Baudolino

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Baudolino is the title of a historical novel by Umberto Eco , which was published under the same title in the original Italian in 2000 and in a translation by Burkhart Kroeber in 2001 . In the style of a picaresque novel, it tells the life story of a Piedmontese peasant boy from the area of Alessandria , who was adopted by the Hohenstaufen emperor Friedrich I Barbarossa in 1154 at the age of thirteen and raised at his court, after studying in Paris as an advisor to the emperor on Italian matters Ascent, set out with his army on the Third Crusade in 1189 , after adventurous journeys to the Far East in 1204 witnessed the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders of the Fourth Crusade and is said to have disappeared somewhere in the Orient a few years later.

content

introduction

The novel begins with a self-written report by the young Baudolino about his first encounter with Barbarossa: It must have been during his first trip to Rome in 1154, the still uncrowned emperor had lost his way in the forest and fog of the western Po Valley , asked the farm boy for help and was, after he had spent the night in Baudolino's father's hut, the next day the boy was led back to his army. The text reproduces the report written down by Baudolino himself, which he wrote at the imperial court in Regensburg "Anno Domini MCLV" (1155) under the heading "Chronicle of Baudolino from the family of the Aulari". Since he has only just learned to read and write and is trying to write in his native dialect, his report is written in a language and spelling that initially takes some getting used to, but then turns out to be very vivid and colorful.

Framework story

After this very personal introduction life Baudolinos is told though in the third person and in today's language, but as he himself as already his sixties in Constantinople Opel said in April 1204 Byzantine historian and senior officials niketas choniates told that he made the The hands of marauding Franconian crusaders and brought them to safety. While he tells the Byzantines his life and talks about it and generally about the course of the world, they watch from a safe place as the magnificent city on the Bosporus burns and is plundered for three days. On the fourth day, they dare to leave their hiding place and, disguised, move to the town of Selymbria on the Marmara Sea together with other refugees . Baudolino ends the story of his life there. It can be divided into two parts in terms of content and perspective:

First part

As a twelve- to thirteen-year-old farm boy, Baudolino impressed the German Emperor, who had lost his way in the fog of the Po Valley, with a tale of lies: San Baudolino, the local saint of that area, prophesied that Emperor Barbarossa would take the nearby town of Tortona . Friedrich is taken with the boy and takes him to Rome for the imperial coronation . Then Bishop Otto von Freising in Regensburg takes care of Baudolino's upbringing, teaching the already blessed with a pronounced love of tales that it is a good work, for the sake of the higher truth, "to testify wrongly what you think is right". On his deathbed, he admonishes him to always think of the kingdom of the priest-king John in the Far East and to look for it. Because: "Only if you look for it will you be able to carry the banner of Christianity over Byzantium and Jerusalem."

Baudolino takes the advice to heart, but first goes to Paris to study and makes his first friends there: a knight's son from Cologne, whom everyone only speaks of as “the poet”, a red-haired Levantine named Abdul, who plays beautiful Provençal songs sings, a traveling scholar named Boron, a French named Kyot who raves about Breton knight and fairy stories and the Jewish Rabbi Solomon. With them he trains his talent for inventing lies, for which they repeatedly consume hashish , in other words: the intoxicating "green honey" that Abdul got to know from the assassins .

After completing his studies, Baudolino takes his friends to the emperor's court, where he is appointed ministerial of the empire. As such - and as a talented liar - he influences the course of world history: he accompanies the emperor on his campaigns to Italy, serves him as a shrewd negotiator in the disputes with the Lombard cities , witnessed the founding of the city of Alessandria and later the Battle of Legnano , procures useful relics - such as the bones of the Three Wise Men , whose transfer to Cologne he organized with his friends in 1164 - and does everything to increase the power and reputation of his adoptive father.

Based on the encounter between the seafarer Sindbad and the Prince of Sarandip , the friends invent a letter from the priest-king Johannes, who allegedly ruled over India, to Emperor Friedrich, which is intended to strengthen his authority in the dispute with the Pope, which, however, triggers a formidable political forgery story . Because even before they actually send the letter off, a Greek spy named Zosimos copies it, changes it a little and addresses it to Emperor Manuel of Byzantium , but later the letter appears, this time to Pope Alexander III. apparently also in Rome. In the only slightly different versions, adapted to the respective addressee, the great power and jewel-bristling wealth of that distant country in the east is always reported in detail. Baudolino had intended the Holy Grail as a gift from the Eastern King of the Priests to the Western Emperor , under which one usually imagined at that time a particularly precious chalice, from which Jesus should have drunk at the Last Supper . But instead of a gold and jeweled goblet, when Baudolino has to show something, he presents the wooden drinking bowl of his father as "the" Holy Grail (because the drinking vessel of the simple carpenter's son Jesus could not have consisted of gold and jewels, but had to be "plain." , unadorned, poor like Our Lord Jesus Christ ”). And he succeeds in the operation because, as Niketas noted in an earlier conversation about relics: "It is belief that makes them real, not belief".

