God's rainbow

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God's Rainbow (Czech. Boží duha ) is a novel by the Czech writer Jaroslav Durych (1886–1962).

Emergence

The Catholic author, who on top of that also represented very far-right political positions before the Second World War, was one of the ostracized authors after the war in the communist era who had no opportunity to publish their works. The 69-year-old author wrote the novel God's Rainbow in 1955 . Only after Durych's death could the book appear in Czechoslovakia in 1969 in the short period of relative freedom of the Prague Spring .

content

With his old age novel Gottes Regenbogen (God's Rainbow) in 1955, Durych dared to tackle a then completely hushed up and politically explosive topic: the expulsion of the Germans from Czechoslovakia after the Second World War due to the so-called Beneš Decrees and their consequences. The work, written in a very pictorial and poetic language, approaches the subject from a Catholic point of view, which puts the question of guilt, repentance and reconciliation at the center of consideration. Driven by a vague religious need for repentance, the author travels to the deserted border regions of the country. There he finds deserted houses that were apparently abandoned all of a sudden, and also a church with a coffin inside. Nobody had buried the dead anymore. Then he meets a young German who somehow inhabits the place of her origin again. Only gradually does the Czech learn the personal history of the Germans, their humiliation and desecration by the Czechs and the death of their mother. The man feels the inner urge to bury the unburied coffin from the church, which he succeeds with great effort. Both live through their repentance, which does not apply to them personally, but expresses their responsibility for the whole, and find each other redeemed.

Urs Heftrich wrote: Only mutual repentance makes it possible to forgive guilt - a guilt, mind you, which both could indignantly dismiss because they personally didn’t hurt anyone. Durych hopes for the reconciliation precisely from the feeling of the responsibility of each individual for the whole: from the will of each to "share responsibility for the secret guilt".

The novel, which is written in a poetically exaggerated way, can be seen as a requiem on the centuries-long coexistence of Czechs and Germans, which shows how coping and reconciliation might be possible.

expenditure

The novel was written in 1955 and was first published in Czech in 1969. In 1975 a German translation was published under the title Gottes Regenbogen by Jan Patočka and Frank Boldt in Postilla bohemica. Quarterly journal of the Konstanzer Hus Society 4th year, 1/2 1975 . An essay by Jan Patočka with the title: "God's Rainbow" by Jaroslav Durych also appeared there. After the fall of communism, the novel was published again in Czechoslovakia, in 1991 with the Melantrich publishing house in Prague. In 1999 the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt published Jan Patočka's translation together with his essay as part of its 33-volume Czech Library, and with this edition made the book accessible to a larger German-speaking readership.

Czech

  • Boží duha . Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1969 (137 pages)
  • Boží duha . Prague: Melantrich, 1991 (170 pages) ISBN 80-7023-083-5
  • Boží duha . Prague: Academia, 2000 (reprint of the 1991 edition in the Scarabaeus series, vol. 15) ISBN 80-200-0800-4

German

  • God's rainbow . Novella. Translation by Jan Patočka and Frank Boldt. Bremen: Verlag K-Presse, 1975 (147 pages) = Postilla bohemica. Quarterly journal of the Konstanzer Hus-Gesellschaft eV 4th year, 1/2 1975
  • God's rainbow . Novel. Translation by Jan Patočka and Frank Boldt. With an afterword by Eckhard Thiele. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1999 (236 pages) ISBN 3-421-05232-8

Dramatization

  • František Derfler: Boží duha, 2001 (Centra experimentálniho divadla, Brno. Director: František Derfler. With Ela Lehotská and Ladislav Lakomý)
  • TV adaptation of the dramatization by František Derfler, 2004

literature

  • Urs Heftrich: Doomed to originality. Czech Catholic authors in the 20th century: Durych, Deml, Čep, Zahradniček. In: Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch, Vol. 35. Berlin 1994
  • Jiři Kudrnáč: Durych, J., Boží duha . In: Slovnik české prózy. Ostrava: Sfinga, 1994, ISBN 80-900578-9-6