Surf (novel)
Brandung is a novel by German writer Martin Walser published in 1985. He takes up the protagonists Helmut and Sabine Halm from Walser's successful novel Ein Flehendes Pferd and transfers them from Lake Constance to California , where Halm accepts a teaching professorship at an American college , falls in love with a student and after personal defeats and the decision to renounce at the end of the Romans returns home.
action
At the beginning of the long vacation, the English and German teacher Helmut Halm received a call from a former fellow student asking him to take on a teaching position at Washington University in Oakland on behalf of a failed scientist . The longer Halm, who initially defended himself, thinks about the matter, the clearer it becomes to him that he is neither the deputy headmaster, who seems to have chosen him as the victim of his attacks, nor the " Spanish fly " he dubbed Always offended school secretary, can endure longer and Rainer Mersjohann's request must be complied with. Halm flies to California with his wife Sabine and daughter Lena, who has just had a failed relationship, while the old spaniel Otto has to stay in Germany.
The first encounter with the waves of the ocean almost comes to a bad end; Halm is thrown to the ground by the surf and his grotesque sufferings in the next few days anticipate his existence as an old man. Mersjohann, whom he described Sabine as a slim, flexible apostle figure, is also unrecognizable - a friendly alcoholic whose wife has separated from him and whose son has disappeared. The Halms get to know campus life and its various illustrious figures. However, Sabine has to return to Stuttgart soon, because shortly after the death of her mother, her father is also dying.
Helmut, the fifty-five year old, quickly responds to the advances of a twenty-two year old student from his conversation course. Fran, described by the university secretary as a “beautiful stupid”, an all-American girl with, as evil tongues summarize, Porsche and Papa practice in Pacific Heights , lets him get as little physically closer as another student in Germany years ago - He has long since worked through this adventure with Sabine, telling stories and confessing - but it occupies him intensely.
While Europe sinks into the gray fog and becomes the continent of agonies - at the end of the book not only the in-laws and the headmaster died, but also the dog Otto was run over - Helmut dresses up under the bright California sun, discovers it Jogging and healthy eating for himself and is working on a lecture (about Heinrich Heine's Laura and Asra, who die when they love), which should not only earn him an extra fee, but also impress the girl from the conversation course. But when he is on the podium, he has to realize that Fran is not in the audience. Apparently she didn't even notice the appointment. Depressed by this realization and bruised by a morning in the heat, Halm collapses in a fit of circulatory weakness.
He is physically even more damaged at a farewell party that Fran organizes before returning to Europe: While dancing, the two fall so unhappy that Halm suffers a facial injury that has to be sewn and Fran breaks her ankle. So externally badly messed up, he returns to Europe - back to his old house threatened by relatives who are after the capital, back to the old furniture that was once carelessly bought together only to find out after a quarter of a century that one Change is no longer worthwhile, back to my colleagues, back to Sabine.
Rainer Mersjohann died of suicide, and Halm is hardly back home when he receives mail from America: Fran, whose crutches were wedged in the car and thus held her on the seat, died in her car, which fell into the surf of the Ocean crashed. In a ring composition , Walser takes up the first sentence again at the end of the novel and lets Helmut Sabine begin to report on his experiences.
interpretation
As in the novel A Fleeing Horse , in this novel the element of water is given the task of clarifying and "correcting" the external circumstances.
background
In Brandung, Walser processed his own experience as a guest lecturer at American colleges. In 1983 he spent four months at the University of California at Berkeley , the real model of the fictional Washington University of the novel. An earlier incident was also incorporated into the novel: At a dance event during his guest professorship at Middlebury College in Vermont in 1973, Hellmuth Karasek witnessed "Martin Walser [...] dancing wildly with a girl waltz", which occurred during the following fall the leg broke. Karasek rated the surf as the "love story of its author with America".
The character of Rainer Mersjohann has its role model in Uwe Johnson , with whom Walser was friends when they were in Group 47 . The friendship had cooled in the mid-1980s, and Walser's description of Mersjohann was a replica of the character Anselm Kristlein - the main character in many of Walser's novels - under whose name Uwe Johnson Walser satirized anniversaries in his novels . Wieland Freund ruled in 2002 that “the description of Mersjohann in Brandung ” was “as tasteless as that of the critic André Ehrl-König in Death of a Critic ”, for which Marcel Reich-Ranicki was the godfather and which led to a public controversy.
reception
Surf was received mostly positively in the German-language feature pages. Beatrice von Matt called the novel “a book that makes you addicted to reading. [...] Once again someone is writing a great novel of the kind we have not known in this kind in German for years, a book that clearly and unmistakably towers over others. "According to Ulrich Greiner, however, the novel does not provide" unambiguous reading pleasure The story saddles the reader as it saddles its hero until he literally gets away with a black eye, while the blue-eyed reader gets out of the deck chair a bit gloomy and sad at the end. "He left open whether" [t] this excessive clarity, this linguistic opulence, this sometimes boastful, pleasurable splendor, this tendril of sentences, ideas, anecdotes, main and secondary stories [...] art or just impressive prose ”. The novel offers "art instead of reality, sentences instead of life." It is "split between love and the inability to live, between wise renunciation and cowardly flight from life."
Hans Egon Holthusen expressed himself more decisively, who felt reminded of Goethe's Werther by the “subject of fatally unhappy love” as well as by “operating with literary models and references” . He praised the description of the world of the campus : "So brilliant, so funny, this world has never been presented so precisely in our literature". For him, the novel was "a narrative event that is extraordinarily complex and polyphonic and fulfills the claim to represent the world in an exemplary manner." Hellmuth Karasek described Brandung as a "book about aging": " Growing old means forbidding oneself to experience one's experiences beforehand." In the novel, he found "cabinet pieces of deadly irony" that are most effective when "Halms' egocentricity is ridiculed". Heinrich Vormweg saw Martin Walser in the novel “at the height of all his storytelling skills” when dealing with “a very difficult and weighty topic”. For Andrea Köhler, Brandung belonged to a “hit list of the best German-language prose works of the last 25 years” in a review of 2006.
literature
- Martin Walser: Surf. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-518-03570-3 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Hellmuth Karasek : Martin Walser - The defense of the origin . In: Werner Brändle (ed.): Identity and writing. A commemorative publication for Martin Walser. Olms, Hildesheim 1997, ISBN 3-487-10322-2 , p. 13.
- ↑ a b Hellmuth Karasek: Malvolio in California . In: Der Spiegel . No. 35 , 1985, pp. 158-159 ( online ).
- ^ Wieland Freund: The repeat offender . In: Die Welt from June 1, 2002.
- ↑ Beatrice von Matt: From exact and from imprecise people . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung of September 20, 1985.
- ↑ Ulrich Greiner: The self- prevention artist . In: Die Zeit of August 30, 1985.
- ↑ Hans Egon Holthusen: Storming a future that doesn't exist . In Die Welt on September 7, 1985.
- ↑ Heinrich Vormweg: Bittersweet the pains of aging. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of August 31 / September 1, 1985
- ↑ Andrea Köhler: America in the mirror cabinet of his literature . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung of June 27, 2006.