Neither the Grail nor Baudolino can, however, prevent Barbarossa from dying while swimming in the Saleph river in Cilicia when he set out on the Third Crusade in 1189 . In Baudolino's memories, however, Barbarossa's death reads very differently than in the history books, and the mysterious bathing accident of his beloved adoptive father will keep him busy for a long time and will only find a (possible) explanation towards the end of his story.

Second part

After Friedrich's death, Baudolino decides not to turn back, but to move further east with his friends and faithful to find the kingdom of the priest Johannes. This expedition takes the group to distant parts of the world that are inhabited by all sorts of strange human and monster beings - a fantastic, sometimes funny, sometimes touching, sometimes dramatic foray into the medieval mythology of mythical creatures . The travelers use the world map of the cosmos of Indicopleustes , who assumed a flat earth . After an endless journey through steppes and deserts, which leads you through the land of the wise gymnosophists , who live in paradisiacal nudity, and through the always and always pitch-dark land of Abkasia, where the feverish Abdul begins to sing again, but then the encounter Do not survive with a manticore , they finally arrive at the stone river Sambation , behind which the ten lost tribes of Israel allegedly live and which can only be crossed on the Sabbath because it then stands still, but on the Sabbath Rabbi Solomon is not allowed to cross it either however for the resourceful Baudolino this is not a problem.

Finally they reach the city of Pndapetzim at the foot of a mountain behind which the kingdom of the priest John is said to lie. In this city, which consists of numerous pointed rock cones with honeycomb-like cave houses , similar to the city of Göreme in Cappadocia , travelers are delayed for a long time, they make friends with a helpful skiapod (monopod) named Gavagai, who explains to them the multicultural crowd that is there Most beautiful harmony, but theological discord lives together, Baudolino has long conversations with the "deacon Johannes", who rules Pndapetzim as priest John's deputy (but proves to be a young man suffering from leprosy , who has similar fantastic ideas about life in the West as the Westerners from Life in the Orient ), and in the end Baudolino even falls madly in love with a fairy virgin with a unicorn named Hypatia , who not only introduces him to a completely new kind of love, but also to the fundamentals of the Gnostic worldview and concept of God.

But then the city is threatened with an attack by the notorious White Huns , Baudolino and his friends help the inhabitants to defend themselves and organize the defense, led by the battle-hardened poet, but in vain, the theological discord of the Pndapetzimer prevails, and the Huns roll over them City. From Baudolino's group only he, the poet and four others can escape. They are kidnapped by cynocephalons and held for years in the castle of the assassin leader Raschid ad-Din Sinan , who is called Aloadin here. Finally, carried by three giant Roch birds , they can fly back to Constantinople in one train over deserts, steppes, forests and mountains.

The crusaders have meanwhile arrived there and are besieging the city, Baudolino and his remaining friends experience the confused months before the conquest of Constantinople in April 1204, use the anarchic situation to do business with false relics: for example, they bring the shroud of the leper deacon John as the shroud of Jesus Christ among the people. In the process, they get into quarrel and conflict with one another, and so in the end there is a real showdown in the catacombs of Constantinople. Immediately afterwards, the shocked Baudolino meets Niketas in Hagia Sophia, which is teeming with plundering soldiers , frees him from the hands of the crusaders and finally escapes with him to Selymbria.

After Baudolino has finished telling his life story, it finally becomes clear to him how his adoptive father Friedrich Barbarossa really died: Horrified by his own role in this death, he withdraws into a life as a pillar saint , spends a good year as a repentant hermit and wise advisor on a hermit column on the outskirts of Selymbria, then descends and, longing for his beloved Hypatia, sets off again for the Far East. "Niketas saw him disappear in the distance, his hand still raised, waving, but without turning around again, undeterred on his way to the kingdom of priest John."

