clever celebration of multilingualism [...] with great pleasure side by side". Thomas Jordan (SZ) takes up the same aspect and argues that the novel overcomes this very claim.

While other reviewers put the reader in the mood for a certain willingness to make an effort and to expect a rather low-tension plot , Jordan adds another point of criticism: The text "always draws the conclusions it suggests itself". In contrast to this, Ijoma Mangold (ZEIT) notes that he himself perceives a multitude of "connecting lines" without these being expressed anywhere by the author. He expressly praises the delicacy and sensitivity of these lines: "In this novel, causalities only exist in the form of a wafer-thin spider's web that covers the world and always trembles as a whole when someone clears their throat somewhere."

Mangold's differentiated judgment about the possible relation of the novel to the current debates about looted colonial art is also striking. While other critics place Babel in this context more or less without judgment or suspect a polemical intention (a kind of "slap" for those responsible), he believes that the author does not consider "this cultural transfer to be simply robbery". With reference to Koldewey's far more well-known predecessor Heinrich Schliemann , he continues: “ Cusanit describes what is nowadays called 'contexts of injustice' with pointed fingers and retrospective morality as a grotesque but also impressive mixture of enthusiasm for the Orient and culture of imperialism , of striving for global power and curiosity for the world , from diplomacy and crazy, from chauvinism and a huge dash of German idealism as well as the conviction that the myths are real. "

Awards

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Sigrid Löffler : An excavation as a comedy. Deutschlandfunk Kultur , February 16, 2019, accessed on March 19, 2019 .
  2. ^ Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair 2019 Fiction. February 14, 2019, accessed March 19, 2019 .
  3. ↑ a b Anne Haeming: Whoever finds it can keep it. Spiegel online , January 31, 2019, accessed March 20, 2019 .
  4. ↑ a b c Paul Jandl: Kaiser Wilhelm and the Ishtartor of Babylon. Neue Zürcher Zeitung , January 30, 2019, accessed on March 20, 2019 .
  5. ↑ a b c d e Ijoma Mangold : When the Prussians dig. Time online , January 27, 2019, accessed March 20, 2019 .
  6. ↑ Conversation with the author Kenah Cusanit. SWR2 , January 27, 2019, accessed March 20, 2019 .
  7. ↑ a b c Kenah Cusanits clever archeology novel "Babel". Welt online , February 26, 2019, accessed March 20, 2019 .
  8. ↑ a b Michael Braun: How Babylon's Treasures Came to Berlin. Der Tagesspiegel , February 1, 2019, accessed on March 20, 2019 .
  9. ↑ Denis Scheck : Kenah Cusanit: "Babel". hot off the press. ARD , January 27, 2019, accessed on March 20, 2019 .
  10. ↑ a b c Fridtjof Küchemann: The most innovative excavators in the Orient. FAZ , February 1, 2019, accessed on March 21, 2019 .
  11. ↑ a b Thomas Jordan: When God invented photography. Süddeutsche Zeitung , February 3, 2019, accessed on March 21, 2019 .