To be alarmed does not count

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There is no cause for concern in the search for the Red Ruhr Army. A reminder is a novel by Jürgen Link . It was published in March 2008 and tells the story of a group of sixty-eight people in the Ruhr area . It differs from other novels mainly through the attempt at a new novel structure, which is characterized by an alternating game of future simulations and the actually progressing story.

action

The theme of the novel is a kind of collective life story of the "Original Chaots ". It is a group of sixty-eight people in the Ruhr area who try, without actually knowing it, to keep in touch with history in the “post-historical” normalism of the period 1973-2001. Neither protagonists nor situations go beyond the framework of the “normal”, so that the first represent a kind of “partisans of normalism”.

These "original chaos" tried to form a coalition against the "V-carrier" in allotments by reading out their simulations, the picaresque "twin stories" in which a female pair of twins plays the main role. The "V-beam" is the "responsible person", which got its name from the joke: "You wear the T-beam and I am responsible". In the “V-carrier” one can see a kind of personification of the capital process: as I in a therapeutic monologue situation. In a kind of race of simulations and extrapolations, the V-beam and the "original chaos" fight for the reality that emerges.

Background and structure of the novel

By means of a series of new narrative processes (e.g. curve movements of catchphrases and stimulus words such as “chaotic”), the suppressed historicity of the endlessly rotating eternal return of our postmodernism / posthistory appears.

The division of literature into political and “subjective” that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s is undermined by this text, which is both at the same time and neither, but a third new thing. The current political-historical dimension is about the “3rd Attempt of the V-carrier ", ie the 3rd rise of Germany to world power (with a" German Vietnam "of the future).

The (in a certain way “blind”) motif of the “Red Ruhr Army” stands for the historical antagonism that has presumably been lost : it alternates between the memory of the first half of the 20th century and the terror motif (both 1970s and simulations around "2001". The cipher "2001" served from the beginning as a symbol for "21st century" and concrete, near "future").

It is about a new constellation of "stories" (as picaresque simulations and as a life story) and "history" (against their alleged extinction in postmodernism ) and thus of play and seriousness. Vanishing point is beyond the postmodern game culture, an “alternative story” without “relapse” into historicist narration. In the twin stories there is 'exciting plot' and comedy, in the report of the 'Original Chaoten' there is an intense, panoramic tone.

text

  • Jürgen Link: There is no need to be alarmist when looking for the Red Ruhr Army. assoverlag, ISBN 978-3-938834-29-9 , 923 pages.

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