Style and structure

Stylistically, Baudolino - Eco's fourth novel and the first with which he returns to the Middle Ages after The Name of the Rose - is the opposite of his baroque novel The Island of the previous day , published five years earlier : in a relaxed, conversational tone, he tells the life story of a charmingly smart-eyed liar, the It is only through his blossoming imagination and his never-ending powers of persuasion that he succeeds in influencing the greats of the world - and that was after all the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in his time ! In doing so, a number of questions are answered with a light hand and quite incidentally, which in the "official" historiography of the Middle Ages were previously considered unexplained and can probably never be finally resolved. For example, the background to the canonization of Charlemagne or the question of how the bones of the Three Wise Men , found in Milan in 1162 , could be identified as such and how they got there as they are today in Cologne Cathedral . Or the question of who wrote the alleged letter from the priest-king John to Manuel I Komnenos , which at the time caused a sensation in Europe and sparked all kinds of wild speculations. In Eco's novel, one now learns that and how it was the talented liar Baudolino who initiated all this and much more. In a certain sense it can be said that all open questions of the historiography of the 12th century are finally answered here, even those of the death of Barbarossa.

Special elements

Breaking traditional motifs from the historical and adventure novel

Eco intersperses the novel with postmodern irony in various forms:

  • In the tradition of the picaresque novel , Baudolino is an enlightened Picaro figure who allows Eco to co-invent and reconnect the events of official historiography of the Middle Ages. Baudolino "creates" the Grail and historically documented writings such as the letter of the priest John, he is the driving force behind Barbarossa and instigates his clever political moves, such as the canonization of Charlemagne. In doing so, he becomes a better and better liar. Eco ends the novel with a metafictional comment when he puts the following final dialogue with an invented friend in the mouth of the (historically guaranteed) historian Niketas Choniates:
“It was a nice story. It's a shame that no one finds out now. "
“Don't think you're the only story writer in this world. Sooner or later it will be told by someone who is even more lying than Baudolino. "
  • Eco treats elements from the adventure novel such as treasure hunts, travel, wars and battles against mythical creatures very ironically : the Holy Grail is an object invented from the start, wars end as a farce (rescue of the city of Alessandria by a cow; the residents of Pndapetzim do not go to the External aggression as underlying their own quarrels).
  • Fantastic elements are on an equal footing with historical "facts", especially in the second part of the novel: Mythical creatures (basilisks, manticors, unicorns) appear more and more, Baudolino falls in love with the satyr Hypatia, who bears the name of the famous philosopher Hypatia . Ironically, some monsters are eaten after they die and Baudolino is driven by the question of where the genitals are located in the skiapods .
  • The orientalism evoked in the first half of the novel , which has the exoticism of distant countries, cultures (keyword: food) and worldviews as its theme, experiences a major break in the end: in Pndapetzim the Orient wants to be saved by the Occident.
  • Even dealing with semiotic elements, which Eco has set as a memorial with The Name of the Rose , is for a long time not presented with the usual seriousness: the apparent murder of Friedrich in a closed room , a familiar topos from detective novels , is ultimately just about people committed who wanted to prevent it.
  • In this novel, as in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Eco refers to his first novel The Name of the Rose when he ends Baudolino's manuscript with the words: " ... and like that other said the thumb hurts me " (edition Hanser, p. 19; dtv, p. 22). Compare the last sentence of " The Name of the Rose ": "It's cold in the scriptorium, my thumb hurts."

Inclusion in the criticism

With this fourth novel by Eco, as with his third, Die Insel des previous day , published five years earlier, the criticism in the German-speaking world was divided: From harsh pans that criticize the novel as totally overloaded and poorly processed in terms of literature (“ His prose is no match for this game ”) or even as“ a work of calculus and cold calculation ”, because here“ the Armani suit of the clever media and press agent from the world of Berlusconi shimmers from under the medieval costume ” Judgments (“reading experience”, “wonderful chapters”, but overall “too thick”) to positive evaluations as a “sensual panorama of the Middle Ages”, “with colorful medieval scenarios”, an “atmospherically compelling story of Alessandria's founding” and a “enjoyable travelogue "Or finally as" also a philosophical elegy ". In terms of publishing, the novel was almost as successful as Eco's first novel, The Name of the Rose .

Clarifications and individual evidence

  1. ↑ In contrast to Baudolino, Niketas is a real person from history: he lived from around 1150 to around 1215 and wrote the fundamental contemporary work about the conquest of Constantinople, from which Eco has repeatedly quoted him, cf. Niketas Choniates, The Crusaders Conquer Constantinople , translated, introduced and explained by Franz Gabler. Byzantine historians, Vol. 3, Styria, Graz 1958.
  2. ↑ This has already been emphasized by the author himself on various occasions. In a lengthy "conversation about 'Baudolino'" that the Romanist Thomas Stauder had with him in May 2001, Eco says: "The Middle Ages believed in the secrets of the Orient, which Baudolino was looking for and which the historian Jacques was about Le Goff has written some things that are very worth reading. In the novel I made a kind of chiasmus out of it: In the first part I describe an Occident full of problems that hopes to find the solution to them in a fairytale Orient; in the second part we speak of one The Orient is in a catastrophic state and awaits salvation from the Occident. " Zibaldone. Journal of Italian Culture and Contemporary , No. 33, spring 2002, Tübingen, Stauffenberg Verlag, 2002, p. 101.
  3. ↑ Otto von Freising is also a real person in history. In his comprehensive world chronicle Chronica sive Historia de duabus civitatibus ("History of the two kingdoms" - meaning the worldly and the heavenly) he expressed the hope for an alliance between the priest king John and the German emperor.
  4. ↑ Baudolino , Hanser, p. 71, dtv p. 77.
  5. ↑ Ibid.
  6. ↑ Behind Baudolino's friends there are lots of historically documented people from medieval literary history: the so-called Archipoet from Cologne, the Provençal troubadour Jaufré Rudel , the traveling scholar Robert de Boron and Provençale Kyot, who, according to Wolfram von Eschenbach , is said to have written the template for his Parzival .
  7. ↑ Alessandria is the birthplace of Umberto Eco
  8. ↑ Both are described in detail and very vividly, the first from the perspective of the returnees Baudolino, who comes back to his old homeland on Christmas Eve for the first time since childhood, the latter from the perspective of the lost soldier - like the battle of Waterloo in Stendhal's Charterhouse Parma .
  9. ↑ The letter really existed, it was allegedly sent to the Byzantine Emperor Manuel I Komnenus by presbyter John, King of India, around 1165, and it caused such a stir that Pope Alexander III. found himself compelled to write a reply in 1177; Ulrich Knefelbach, Die Suche nach dem Reich des Priesterkönigs Johannes, offers more details and the text of the letter in German translation . Represented on the basis of travel reports and other ethnological sources from the 12th to 17th centuries. Century . Verlag Andreas Müller, Gelsenkirchen 1986; further references here .
  10. ↑ In the novel it is only called “Gradal” from the Latin “gradalis”.
  11. ↑ Baudolino , Hanser p. 315, German version p. 336.
  12. ↑ Baudolino , Hanser p. 133, dtv p. 142.
  13. ↑ An inside joke for those familiar with the language philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine , who in his famous essay “Meaning and Translation” uses the made-up word “Gavagai” to demonstrate how difficult it is to understand the meaning of a word in a completely unknown language. even if a native helps the linguist: "A rabbit scurries past, the native says:" Gavagai ", and the linguist notes" Rabbit "(or:" Look there, a rabbit ") as a provisional translation that needs to be tried out in a wider sense “, See WV Quine, Word and Object , from the Engl. Joachim Schulte and Dieter Birnbacher, Reclam, Stuttgart 1980, p. 63; see. Umberto Eco too, basically the same in other words. About translating , from the Ital. v. Burkhart Kroeber, Hanser, Munich 2006, p. 43.
  14. ^ Edition Hanser p. 596, German version p. 631.
  15. ^ Andreas Kilb in the FAZ of October 9, 2001
  16. ^ Lothar Müller in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of September 1, 2001
  17. ↑ Fritz J. Raddatz in the period from October 4, 2001
  18. ↑ Martin Halter in the Zürcher Tages-Anzeiger on September 5, 2001
  19. ↑ Maike Albath in the NZZ of Sept. 3, 2001, which, however, finds "the symmetrical structure of the novel and the historical coincidences [...] constructed"
  20. ↑ Roland H. Wiegenstein in the Frankfurter Rundschau of Sept. 13, 2001, who particularly emphasizes the "enchanting, touching love story between Baudolino and Hypatia".

Characters in the novel

(More details about the figures - pictures, descriptions, text excerpts - are available on the special website of the Hanser Verlag, see below under web links.)

  • Baudolino
  • his father Gagliaudo
  • The Byzantine Niketas Choniates
  • Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa
  • his wife Beatrix of Burgundy
  • Bishop Otto von Freising
  • Chancellor Rainald von Dassel
  • Baudolino's friends Abdul, Kyot, Boron, Rabbi Solomon and the poet
  • The Alexandrians Boidi, Porcelli, Cuttica, Boiamondo, Colandrino and Aleramo Scaccabarozzi called il Ciula
  • Colandrina
  • Zosimos from Chalcedon
  • The Armenian Ardzrouni
  • The Skiapod Gavagai
  • The eunuch Praxeas
  • The deacon Johannes
  • Hypatia

expenditure

Secondary literature

  • Thomas Bremer u. Titus Heydenreich (Ed.), Seventy Years Umberto Eco , Zibaldone : Journal of Contemporary Italian Culture, No. 33, Stauffenburg Verlag, Tübingen 2002, ISBN 3860579851 .

radio play

Web links